Raw Data with Rob Collie

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  • 5.0 (53)
  • BUSINESS
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

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.

  1. 1D AGO

    The Dangers of Letting AI Speak for You, and Why Selling AI Might be Easier than Selling Dashboards

    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 situation where you thought you were being thoughtful. This week's Raw Data walks straight through one of those moments, from both sides of the exchange, and it's a reminder that outsourcing the structure of your thinking is not the same thing as being clear. Then there's the part that's almost more interesting. Thirteen years ago, the first real client engagement couldn't get traction around dashboards. The connection between "this is my business" and "data should change how I run it" just didn't stick. Same people, same company, different conversation recently around AI. Immediate traction. Leaning forward. Connecting dots in real time. That difference isn't about better slides or better storytelling. Dashboards improved a slice of the business. AI shows up in the messy motion of the whole thing. In workflows. In manual processes. In strategic questions leaders don't have time to chase down. That shift in surface area changes everything. AI isn't a toy and it isn't a ghostwriter. It's leverage. Real leverage. The kind that can remove friction across an organization faster than dashboards ever could. But leverage only works if you're still the one steering. That's really what this episode comes down to. Listen in, then decide where AI belongs in your workflow and where it needs to stay out of your head.

    41 min

  2. FEB 10

    Jensen Huang's Reindeer Games, Agent Frameworks vs. Fully Custom, and Rapid Impact vs. Technical Debt

    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 agent frameworks, every AI company's got one, some have more than one, and instead of clarifying things, it's freezing people up.. There's a massive gap between what AI can do right now and what most organizations are getting out of it. Justin calls it the capability overhang, and it's growing. Not because the technology isn't ready, but because of how businesses are approaching it. Rob's got stories from the field that'll make you feel like the guy in the manhole from Die Hard, waving his hands: "I can just do it right here. No really. Right here." You'll learn what it really means to unlock AI (spoiler: it's not about waiting for the tech to get better), why hoping for built-in solutions is a fantasy, and why Claude is now updating its own instructions when it screws up. If you've been wondering whether you're behind on AI or just appropriately skeptical of the hype, this one's for you. Also in this episode: Juan Garcia on Raw Data with Rob Collie Morpheus / The Matrix Die Hard Manhole scene

    34 min

  3. FEB 3

    How to Acclimate Your Family to AI

    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 level job market, Discord as the default communication layer, and a Claude Code powered date night that feels entirely normal to everyone involved. The other involves younger kids, a TV, a terminal window, and a two-hour experiment that turns into a fully illustrated story built with multiple AI tools, false starts included. Even Microsoft Word makes an appearance. The stories are personal, but the takeaway is practical. AI rarely gets it right the first time. Iteration matters. Context matters. Switching tools matters. And exposure builds confidence faster than instruction. This episode isn't about business use cases. It's about understanding how people actually acclimate to new technology and why that same pattern shows up inside organizations, whether leaders plan for it or not. Also in this episode: GitHub repository

    22 min

  4. JAN 27

    Tales from the Five Percent: Tangible AI Success, w/ Tuio's Juan Garcia

    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 underwriting. His claims adjusters went from 10 cases a day to 50 because the AI does everything except the stuff that actually needs a human. Here's the thing. Juan started this in mid-2023 with GPT-3.5. His team built 75 subagents to control quality on that first chatbot. That's the kind of smart engineering that makes AI work in production. He'll tell you exactly when to let the AI decide, when to kick it to a human, and why confidence thresholds matter more than anyone talks about. He'll also tell you where they won't use AI. Rejecting claims. Handling money. Anything that needs actual empathy. You can't fake that and you shouldn't try. Want to know what works in production? Juan's got the decisions and the profit margins to back it up. Also in this episode: Juan's Tuio presentation

    1h 14m

  5. JAN 20

    Rob's New Book on AI (and Why He's Writing It)

    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 hype is everywhere, the confusion is real, and business leaders are being handed tools without a usable mental model for how success actually happens. This foreword is an explainer. Plain English. Business focused. Written for leaders and for the people who have to help those leaders make good decisions. No formulas. No technical flexing. Just a clear frame for thinking about AI in a way that doesn't implode six months later. Consider this episode an early access audio version of something that's still being built. Give it a listen. And if the foreword resonates, stay close. This may not be the last chapter you hear early.

    14 min

  6. JAN 13

    Is AI "Vibe Coding" the Next VBA?

    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 that actually has AI running inside it at runtime? The difference matters if you're deciding where to invest time, money, or political capital. They also tackle who's going to build this next-generation line of business tools. Is it the Power BI crowd all over again? The VBA veterans reinventing themselves? Or a new kind of builder who sits closer to the business than IT ever could? If you're nursing a mission-critical spreadsheet you're afraid to touch, or paying too much for SaaS that almost fits, this conversation will feel uncomfortably familiar. And useful. Listen to the episode and start thinking about what replaces your macros before they replace themselves.

    26 min

  7. JAN 6

    Democratized Data Science, Custom Software is the Future, and the Data Gene Rides Again

    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 data, the domain, and how to spot bad answers before they turn into bad decisions. That's where the data gene shows up again. When those people are empowered to build software fitted to how work happens, off-the-shelf tools stop feeling helpful and start feeling like friction. This episode is about noticing that shift while everyone else is still watching benchmarks. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform for weekly reality checks on AI and Analytics delivered straight to your inbox.

    26 min

  8. 12/16/2025

    The Apparent Meaninglessness of AI Benchmarks, plus How to Explain AI Opportunities to Others

    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 percent improvement on a leaderboard rarely translates into anything you can feel on the job. They talk about why model choice usually isn't the bottleneck, why swapping models should be easy if you've built things the right way, and why the most successful AI work rarely shows up as a flashy demo. Most of the value is happening quietly, off-screen, inside systems that look a lot more like normal software than artificial intelligence. Rob and Justin also talk about why explaining AI is often harder than building it. The first demo people see tends to stick, even when it's the wrong one. Consumer AI feels magical. Business AI face plants unless it's built with intent, structure, and real context. This episode gives leaders better language for that gap, without hype or panic. If you're done chasing benchmarks and just want a way to think about AI that survives contact with reality, this episode's for you.

    34 min
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About

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.

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