Even in the AI Era, Communication is the Central Theme
Release Date: 08/19/2025
Rob's New Book on AI (and Why He's Writing It)
Raw Data with Rob Collie
This week’s episode breaks the usual format, and that’s the point. Instead of a guest or a debate, Rob does something he hasn’t done publicly in a long time. He reads the foreword to a book he’s actively writing. The first one since 2015. Back then, his books helped define how people learned Power BI. For a few years, he was literally the guy who wrote the book. Then he stopped. No updates. No sequels. An entire generation of practitioners came up without ever encountering his work. So why return now? Because the same pattern is repeating itself, just louder. This time with AI. The...
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Is AI "Vibe Coding" the Next VBA?
Raw Data with Rob Collie
Those Excel macros running your business were never meant to be permanent. Someone in accounting built them because the company needed custom software and didn’t have the budget or patience for a two-year IT project. IT hates them. You know they’re fragile. But they work. And compared to expensive software that never quite fits, working counts for a lot. In this episode, Rob and Justin dig into what might finally replace that world. Not in theory, but in practice. Over the next four years, is the real shift AI helping people build traditional software faster and cheaper? Or is it software...
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Democratized Data Science, Custom Software is the Future, and the Data Gene Rides Again
Raw Data with Rob Collie
Every week brings a new AI model, a new benchmark, and a new reason to believe everything just changed. But for most companies, none of that matters if the people closest to the work can’t use these tools to build something real. In this episode, Rob and Justin walk through what democratized data science really looks like. Not dashboards. Not prompts. Actual analysis and custom software built around a specific problem, driven by someone who knows the data well enough to challenge the answers. The difference isn’t the technology. It’s the person driving it. Someone who understands the...
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The Apparent Meaninglessness of AI Benchmarks, plus How to Explain AI Opportunities to Others
Raw Data with Rob Collie
Every week brings a new AI benchmark. Higher scores. Bigger claims. Louder voices insisting this changes everything. And yet, when you put AI in front of a real business problem, none of that noise seems to help. In this episode, Rob and Justin dig into why AI benchmarks often feel strangely meaningless in practice and why that disconnect is the point. Benchmarks aren’t useless. They’re just answering a different question than the one most businesses are asking. This isn’t just random conjecture either. Rob walks through what he’s learned building actual AI workflows and why a twenty...
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The Power BI Fundamentals Behind Expert Development *and* AI Simplicity, w/ Microsoft's Rui Romano
Raw Data with Rob Collie
Everyone keeps asking whether AI kills Power BI or makes it stronger. Rui Romano flips that entire question on its head. As the Microsoft PM behind PBIP, TMDL, and all the file format work that rebuilt Power BI's foundation, he explains how the platform accidentally became one of the most AI-ready systems in analytics - and it wasn't by accident, not really. His team was solving problems for real developers who were tired of unsupported workarounds and offshore relay races. They weren't training agents. But the work they did means AI now feels native instead of duct-taped on. What we learned...
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Why We Should Stop Paying Attention to the % of AI Projects which Fail (and Instead Learn Why the Others Succeed)
Raw Data with Rob Collie
This episode starts with a familiar scene. A role opens, the applications pour in, and suddenly you’re staring at a mountain of resumes that deserve real attention but arrive faster than anyone can process. The mix had everything… experienced candidates, newcomers trying to break in, and a growing stack of AI-generated submissions that looked sharp until you asked a second question. That’s where Haystack came in. Instead of using AI as a blunt filter, Rob and the team treated it like a collaborator. Teach it what matters. Teach it what P3 looks for in a teammate. Teach it how to separate...
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Cat Negotiations, Dishonest Chatbots, AI vs AI in the Job Market, and More Real World AI Use Cases
Raw Data with Rob Collie
Rob finally cracked his years long standoff with the podcast lair cat, and the fix was hilariously simple. That small victory ends up setting the tone for the whole episode, because everything that follows has the same energy: real problems that only make sense once you shrink the solution down. As Rob talks through the cat truce, Justin brings in a different kind of chaos. A customer service bot that sounded fully in command yet never actually did the thing it said it did. Pair that with a hiring queue full of AI written applications, and the whole picture starts to come into focus. Once you...
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Customizing AI for Your Business is Crucial But It Isn't Hard
Raw Data with Rob Collie
Everyone’s talking about AI like it’s plug-and-play. Spoiler: it’s not. In this episode, Rob digs into why Big Tech’s billions in AI R&D haven’t yet turned into matching revenue — and what that means for the rest of us. The truth? The real business wins don’t come from off-the-shelf models; they come from smart customization. Rob breaks down the “magic Lego brick” approach that separates hype from practical reality, showing how everyday tools like Power BI and Power Automate can connect to AI in surprisingly simple (and powerful) ways. He also revisits Bill Krolicki’s...
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Is AI a Bubble?
Raw Data with Rob Collie
When the bubble pops, what’s left standing? Everyone’s calling AI a bubble — and yeah, there’s some wild stuff happening behind the scenes. Billions changing hands between the same few tech giants. Investments that look more like circular loans than innovation. But what if the real bubble isn’t AI at all? Rob breaks down what’s really inflating, what’s not, and why your business shouldn’t lose sleep over it. The headlines may sound like the sky’s falling, but the tools driving real results aren’t going anywhere. Some bubbles burst. Others just float higher. Listen now to...
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Getting Specific with AI via Categories: Chat, Headless, and Embedded
Raw Data with Rob Collie
Everyone’s talking about AI. Almost no one’s getting specific. And that’s the problem. Rob and Justin break down the three categories that matter: chat agents you talk to, embedded assistants baked into your workflows, and headless systems running quietly in the background doing the grunt work nobody wants to do. This isn’t theory. This is how AI is finally working for real companies. They walk through Vendor Bot, Scheduler Bot, and Budget Bot — small, focused tools that do one thing exceptionally well. Because here’s what keeps happening: the “one bot to rule them all”...
info_outlineAI 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 and Word docs are a band-aid, not a solution. Persistent, shareable conversations could change the way model developers and business users collaborate, but only if governance and security evolve fast enough to keep up. Along the way, they show why usage data from Copilot queries is miles ahead of click stats on a dashboard and why the story of your data has always hinged on the same thing: people understanding each other.
Dashboards may have set the stage, but conversation is where the real action is. Listen now and see what happens when the chat itself becomes the deliverable.