A book by Rob Browton
Brave New Bots
Keeping Ahead Professionally in a World of Agents, Bots, and AI Slop
You don’t need to out-code the bots. You need to out-judge them.
AI agents are arriving in ordinary professional work, and the feeds are filling with machine-made filler. Most books pick one story — the hype or the doom, the engineer’s manual or the executive playbook. This one is for the professional in between: the person who will actually work alongside the bots.
Built around a single habit — the Small-Experiments Loop — it teaches you to put agents to work in fifteen-minute experiments, check work you didn’t do, keep the skills that feed your judgement, and never ship slop.
Grounded in the current literature and honest about what nobody knows yet: no guarantees, no jargon, no transformation promises — just odds-shifting habits you can start today.
- Agents, bots and LLMs explained in plain English — minus the demo reel.
- A 30-day plan of small experiments, one per working day, with a write-in tracker.
- The slop-spotting toolkit: how to stay credible when average content is free.
The spine of the book
The Small-Experiments Loop
One habit, repeated. Every chapter ends with a fifteen-minute version of it. It is a practical synthesis rather than a discovery — the book credits its sources at every step.
- Step 1
Spot
Notice a task in your week that a bot could plausibly take on.
- Step 2
Try
Give it fifteen minutes. No more, and nothing that matters yet.
- Step 3
Judge
Check the work you didn’t do. Would you put your name on it?
- Step 4
Keep
Keep what earned its place. Kill what didn’t, without ceremony.
- Step 5
Show
Tell someone what you learned. That is how it compounds.
Free — no purchase needed
The 30-day experiment tracker
The write-in pack from the book: four weeks of the tracker, one small experiment per working day, plus the quality-bar worksheet from chapter eight. Print it, fill it in, throw it away if it does not help.
Twelve chapters, four parts
The lie of the land
- What just happened to work
- Agents and bots, minus the hype
- The slop flood
Working with the bots
- Your first small experiment
- Delegating without losing the plot
- The everyday toolkit
- Keep the skill, delegate the task
Standing out of the slop
- Don’t ship slop
- Spotting slop
- Your credibility moat
Keeping up
- The 30-day plan
- Staying current without drowning
What it does not claim
- No guarantees, and no promise of transformation.
- It will not teach you to build agents, and does not think you need to.
- It makes no predictions about the job market.
The author
Rob Browton is an occupational psychologist with twenty years in enterprise employee listening, organisational development and leadership facilitation. He writes about the shift to AI-supported work — turning something abstract and fast-moving into something professionals can reason about and act on. More of his work.