Raw Data with Rob Collie

In this week's episode, Rob and Justin dig into the weird paralysis happening at enterprise scale. Fortune 500 companies are spending six months in high-level negotiations to build AI workflows that could be done in a week. IT departments, trained for decades to fear custom code, are watching their companies get lapped by competitors who just decided to turn the thing on. Everyone's releasing agen...

This week's episode steps away from dashboards and delivery stories and into real life. Rob and Justin both spent the same week realizing how naturally AI is already showing up at home. Not as a plan. Not as a lesson. Just as part of how the next generation creates, explores, and even plans a date. One household includes an about to graduate computer science student navigating a shrinking entry le...

This week's episode is a case study in what AI looks like when it's doing real work. Juan Garcia runs an insurance company in Spain. Industry average profit margin is 5%. He's at 15%, headed for 18%. The difference? Five AI agents in production doing real work. Not pilot projects. Not demos for the board. Actual agents handling claims, customer questions, marketing decisions, fraud detection, and...

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 seq...

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 wh...

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 arou...

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 answe...

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...

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 H...

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...

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...

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 sle...

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 th...

AI without the committee: Most manufacturers are still holding meetings about AI. Bill Krolicki just built it. As CFO of Interpak, he didn't wait for a strategy deck or a vendor pilot—he wired Power BI and Power Automate into a self-running operation. His bots read supplier emails, catch late shipments before they blow up production, and update the ERP while everyone else is still asking who owns...

Last week we got a facelift—new name, new look, same deep data dives. This week? We prove the rebrand wasn't just cosmetic. Rob kicks things off with a time machine moment: his first gig at Microsoft in the '90s, building the Windows Installer. The running joke back then? "Installing yesterday's apps tomorrow." Cut to 2025, and that exact same code shows up while he's configuring an AI tool for da...

Everyone's talking like AI is coming for your job. Rob's here to tell you it's coming for your skill set. If you already think in tables, models, and relationships, congratulations—you're built for what's next. This episode is part pep talk, part reality check, and all proof that data people aren't getting replaced. We're getting promoted. Rob takes you inside Microsoft's campus and out into the r...

Nobody loves requirements docs. They're the corporate equivalent of writing a novel just so someone can skim the back cover. The real question is whether you can ditch all that and go straight from "here's what I need" to a working Power BI model. In this episode, Rob and Justin push AI into that role and see what breaks, what builds, and what actually saves you time. Turns out, the magic isn't in...

Large language models aren't magic. They're pivot tables for words. That's the real breakthrough — not a crystal ball, not a robot overlord, but a new way to roll up all the noise in your business into something you can actually use. And that's why AI belongs in the middle layer. Just like BI gave you visibility across systems, AI is becoming the connective tissue for all the unstructured stuff th...

This isn't another AI think-piece, it's a full-on data brawl. Copilot is out here plagiarizing Rob's pivot table crusade while the self-appointed nerd police try to lock down the definition of agentic AI. Meanwhile, thirty years of fantasy football become the unexpected proof that tuning beats buzzwords every single time. What starts as a slip from Copilot turns into a bigger story about how AI re...

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 fas...

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 finan...

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 t...

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 yo...

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 w...

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 in...