Collide AI 2025 Wrapped Part 1 turns into a real talk on why forward deployed engineers win where AI pilots stall, with Michael Cortez, John, and Nick Smart swapping war stories from completions, geophysics, and the startup trenches while they map out how Collide Enterprise moves past basic chat tools into search plus workflows that actually hold up in the real world.

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00:00 Setup and intros
00:45 Michael’s path and joining Collide
01:59 Nick’s background and role shift
03:08 Collide Enterprise vs community
04:16 Search, RAG, and workflow evolution
06:31 Why out of the box AI falls short
08:41 Time savings and real work focus
11:39 Single source of truth vision
13:16 Small teams scaling bigger assets
17:18 AI adoption vs past tech hype
19:26 Digital transformation missing link
20:20 Why FDEs make pilots work
23:36 Biggest learnings this year
31:52 What’s next in 2026
38:57 Bold predictions for 3 to 5 years
47:37 Fine tuned models teaser and wrap

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Collide AI 2025 Wrapped Part 1: Why Forward Deployed Engineers Ship When AI Pilots Fail