How I Work

You see another article. "This platform just changed everything." And suddenly, the AI platform you've been using for months feels completely inadequate. You wonder if you're behind. You wonder if you should switch again. 

Neo and I have had this conversation more times than we can count, and it's one of the questions we get asked constantly at Inventium AI. Which of the four major AI platforms, Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, should you actually be using? 

In this How I AI episode, Neo and I walk through the three questions you should ask yourself before co...

** Grab tickets for The Energy Game Melbourne launch (29 July, 6:30pm) here and order The Energy Game book here.** 

If you're someone who keeps saying yes when you should say no, or who has never once thought of rest as a skill worth building, this conversation will give you a starting point that doesn't require overhauling your life. 

This is part two of a two-part crossover with the This Is Work podcast, hosted by Shelley Johnson. In this episode, Shelley and I go deep into the science-backed strategies from my new book, The Energy Game, covering all three...

You've probably seen Cowork mentioned inside Claude, or perhaps you clocked the headlines when Microsoft folded it into Copilot a couple of weeks ago. Either way, the question people keep asking is simple: how is this actually different from just chatting with Claude? 

The answer comes down to files, time and money - three things that change quite dramatically once you move from chat to Cowork. 

In this How I AI episode, Neo and I unpack exactly what Cowork can do that regular chat can't, how to know which one to reach for, and what the new Microsoft...

** Grab tickets for The Energy Game Melbourne launch (29 July, 6:30pm) here and order The Energy Game book here.** 

What does it take to realise you've hit burnout? For me, it wasn't a dramatic collapse. It was a fantasy about being hospitalised just so no one could contact me, and the hardest decision I'd face would be lime or raspberry jelly. 

When I shared that thought with a friend who is also a clinical psychologist, she told me she'd heard it so many times she had a name for it. That moment of recognition, equal parts relief...

If your organisation has moved its AI licenses onto a per-use plan, every single chat thread your team sends is now adding to a bill. Some companies are already burning through their entire IT budget for AI within the first couple of months of the year, and most staff have no idea their usage is costing anything at all. 

It doesn't have to be a mystery. There are simple habits, from which model you default to, to what time of day you send your first message, that change how far your usage actually stretches. 

In this How...

** Grab tickets for The Energy Game Melbourne launch (29 July, 6:30pm) here and pre-order The Energy Game book here.** 

Writing a book is hard. But getting a publisher to say yes to your book? That is an entirely different challenge, and one that most aspiring authors know almost nothing about. 

What actually happens when a proposal lands on a publisher's desk? Who else needs to sign off before an offer is made? And in a world where anyone can ask AI to explain any topic, why has "great content" stopped being enough on its own? 

This on...

If you've ever stared at a model picker and wondered whether to click Flash, Sonnet, Opus, Instant, or Think Deeper, you are not alone. These naming conventions are genuinely confusing, and most people just pick something and hope it works. The stakes are higher than they might seem, though. Token misuse has left some companies with eye-watering AI bills, including one case where a single employee ran up a $500,000 tab in a month. 

The good news is that there is a simple mental model that cuts through all the noise, and once you have it, choosing the rig...

We're using AI more than ever. And yet, according to research from Glean's Work AI Institute, only 10% of Australians say AI is significantly improving organisational performance. 

The truth is that most organisations have done what Dom Price calls the "Woodstock theory" of AI adoption: build it and they will come. Throw the tools out there, hope people figure it out, and wait for the productivity miracle that never quite arrives. 

In this episode, I sit down with Dom Price, former Atlassian work futurist and one of the sharpest thinkers I know on how organisations actually work. Dom j...

** Grab tickets for The Energy Game Melbourne launch (29 July, 6:30pm) here and pre-order The Energy Game book here.** 

You have the calendar colour-coded. You time block. You deep work. You have iterated on your to-do list more times than you can count. And yet somehow, you are still exhausted - falling further behind, producing less than you know you are capable of, and wondering what on earth is wrong with you. 

Nothing is wrong with you. But the solution you have been sold almost certainly is. 

This episode is a little different. It is an...

There is a question most of us skip past entirely in our daily lives: do I actually matter? Not "am I useful?" or "am I successful?" but do I matter, as a person, independent of what I produce or achieve? 

It sounds simple. But the research suggests we are terrible at actually living like the answer is yes. 

In this episode, I sit down with Jennifer Breheny Wallace, journalist and bestselling author of Mattering, a book that unpacks why so many of us have tied our sense of worth to our output, and what it costs u...

What happens when a team generates a thousand ideas - and kills most of them within minutes? 

In this Quick Win, I speak with Exploding Kittens co-creator Elan Lee about how he and his team turn chaos into creativity during their quarterly design retreats. Over three intense days, they generate, test, and ruthlessly discard ideas - all without bruising egos. 

Elan shares how he’s built a culture of trust where killing ideas isn’t failure, it’s focus - and why showing your team it’s safe to let go might be the most powerful l...

In a portfolio career, requests have a funny way of multiplying. A speaking gig here, a board invite there, a coffee catch-up that sounds valuable but drains you for days. The answer to all of them is technically "yes" right up until the moment it isn't. 

Katie is 18 months into consulting and a portfolio career, and she came to me with a problem a lot of people share: she's getting busier, she cares deeply about protecting time for values-driven work, and saying no is a muscle she's still building. 

This episode is part of The Work Ed...

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

You have access to AI. You probably use it a fair bit. And yet there's a good chance you're still manually scrubbing through meeting transcripts, tabbing between LinkedIn and Google News before every sales call, and spending 20 minutes writing an executive summary for a paper you just finished writing. 

That gap between having AI and actually letting it take things off your plate is where a lot of time quietly disappears.  

In this How I AI episode, Neo and I walk through eight tasks t...

Most professionals are terrible at talking about themselves. Not because they lack substance, but because no one ever taught them that being interesting is a skill, and that skill can be learned. 

Maz Farrelly has spent decades on the other side of that problem. As the executive producer behind Big Brother, The X Factor, and Celebrity Apprentice, she has auditioned over 20,000 people, had her content watched more than eight billion times, and once broke Twitter deliberately. In this episode, I sit down with Maz to unpack what the TV industry understands about attention that most professionals never le...

We put someone on the moon in 1969. We didn't put wheels on suitcases until 1972. The problem was: Nobody had stopped to notice the problem existed in the first place. 

That gap - between the problems people will tell you about, the ones they'll only admit after a drink, and the ones they don't even know they have - is exactly where Maz Farrelly operates. In this bonus conversation with the executive producer behind Big Brother, The X Factor, and Celebrity Apprentice, we get into the practical mechanics of walking into a meeting and already having the room on your sid...

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

You type a research question into your AI tool, get back a perfectly serviceable answer, and still feel like something's missing. The output isn't wrong, exactly. It just didn't quite hit the mark. The culprit, more often than not, is the prompt you started with. 

The good news: there's a smarter way to approach this, and it doesn't involve becoming a prompt engineering expert. 

In this How I AI episode, Neo and I walk through the agent Neo reaches for more than any other he ha...

Knowing how hiring works does not prepare you for what job hunting actually feels like right now. Today’s guest, Nicole, found that out the hard way. She has spent 30 years on the hiring side of the table. She has interviewed hundreds of candidates, read thousands of applications, and knows exactly what good looks like. So when she re-entered the job market after a six-month sabbatical, she found herself starting from scratch. 

Nicole, a senior executive, knew how the game used to work. What she didn't know was how much it had changed. AI-generated resumes flooding inboxes. Applicant trackin...

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

You sit down to research something for work, open a few tabs, type a vague query into AI, and get back something that feels… fine. Technically an answer. Not quite useful. Meanwhile, that report you've been working on probably needs another set of eyes, but getting real feedback takes time you don't have, so you send it anyway and hope for the best. 

There's a better way. In this How I AI episode, Neo and I walk through three agents we think every knowledge worker genuine...

**This week I'm sharing a crossover episode from the Humans, being. podcast with the wonderful Lael Stone. It's one of the more personal chats I've done in a while. We talk about my burnout year, the tiny experiments that brought me back, AI and where I think it's headed, and the uncomfortable question of whether being ordinary might actually be enough. I hope you love it as much as I loved having it. You can find the original episode on Humans Being here.**

Amantha calls her AI 'Sunny'. She talks to it on the drive t...

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

There's a question you've answered a hundred times before. You know the one. Someone pings you, you stop what you're doing, dig through a document or two, and type out the same response you've typed a dozen times this month. It doesn't feel catastrophic in the moment, but across a week it quietly eats hours. 

A knowledge agent is built for exactly this problem. It holds the information so you don't have to be the one constantly retrieving it. 

In this How I AI episode, Neo a...

There's a moment a lot of professionals know well. You put real thought into a LinkedIn post, hit publish, and watch the likes trickle in. Five. Maybe six. One comment from a colleague you personally recruited into the thread. 

Meanwhile, your feed has started to look like it was written by the same person. Polished, vaguely inspirational, and somehow saying nothing at all. 

In this episode, I sit down with Jessi Hempel, senior editor-at-large at LinkedIn and host of the award-winning podcast Hello Monday, to get inside what's actually happening on the platform right now. Jessi h...

There are interviews, and then there are conversations. The best podcast hosts know the difference, and the gap between the two is harder to close than it looks. 

In this bonus episode, I get to turn the tables. Jessi Hempel (host of the podcast Hello Monday and senior editor-at-large at LinkedIn) and I nerded out on the craft we both love: what it actually takes to walk into an interview prepared, how to stay present when a guest goes flat, and the moment a scripted exchange becomes something neither person planned for. 

If you've ever wondered w...

**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...

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. 

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...

What if the thing you spend the most time on at work won't matter at all when you're gone? 

It's a confronting question, but it's the kind Tom Rath lives with deliberately. He walks past a 10,000-headstone cemetery near his home in Washington DC and has never once seen a grave mention social media followers, email response times, or job titles. Yet these are the things most of us spend our days chasing. 

In this episode, I sit down with Tom Rath, one of the most widely read authors in the world of work and wellbeing a...

Sign up for Inventium’s AI Agent Bootcamp virtual or in-person.

Your organisation hit its AI adoption target. Eighty percent of staff have a licence, onboarding is done, and the usage dashboard looks great. So why does the work feel the same, or worse? Hitting an adoption target and actually getting value from AI are two completely different things, and most organisations are confusing one for the other.

The truth is that a team using AI badly can actually perform worse than one not using it at all. Buried in mediocre output, drowning in documents no...

The more AI tools you use, the more productive you get. Right? 

Not exactly. Boston Consulting Group leader Gabriella Rosen Kellerman studied what actually happens to people who are using AI intensively at work, and what she found is that beyond a certain point, something breaks. Not burnout. Something different, something the existing research wasn't equipped to explain, and something that organisations are currently making worse without realising it. 

In this episode, I sit down with Gabriella to unpack AI Brain Fry: what it is, who is most at risk, and why the sweet spot for productivi...

Every time you open a new AI chat, you're starting from scratch. You type out the background, explain your role, describe the project. Then you do it again tomorrow. And the day after.

There's a better way, and it takes about 15 minutes over a cup of coffee.

In this How I AI episode, Neo and I walk through the briefing document - a single context file that gives AI everything it needs to understand your world before you've typed a single word.

Neo and I cover:

You're in sales. Even if your job title has nothing to do with sales, you are selling every single day. Ideas, proposals, budget requests, buy-in. The only question is whether you're any good at it.

In part two of our chat, I sit down with Sabri Suby, founder of King Kong and a shark on the most recent season of Shark Tank Australia, to get into the skills that have helped him close over $300 million in deals. We cover how he trained himself to communicate with clarity and authority, why he believes the video sales letter is...

You are almost certainly doing most of your computer work the slow way.

Think about the last time you sat down to write an email, rename a file, or work through a tricky problem at your desk. Chances are, your fingers went straight to the keyboard. And you are not alone — when Neo and I ask audiences how much of their computer time is spent typing versus talking, almost everyone is close to 100% typing.

In this How I AI episode, Neo and I make the case for voice as a core part of your workflow, no...

What if the secret to getting more done was to stop doing things?

Sabri Suby, founder of King Kong, one of Australia's fastest-growing digital agencies and a shark on the most recent season of Shark Tank Australia, has built his entire work philosophy around subtraction. He audits every hour of his week, limits meetings to two days, and has trained his "fixer" to keep the outside world from ever reaching him.

In part one of our two-part conversation, I sit down with Sabri to get inside the full system, including his Kings Audit process, his de...

There is a moment most people have had in a meeting: the AI bot joins before your guest does, someone has to awkwardly ask if recording is okay, and the whole dynamic shifts. It is enough friction that most people just give up and go back to scribbling notes by hand.

There is a better way, and it does not involve anyone knowing a bot is even in the room.

In this How I AI episode, Neo and I do a deep dive into Granola.ai, the meeting transcription tool that has become non-negotiable for...

Being prepared is one of those things that sounds straightforward until you actually look at a leader's calendar. Back-to-back meetings, a constant stream of reports from different teams, and negotiations that require you to know the full history of a relationship before you've even said hello.

The pressure to be across everything is massive. The time to actually get there rarely is.

In this episode, I sit down with Joseph Lyons, President of ELMO Software, to talk about how he uses AI in genuinely practical, day-to-day ways. From personalised daily briefs for his exec team...

Download Inventium.ai's anti-AI slop prompt here: https://amantha-imber.kit.com/d5f746bd3e

You can always tell when something's been written by AI. The LinkedIn post that opens with "in today's fast-paced world." The article that ends with "it's not about X, it's about Y." Technically fine, but somehow hollow. Like it was written by nobody in particular.

The frustrating part is that this can happen even when you're doing the real thinking. You write the ideas, hand it to AI for a cleanup, and it flattens your voice, packs it with em-dashes...

**Record a question for Amantha’s next Ask Me Anything here: https://www.speakpipe.com/howiwork **  

It's Ask Me Anything time!

I asked listeners of How I Work to send in the biggest challenges they’re facing at work right now: from AI overwhelm to constant meetings to feeling busy but not actually making progress.

In this Ask Me Anything episode, I tackle questions like:

That wall of industry newsletters in your inbox isn’t a reading list. It’s a stress list. 

You tell yourself you’ll get to them later. You don’t. And the pile keeps growing. 

In this How I AI episode, Neo and I explore how to use AI as a structured research assistant. Not just to summarise articles, but to filter signal from noise, prioritise what’s actually relevant to you, and automatically deliver regular briefings so you don’t even have to remember to run the search. 

Neo and I cover: 

Visualising success feels productive. Vision boards, manifesting, picturing the finish line. It gives the sense that you’re moving closer to the goal. 

But according to the research, that mental shortcut might actually be working against you. 

In Part 2 of this two-parter (listen to Part 1 here), I continue my conversation with behavioural scientist and author Nir Eyal to unpack why. Nir spent six years researching how beliefs shape what we see, feel, and do, and why the stories we tell ourselves can dramatically change our behaviour. 

We talk about the surprising power of “failure goals”, wh...

When your to-do list feels endless and everything seems equally urgent, it’s hard to know where to start. The overwhelm doesn’t usually come from one big task. It comes from trying to hold meetings, emails, projects and life admin in your head all at once. 

In this How I AI episode, Neo and I walk through practical ways to use AI to help you prioritise when your week feels out of control. Not by magically deleting tasks, but by giving you a clearer structure for deciding what actually matters today. 

We share two different appro...

What if the biggest obstacle standing between you and the things you want in life isn’t your effort, your discipline, or even your circumstances? What if it’s the beliefs you didn’t realise you were holding. 

In Part 1 of a two-part conversation, I sit down with behavioural scientist and bestselling author Nir Eyal to unpack how our hidden beliefs shape what we see, how we feel, and what we do. Nir spent six years researching his latest book Beyond Belief, exploring the science behind how beliefs influence our behaviour and how we can change the ones that are qu...