Raw Data with Rob Collie

We just rebuilt our entire website in five weeks. Rob figures getting the same result the old way would have cost at least a million dollars. No, AI didn't replace the marketing department. Nobody got fired. And nobody found a magical button labeled "Make Website." We just did something that would have been completely out of reach for us a year ago.  Our old website had been hanging around since 2019...

There are two ways to build backwards. One starts with the answer you actually want and works its way toward the plumbing. The other starts with the plumbing and hopes the answer is in there somewhere. Consulting has historically been awfully fond of option two. AI makes that harder to defend. When you can get something working in front of the business early, there's no particularly good reason to...

Rob has a lot of Claude folders now. One knows the book. Another knows the company planning. Others have picked up meeting notes, briefing docs, LinkedIn ideas, strategy work, and whatever else was useful enough to save at the time. None of this felt like a problem while it was happening. Quite the opposite. The whole setup was working well enough that Rob kept giving it more to know. Then one of...

For a minute there, it looked like the AI wars would come down to who built the smartest model. Rob's not buying that anymore. Take Claude. Rob's increasingly convinced that what makes Anthropic so sticky isn't Claude itself. It's Claude Code. It's Cowork. It's the software wrapped around the model that makes the whole thing so ridiculously useful. Great news for Anthropic, except for one tiny pro...

For years, businesses learned that having data and being able to use it are two very different things. We cleaned it, structured it, modeled it, argued about which version was the truth, and built entire careers around making messy information useful. Now AI is creating the same problem all over again. Except this time, it's knowledge. In this episode, Rob explains why everything we learned from t...

There's a new word for what your team is doing with the AI you bought them. You're not going to love it. "Botsitting." Babysitting, but for bots. Journalists are suddenly all over it, and not one of the AI people Rob asked had ever heard of it. New name, familiar burn. Turns out mandating AI usage is a great way to pay good money for software that makes everybody slower. Then the flip side. Rob's...

For most of tech history, the new thing belonged to the new people. Then AI showed up and ruined a perfectly good pattern. Because the smartest model on the planet can know darn near everything and still have no idea how your company works. It doesn't know which rules matter, which ones everyone ignores, why that ugly spreadsheet still exists, or that the "temporary" workaround from 2019 is now ap...

There have always been people who can't help themselves. Give them a clunky process, a messy spreadsheet, or a problem nobody owns, and they're already halfway to building something better. Rob calls them crafters . They were valuable before AI. They're becoming indispensable because AI rewards exactly the way they've always worked. While everyone else is trying to "become AI native," crafters are...

AI headlines have already moved on to the deep end. Most businesses haven't. Every week brings another headline about what's next for AI. Build your own model. Train your own LLM. Customize everything. It's exciting, unless you're one of the thousands of companies still trying to answer a much simpler question: where does AI actually fit into the work we do every day? Here's the thing. AI has beco...

For about two years, we've all been reaching for the biggest hammer on the wall because someone else was paying for the nails. If you were on a subscription, you grabbed the biggest, baddest model on the menu and used the crap out of it. Two hundred dollars a month for work that would have cost thousands on the meter. It rounded to free. Then a new model showed up for roughly fifteen minutes. It w...

For years, Rob had a pretty good system. When a new technology showed up, he didn't immediately declare it the next big thing. He wanted to understand why it mattered first. Sometimes that meant jumping in early, like he did with Power BI. Other times, it meant waiting until the signal was stronger than the hype.   AI was different.   It was the first technology that made Rob question whether his...

Microsoft 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 f...

For 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 someo...

If 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 billio...

Rob 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 pr...

Garett 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 b...

Rob 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… th...

Something 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 no...

The 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...

The 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 plac...

Most 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...

Most people think they've already experienced AI. They've asked a chatbot a question, had it summarize something, maybe even draft an email. That version is useful, but it isn't the one that actually changes how work gets done. The real shift starts when AI stops talking about work and starts participating in it. That's the moment Rob ran into while experimenting with Cowork tools, and it was conv...

Every once in a while a new tool shows up that bends the career curve for a certain kind of person. Not everyone. Just the people with that itch to poke at systems until they finally give up their secrets. The same instinct that used to turn someone into the unofficial Excel wizard in the office is now colliding with AI development tools that can help you build real software. If you have the data...

Rob and Justin had a plan. Scale Justin's brain across the entire P3 consulting team. Build an AI agent that bottled up his frameworks, his instincts, the way he navigates AI conversations with clients. In theory, everyone gets smarter overnight. It was a solid idea. The tech worked. The knowledge base was deep. The guardrails were tight. And almost nobody used it. Not because it was broken. Becau...

There's an easy button for hard conversations now, and it's dangerously good. You've got something complicated to say. It needs nuance. It needs empathy. It probably needs a little courage. The AI will draft the whole thing in seconds. It sounds smart. It sounds reasonable. You skim it. You send it. And most of the time, nothing bad happens. The problem is that the time it does go bad is the exact...