Podcast
Raw Data with Rob Collie
Hosted by P3 Adaptive · EN
Raw Data with Rob Collie breaks down the complex world of AI into practical actions for modern business leaders. With co-host Justin Mannhardt and expert guests, the show uses real stories to deliver clarity and confidence to turn your data into real business value. Catering especially to mid-market leaders who know their size isn't a limitation but a competitive advantage, Raw Data cuts through the hype with straight talk from people who've actually built, deployed, and lived with these systems in high-stakes environments. Whether you're a business leader drowning in AI noise or a data practitioner ready to get off the starting line, you'll get accessible breakdowns of technology that drives actual impact, confidence-building roadmaps for modernizing data analytics, and practical wins you can apply immediately. This isn't theoretical frameworks or jargon wallpaper; it's honest guidance from leaders who've been in your shoes and figured out what actually works, so you can too.
33episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Why Bigger AI Isn't Always Better
Yesterday00:29:50Tap to summarizeMicrosoft just unveiled a monster of a machine built for local AI. More memory. More horsepower. More everything. Which led Rob and Justin to a question that has almost nothing to do with the hardware. Are we already using more AI than the job actually requires? This conversation starts with Microsoft's latest announcement but quickly turns into something much bigger. When do you actually need a frontier model? When is a smaller model just as good? And what happens when companies stop optimizing for the smartest AI and start optimizing for the right AI? It's a familiar pattern. New technology shows up, everyone assumes bigger is better, and eventually we learn that the best solution isn't the most powerful one. It's the one that's powerful enough. AI may be reaching that point faster than anyone expected. Along the way, Rob and Justin dig into the economics of tokens, why developers should think differently than everyday AI users, and why Microsoft's latest hardware announcement feels like it's missing a piece of the story. They don't pretend to have all the answers. Instead, they do what this podcast does best: pull on an interesting thread until a much better conversation emerges. If your first instinct has been to reach for the biggest model every time, this episode might convince you that the future belongs to the people who know when not to.
Transcribe →What Happens After the AI Works?
1w ago00:35:40Tap to summarizeFor the past few years, the conversation around AI has focused on the technology. Which model is best. Which tools to use. How fast everything is changing. But once you start building with it, a different challenge emerges. The technology is often the easy part. The hard part is everything else. The definitions that don't match. The documentation nobody trusts. The tribal knowledge living in someone's head. The processes that work only because a few key people know how to navigate around the mess. Business intelligence exposed some of these problems years ago. AI is exposing even more of them. For years, the people who cared about semantic models were mostly talking to each other. Everyone else had a simpler view: the dashboards worked, the BI nerds were overcomplicating things, and if a slightly different version of yesterday's question showed up, someone could always write more SQL. That worked well enough until AI agents became the ones asking the questions. Agents don't wait two weeks for a developer. They improvise. And the improvisation is different every time. That's the moment the semantic model stopped being a nice-to-have and started looking a lot more like a requirement. Every data quality problem that used to come home to roost the first time you built a dashboard is back, only now the list is longer. AI cares about policies, institutional knowledge, organizational context, and all the things that used to live quietly in people's heads. The one-version-of-the-truth problem just got a much bigger job description. Along the way, Rob and Justin compare notes from the front lines of building with AI, from multi-agent systems and knowledge management to the unexpected ways these tools behave once they leave the lab and meet real organizations. There's a book update in here too. Fair Game is officially available for pre-order, and Rob shares why the independent bookstore route matters more than most people realize. If you've been wondering what happens after the AI works, this episode is a pretty good place to start. Also in this episode: Pre-order Fair Game: Customizing AI to Your Business Is Easier Than You Think Fortune: Big Tech is laying off developers. My company just hired its first. We're both right about AI (By Rob Collie)
Transcribe →Absences, KPI Updates, Book Title and Pre-Order Bundle Reveal
2w ago00:06:52Tap to summarizeIf you've listened to the podcast over the past several months, you've probably heard Rob mention "the book" a few times. Well, it's finally done. In this solo episode, Rob reveals the title, shares the story behind it, and talks about the question that sent him down the AI rabbit hole in the first place: what does this technology actually mean for normal businesses? Not Silicon Valley. Not billion dollar tech companies. The rest of us. What he found was both simpler and more surprising than expected. The farther he got from the headlines and hot takes, the clearer it became that AI isn't some magical new category of technology. It's a lot closer to the data, software, and business problems companies have been wrestling with for years. Which raises an interesting question: if AI is more approachable than most people think, why are so many organizations still standing on the sidelines waiting for someone else to go first? As it turns out, that question became a book. And this episode is the story of how it got there. Also in this episode: Pre-order Fair Game: Customizing AI to Your Business Is Easier Than You Think Fortune: Big Tech is laying off developers. My company just hired its first. We're both right about AI (By Rob Collie)
Transcribe →It's Time to Start Looking Into Microsoft IQ
May 500:19:33Tap to summarizeRob was supposed to be finishing his book. Last chapter. Two days past deadline. Freedom was right there. Instead, he hit pause and recorded this. Because something from a few weeks ago wouldn't leave him alone. A Microsoft exec had dropped "Microsoft IQ" into a conversation weeks ago. At the time, it didn't fully land. Not unusual. There's been a steady firehose of new terms, new features, new promises. Most of them sound important. Not all of them are. Then he got deep into the data chapter. The one where you have to stop talking about what AI could do and deal with what it takes to make it work in a real company. And that's where this thing stopped sounding like a label and started looking like a plan. AI looks great right up until you ask it to do something that depends on your business. Your definitions. Your documents. Your people. That's where things usually start to wobble. Not because the model isn't capable, but because it doesn't have the context to land the answer. What Microsoft is doing with IQ is trying to meet that problem head on. · Fabric IQ is the structured side. Semantic models doing what they've always done, but now under a lot more pressure. · Foundry IQ is all the documents and content you forgot you had. · Work IQ is the human layer. Who's involved. Who needs to know. What you meant when you said "that thing." And yeah… if you've been doing Power BI the right way, this is where it gets interesting. Because those semantic models everyone else treated like optional homework? That's now the thing everything else leans on. We're not saying this episode is the key to your AI implementation, but it will make it clear why some of this is working and some of it isn't.
Transcribe →Cowork Builds Apps Now, and 'Acquired Skills Will Appear Here' w/ Garett Medlin
Apr 2800:56:10Tap to summarizeGarett Medlin just got the official title for the job he was already doing: AI Practice Lead at P3. He's also the person responsible for Rob trying Cowork in the first place, despite Rob's very reasonable question: "Why the hell would I want Cowork if I already have Claude Code?" Then Rob accidentally proved Garett right. He made an offhand comment about needing a better way to track feedback on book graphics. Nothing dramatic. Just the kind of annoying little process problem everyone complains about and nobody fixes. Two days later, there was a Slack bot reminding him to review images, a web app with approve buttons, surrounding context from the manuscript, and a clean way to send feedback without creating a Slack archaeology project. Built by a non developer. In Cowork. Which makes Microsoft's Copilot Cowork story… awkward. Garett came with the field report. Yes, it can make PowerPoints. Yes, it talks to OneDrive. No, it doesn't have memory. No, it doesn't have custom instructions. No, it doesn't have projects. The section where those capabilities are supposed to live is called "Acquired Skills," and it currently says they will appear here. Which is a choice. At the same time, companies are getting top down mandates to spend $20 million a year on AI with absolutely no idea what they're supposed to spend it on. IT gets handed the problem, Copilot gets treated like the answer, and somebody nearby is always trying to sell a very expensive fear of the tools that already work. This episode is really about that gap. Between what's shipping and what's still "coming soon." Between the people waiting for enterprise permission and the people already building useful things on a Tuesday afternoon. Turns out, the scariest part of AI might be realizing the non developers got there first.
Transcribe →AI "versus" the Medical Establishment, Rob's Sith Name, and the Death of Social Media?
Apr 2100:30:02Tap to summarizeRob didn't go looking for a fight with the medical system. He just showed up with receipts. Claude had already mapped the symptoms, suggested the tests, and summarized the situation better than any portal ever would. And instead of pushing back, the doctor basically said, "Yeah, this all checks out," added a few things, and moved on. No drama. No turf war. Just a quiet moment where you realize… the system didn't break. It just got leapfrogged. The next morning, sitting in an Uber on the way to the fasting lab, Rob had AI log into his medical portal, pull down test results, interpret them, suggest next steps, and tee up additional tests before the lab even opened. That's not "AI as a helper." That's AI running point. And when it catches an error in the doctor's AI-generated notes and fixes it by talking to their system directly… yeah. That's the moment. You don't unsee that. Which is great… until you zoom out. Because the same thing that lets you bulldoze friction in healthcare also bulldozes friction everywhere else. Social media. Identity. Trust. If AI can operate the interface better than you can, the whole idea of "who's actually doing what" starts to get fuzzy real fast. There's a version of this where everything gets more efficient. There's another version where everything gets a little… fake. This episode walks through both. It's worth knowing which one you're already in.
Transcribe →Book PR, Fourth-and-One, the AI Knowledge Cliff, and LinkedIn WTF Moments
Apr 1400:28:06Tap to summarizeSomething shifted this year and you can see it in the reactions. Not to the technology. To people talking about it. Rob shared a screenshot on LinkedIn. CFO. Friday night. Using CoWork in real time. The kind of moment where you have to stop yourself because you won't sleep otherwise. And that's what set someone off. Not hype. Not a prediction. Just… "this is happening." Apparently that's enough now. Rob calls it the knowledge cliff. AI knows three things. What's in the training. What it can pull from the web. And everything that only exists in your world. The first two feel almost the same. The third is where things break. That's where most of the frustration lives. If you haven't crossed that line yet, AI feels inconsistent. Impressive one minute, useless the next. If you have, it starts to look a lot more like real work getting done. You can see it in companies already changing how they plan and operate. You can see it in schools trying to figure out how to respond. And you can definitely see it in the comments, where people react to the exact same example like they're living in two different worlds. You can't really be smug about it. But the people who've crossed the cliff aren't waiting for consensus. They weren't a year ago either. This episode won't tell you what to think about AI but it will make it a lot harder to ignore what's already happening.
Transcribe →How Claude Cowork is Helping a College Senior Boil the Job-Hunting Ocean
Apr 800:46:53Tap to summarizeThe job hunt is a numbers game. The problem is, the numbers are brutal. Hundreds of applicants per role. Ghosted applications. "Entry level" jobs asking for experience no one at 22 could possibly have. In this episode, Rob brings on his daughter Ella, a college senior in the middle of it, and hands her something different. Not advice. Not a better resume template. A coworker that doesn't get tired, doesn't lose track, and doesn't stop digging. Within 48 hours, she's using Claude Cowork to search across sources, filter for real roles, verify listings, organize everything into a system, and adjust the criteria on the fly when the market doesn't cooperate. It's messy. It's imperfect. And it's wildly more effective than doing it alone. Watching it happen in real time makes one thing pretty obvious. This isn't about AI helping you think. It's about AI helping you work. One person scrolling and hoping. One person running a system that never stops. Listen to this episode to decide which side of that you want to be on.
Transcribe →More Cowork Love, "Data Gene" Gets a Rebrand, Tiny Bottle, and the End of Wordpress
Mar 3100:30:56Tap to summarizeThe work feels different now. You can hear it in this one. Something that used to feel like overhead suddenly starts pulling its weight. Not a demo. Not something you have to babysit. It's actually doing useful work while you're still figuring out what you want. That's a weird moment the first time you see it. And then it stops being weird and just becomes the new normal. It shows up in a few places here. Cowork starts earning its keep. The "data gene" gets reworked into something that fits where things are going. And there's a moment that might make you a little uncomfortable if you've spent years leaning on tools like WordPress to get things out the door. Because the gap those tools were filling is getting smaller. Fast. The people who like to build and adjust as they go feel that immediately. They don't want to wait around for results. Now they don't have to. And then there's the other camp. The folks who checked this out once, decided it wasn't that impressive, and moved on. Still pretty confident the whole thing is overblown. You can feel that tension in this episode. And it matters. Because a year ago this would've sounded like a stretch. It doesn't anymore.
Transcribe →Knowitall Doctors, Mac Keyboards, More Love for CoWork, and Maybe it was the Models After All
Mar 2400:43:00Tap to summarizeMost AI still lives in the "that's pretty cool" category. It answers questions, writes a decent paragraph, maybe even points you in the right direction. And then you still have to go do the work. That line is starting to move. Not in theory. In real, hands on, open the file and keep going kind of ways. We're talking about outputs that don't fall apart the second you touch them. Work that shows up structured, editable, and worth building on. That's a very different experience than what most people think of when they hear "AI." Some of this stuff still feels like a demo. You try it, you nod, and then you go back to doing things the old way. Other parts are starting to feel different. You give it something real and it gives you something back you can use without starting over. That's the shift. And once you see it, it's hard to unsee. Listen to the episode and decide where AI in your business is still a demo and where it's finally ready to pull its weight.
Transcribe →