**Join the AI Agent Bootcamp here: https://www.inventium.ai/learnvirtually-agents**

The word "agents" is everywhere right now. It shows up in product updates, LinkedIn posts, and conversations at work, and yet for a lot of people, it still doesn't quite click. What actually is an agent? Is it the same as agentic AI? And does any of this actually matter for the way you work?

If you've been nodding along while quietly unsure, you're in good company. The AI industry has done a genuinely poor job of naming things, and it's created a lot of unnecessary confusion.

In this How I AI episode, Neo and I cut through the jargon and get into what agents actually are, how they differ from agentic AI, and where both individuals and teams can start using them right now.

What you’ll learn:

• Why the terminology around AI tools is so confusing, and the key distinction between "agents" and "agentic AI" that actually matters in practice.

• What an agent is versus what agentic AI is

• How individuals can use agents for tasks they repeat regularly

• How teams can use agents to standardise outputs like reports, reduce the burden of repetitive questions, and let people self-service answers using a knowledge agent

• What the best starting question is to know if a problem can be solved by an agent

Connect with Neo Aplin on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/neoaplin/) and via inventium.ai, where he leads Inventium's AI training and upskilling work with organisations and teams.

My latest book The Energy Game is out on July 7, 2026. You can order a copy here: https://amzn.to/48ID29M

Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber)

Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai)

If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha.substack.com/

Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.

Get in touch at amantha@inventium.com.au

Credits:

Host: Amantha Imber

Sound Engineer: Martin Imber

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do with four extra hours a day? Probably say you don't have them. But according to Laura Vanderkam, one of the world's leading thinkers on time, they're already there. You're just not seeing them.

Laura has tracked her own time for 11 years. She's run large-scale time-tracking studies with hundreds of participants. And what she keeps finding is the same thing: the stories we tell ourselves about our time are almost always wrong. The tasks we dread feel longer than they are. The free time we insist we don't have keeps showing up in the data.

In this How I Work episode, I sit down with Laura to dig into what 11 years of time diaries actually reveal, why tracking your time for just one week can make you feel dramatically better about your life, and how to reclaim those post-dinner hours that most of us write off as dead time. Laura is a bestselling author of many books on time and productivity, and her latest, Big Time, is one of the most practical and perspective-shifting reads I've come across in a long time.

If you've ever ended a weekend convinced you had no time to yourself, this conversation will change how you see the week ahead.

Key discussion points

• Why tracking your time for a single week raises time satisfaction scores by nearly 18%, and what's actually driving that shift

• The gap between how people think they spend their time and how they actually do, particularly for those who work flexibly or check email on weekends

• The concept of "golden hours" and why the four to five hours between dinner and bedtime are far more valuable than most of us treat them

• How to tell the difference between a complex life and a chaotic one, and the circus metaphor that reframes what a well-run household actually looks like

• The weekly planning ritual Laura swears by, including the three rings of the circus she reviews every Thursday morning
• Three surprisingly small changes that can make your workday feel genuinely better, without changing jobs

Key quotes

"Four to five hours is a lot of time to just write off as unusable. The day is not over after dinner."

"Complexity and chaos are not the same thing. We're aiming for controlled complexity."

Connect with Laura Vanderkam on Instagram placeholder], X (Twitter), and LinkedIn and her website, and check out her latest book Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance wherever you get good books.

And if this episode resonated, I recommend my conversation with Oliver Burkeman on how to make time for the things that actually count. Check that out here.

My latest book The Energy Game is out on July 7, 2026. You can order a copy here: https://amzn.to/48ID29M

Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber)

Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai)

If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha.substack.com/

Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.

Get in touch at amantha@inventium.com.au

Credits:

Host: Amantha Imber

Sound Engineer: The Podcast Butler

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You've bought the licenses. You've made the announcement. And a few months later, you're staring at a workforce either ignoring the tools entirely or churning out AI-generated fluff that nobody's reading. The ROI? Nowhere to be found.

The problem isn't AI. It's how organisations are rolling it out.

In this How I AI episode, Neo and I share a recording from a live webinar we ran on why AI rollouts fail and what it actually takes to set yours up for success. We cover the most common mistakes we're seeing on the ground, the research that should change how you think about training, and the question every leadership team needs to answer before spending another dollar on licenses.

Neo and I cover:

• Why an unclear AI strategy at the leadership level creates confusion across teams, with some departments using the tools freely and others too uncertain to try.

• The leadership credibility problem: when CEOs and senior leaders don't use AI themselves, the rest of the organisation takes it as a signal that they shouldn't either.

• Why buying licenses without training can actually reduce productivity, producing a flood of low-quality, AI-generated work that slows people down rather than speeding them up.

• The surprising finding from HBR research that the average time saving from AI is just 2.5%, and why vanity metrics like daily logins and token usage tell you almost nothing about real value.

• The agent proliferation trap: why having everyone in your organisation building agents independently leads to duplicated, inconsistent, and unowned tools that create more confusion than clarity.

• The cultural barrier of AI fear, and why people won't genuinely adopt a tool they believe is there to replace them.

• AI brain fry, a distinct form of cognitive fatigue caused by constant context-switching and vigilance when managing multiple AI tasks simultaneously.

• Why training to tasks rather than features is what actually shifts behaviour, and the research-backed minimum dose of five hours of hands-on training required to see any meaningful benefit.

• The case for training close to license rollout to prevent bad habits forming before people know how to use the tools well.

• A three-stage framework for AI adoption: access, literacy, and leverage (individual then organisational), with literacy positioned as an ongoing capability rather than a one-off event.

• Why planning where time savings will actually go matters as much as achieving them, otherwise people simply fill the space with more work.

Connect with Neo Aplin on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/neoaplin/) and via inventium.ai (https://inventium.ai), where he leads Inventium's AI training and upskilling work with organisations and teams.

My latest book The Energy Game is out on July 7, 2026. You can order a copy here: https://amzn.to/48ID29M

Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber)

Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai)

If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha.substack.com/

Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes.

Get in touch at amantha@inventium.com.au

Credits:

Host: Amantha Imber

Sound Engineer: Martin Imber

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.