The Biggest Improvements Announced at FabCon, and the Ever-Widening Gap Between Adoption and Capabilities
Release Date: 04/22/2025
Is CoPilot the End of Filters? (Plus a Cautionary Tale)
Raw Data By P3 Adaptive
Pivot tables finally auto-refresh. Humanity wins, but our host Rob Collie is still annoyed. Why? Because he asked for it back in 2007 and got shot down. That little gripe kicks off a bigger conversation: what else in data is overdue for a shake-up? Copilot might be next. Forget filters. Forget dashboards. Rob put it to the test on his beer-league hockey stats and found himself asking questions faster than any report could keep up. It felt natural, almost too natural. Then came the twist. Copilot served up an answer that looked perfect… and was completely wrong. If it can fool the guy who...
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The "Steal My Money" Lever: A Timely Tale of Data Saving the Day
Raw Data By P3 Adaptive
Every campaign has it: that shiny "more reach, lower cost" lever that looks like marketing gold but really just siphons your budget into digital quicksand. We pulled it. The metrics looked fantastic. And that's exactly how we knew we'd been had. In this episode, Rob breaks down a real-world lesson in false signals, phantom clicks, and why data discipline isn't just consultant-speak—it's your financial survival strategy. We're talking about the bots that sneak in through "partner sites," how they corrupt your retargeting, and the ripple effect that turns good data bad across your entire...
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Even in the AI Era, Communication is the Central Theme
Raw Data By P3 Adaptive
AI is rewriting the rules of analytics. Copilot can pull answers straight from your semantic model and bypass the dashboard entirely. But for all the tech fireworks, the same old truth holds: communication is still the hardest part. Stakeholders don’t always know what they want, builders don’t always know how to translate it, and requirements docs have never fixed that gap. Copilot just puts the tension in sharper focus. Rob and Justin dig into why vanishing chat histories aren’t just inconvenient, they erase the most honest record of what stakeholders actually care about. Screenshots...
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Episode 200: The Road Ahead for Data and AI
Raw Data By P3 Adaptive
Two hundred episodes in, and we're done with the warm-up! Episode 200 finds Rob flying solo and pulling zero punches on the question everyone's quietly asking: what's the future of data work? No anniversary nostalgia here, just uncomfortable truths about AI bootcamps at Starbucks, semantic models going naked, and why being "pretty good" at anything is about to get very complicated. If you think you know where this is all headed, think again. Rob spent yesterday turning a non-techie real estate agent into an AI power user, and what he saw exceeded anything from the early Power BI days. But...
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The "Dobie Moment" (The Awesome Power of AI/CoPilot Frontends - AND a Cautionary Tale)
Raw Data By P3 Adaptive
Most of us have been in the trenches long enough to know when something's about to flip the script. And brother, we're standing at the edge of a cliff most data folks don't even see coming. Rob Collie thought he had Power BI figured out. Then Copilot did something impossible; it cracked a question that should've left it scratching its digital head. But it didn't just answer. It nailed it. That's what we're calling the Dobie Moment—when AI stops being a fancy calculator and starts being genuinely scary-smart. Here's the thing nobody's talking about, your semantic models aren't just sitting...
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The Million-Token Myth and the Magic of Digital Colleagues
Raw Data By P3 Adaptive
AI looks unstoppable… until you hand it a hundred pages of meeting notes. Rob and Justin dig into why context windows and token limits quietly run the show. That “million-token” brag from Google? More like weighing the Titanic in bananas. From Shakespeare to SharePoint, this episode shows why AI remembers the Roman Empire better than your company history—and why that’s not a bad thing. Rob also introduces Griff, a digital colleague that fires off P3-flavored ideas like it’s had three espressos. It’s practical AI that’s actually fun to use. Hit play to find out where AI is...
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Semantic Models Give You (and Microsoft) the AI Upper Hand - Plus a History Lesson on Why Frontends Matter
Raw Data By P3 Adaptive
Back in 2010, Tableau beat smarter tools with a better demo. No brain, all charm and the market loved it. Fast-forward to now: same playbook, new costume. The AI dashboard crowd is selling “natural language BI” with zero semantic model, zero memory, and a whole lot of LinkedIn swagger. In this episode, Rob and Justin revisit why Tableau’s empty-calorie approach won the first round, and how that same mistake is about to flood the AI + BI space all over again. Turns out, you can still sell snake oil if you call it GenAI. Rob breaks down how an elite MIT course managed to skip LLMs...
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Everything's Real, Everything Matters, and Everyone Knows It w/ Quadrant Concrete CFO Joseph Graziano
Raw Data By P3 Adaptive
Let’s say your business runs on sun, sweat, and schedule precision. You’ve got crews in the field, materials that don’t wait, and about 90 minutes to get it right before the product turns into a thousand-pound paperweight. That’s the world Joseph Graziano lives in. He’s the CFO of Quadrant Concrete and also the guy keeping the trucks moving, the forecasts dialed in, and the safety records spotless. Because in the mid-market, you don’t get extra people. You get extra resourceful. Joseph shares how he helped transform a boots-on-the-ground concrete business into a data-forward...
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It's Time to Start Giving Power BI CoPilot a Serious Look (For End User Interaction)
Raw Data By P3 Adaptive
It started as a side project. Rob Collie built a Power BI model for his rec league hockey team. Just for fun. Just to see what the data could say. But something weird happened. The dashboards were solid. The data model was solid. But, the users still had questions. And lots of them. And that’s when it clicked: people don’t think in slicers. They think in questions. Natural ones. The kind dashboards rarely anticipate. In this episode, Rob and Justin Mannhardt didn’t just talk about Microsoft’s Copilot for Power BI. They put it to the test. No tuning. No prep. Just a raw semantic model...
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Connecting AI to Your Company's Internal Information
Raw Data By P3 Adaptive
AI wants your data, but it can't handle the truth . . . “We’ll just plug our data into ChatGPT.” Sure. Sounds easy. Rob thought so too, right up until he hit token limits, had to install Python, and discovered that even two megabytes of transcripts was too much for the world’s smartest models to handle. In this episode, Rob and Justin break down what happens when you try to use AI on your company’s internal data. Spoiler: it’s a lot more complicated than the vendors make it sound. From semantic search to retrieval augmented generation (RAG), they unpack why the dream of “ask AI...
info_outlineWhat’s the value of a long-awaited feature?
Well, that depends. Have you ever tried explaining a fiscal calendar that doesn’t believe in months?
This week, Rob Collie and Justin Mannhardt dive into the latest Microsoft Fabric updates, including the long-rumored, almost-mythical custom calendar support in DAX, the highly requested user-defined functions, and the Copilot expansion that might finally be worth the hype. These updates aren’t just bells and whistles; they’re fixes to problems that have been quietly driving your team up the wall for a decade.
And while the tech is cool, the real story is what it unlocks for the people trying to build reliable reporting, reuse their logic across models, and stop wrestling with edge cases in Excel at 10 p.m.
If you’ve ever been told, “that’s just how it works,” this episode is a breath of fresh air, and a reminder that progress doesn’t always come with a parade. Sometimes it shows up in patch notes.