AI Is Already Changing Data Jobs: Why You Must Create More Value Now with Rob Collie
In this episode of Future Finance, hosts Paul Barnhurst and Glenn Hopper welcome Robert Collie, founder and CEO of P3 Adaptive, for a conversation about artificial intelligence, data analytics, and how finance professionals can prepare for the future of work. Robert shares his journey from helping build Power BI at Microsoft to founding P3 Adaptive and explains why AI is creating both disruption and new opportunities for finance and data professionals.
Robert Collie is the founder and CEO of P3 Adaptive, a Microsoft analytics and AI consulting firm. During his 13 years at Microsoft, Robert helped lead the development of Power Pivot and Power BI. He is also the author of the bestselling Power Pivot and Power BI book and hosts the Raw Data with Rob Collie podcast. His upcoming book, Fair Game: Customizing AI to Your Business is Easier Than You Think, explores how organizations can make AI practical and accessible.
In this episode, you will discover:
How Power BI and Power Pivot changed the way organizations use data.
Why AI is creating new opportunities for finance and data professionals.
Why sitting still with current skills can create career risks.
How companies can build AI systems using strong data foundations.
Why semantic models are becoming essential for AI adoption.
Robert brings decades of experience in business intelligence, analytics, and AI, sharing practical lessons on how finance leaders and data professionals can adapt, learn, and create value in a rapidly changing environment.
Follow Glenn:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gbhopperiii
Follow Paul:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thefpandaguy
Follow Robert:
Website: https://p3adaptive.com/
Book: https://fairgamebook.ai/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robcollie/
In Today’s Episode:
[00:00] – Trailer
[00:00] – How AI is changing jobs
[02:43] – Robert’s Microsoft journey
[06:06] – Power BI and Power Pivot impact
[11:25] – Leaving Microsoft for P3 Adaptive
[15:43] – AI and the future of data work
[19:33] – Making AI accessible
[25:13] – AI tools and better workflows
[31:11] – AI in career planning
[33:38] – AI changing finance and consulting
[35:16] – Why semantic models matter
[38:35] – Building a strong company culture
[40:34] – Robert’s AI book and future plans
Full Show Transcript:
Co Host : Glenn Hopper (01:14):
Welcome to Future Finance. I'm dialling in today from home. My building was hit by lightning the other day and the internet's been down for six days or something now. So I'm really out of sorts and I'm surrounded by video games too, which makes it really hard to do podcasts.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (01:30):
Likely story, sure. You just want to be at home with your video games. It's all right, Glenn.
Co Host : Glenn Hopper (01:34):
Well, I'm here today with my esteemed co-host, Mr. Paul Barnhurst, the FP&A guy himself, and our guest, Rob Collie. Really looking forward to diving in today.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (01:44):
Excited to have you. Welcome to the show, Rob.
Guest : Robert Collie (01:46):
Thank you very much. So did your internet become super internet after being hit by lightning?
Co Host : Glenn Hopper (01:51):
I think that's if it gets bit by a spider. I don't think - Oh, I see. Yeah.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (01:56):
You weren't in the building when it got hit, were you?
Co Host : Glenn Hopper (01:58):
I was not. I was at the OneStream splash conference last week and I came in
Host : Paul Barnhurst (02:03):
And noticed nobody's in there. Just as long as you're safe, I can make fun. If something had happened, then I would feel bad.
Co-host: Glenn Hopper (02:07):
Yeah. No, everybody's fine. Apparently a couple of computers and some keyboards and our switch, our internet switch and some wiring around it and some signs got knocked out too. But yeah.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (02:18):
So pretty good jolt then. Fried a few things he was like. All right, well we're glad everybody's safe. And just we'll start here by giving a little bit of background about Rob and then we'll jump into things. I have a start before I even read his bio to say I'm really excited for this interview. I've listened to several of his podcasts a while back and I even have a copy of here. We were talking about it before his book, PowerPivot and Power BI. What this from 2013? Is that when it was?
Guest : Robert Collie (02:43):
15. 2015. 15.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (02:45):
Yeah, I picked it up in early 17 when I first learned about Power Query and Power Pivot. It got me through a project along with, there's Ken Pulse's book on PowerQuery. You two were bought about the same time.
Guest : Robert Collie (02:58):
Yeah, that's right. Yeah. And I promised myself that was the last book I would ever, ever, ever write. And I recently discovered that that was a lie.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (03:07):
Yeah, we'll have to bring that up at some point. I did see a little bit about it on LinkedIn. You shared a little bit of the, I think it was the back jacket.
Guest : Robert Collie (03:16):
Indeed. Indeed. Yes.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (03:17):
So let me get a little bit of Rob's background, and then we'll jump into the question. So Rob Colley is the founder and CEO of P3 Adaptive. You can see it on his shirt there if you're watching online, a national Microsoft analytics and AI consulting firm. During his 13 years at Microsoft, Rob led the BI-focused capabilities in Excel and was subsequently one of the founding engineers on Power BI. He then left Microsoft to found P3 Adaptive. Rob is a sought-after speaker and author of the number one selling Power BI book, Power BI and Power Pivot, which you just saw there a minute ago. Rob is relentlessly committed to making transformative data solutions accessible to organizations of all sizes. He is widely regarded as one of the leading authorities on Microsoft Power Pivot and Power BI technology and a thought leader within the business intelligence industry.
(04:15):
He also hosts the Raw Data with Rob Colley podcast and is an active voice in the data and AI community. And as he mentioned earlier, he's getting ready to release another book, which he swore he wouldn't. I think a lot of people have done that. Glenn, did you swear you wouldn't after your first?
Co Host: Glenn Hopper (04:32):
No, I was hooked. So I'm what, three books in four years I think it is.
Guest : Robert Collie (04:38):
That's a different experience than
Co Host : Glenn Hopper (04:39):
My head. Mingers.
Guest: Robert Collie (04:41):
Yeah. I love writing, but boy, the commitment, the slog and what it does to my life is the thing that ultimately the first couple of chapters are, that's great.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (04:53):
Yeah. I haven't been able to bring myself to write a book yet. I've had a few people try to convince me and I say I go back and forth. I did. I've talked about it, but I'm not quite there yet. So we'll see if I become one of those book authors like you two. I just like to be different. It allows me to stand out.
Co Host : Glenn Hopper (05:12):
And you can't read, so that would be a... Well,
Host : Paul Barnhurst (05:16):
Based on the way I read the bio, thanks. Thanks there, Glenn.
Guest : Robert Collie (05:20):
Speaking of which, when we run into people, my wife has been telling people, "Yeah, we've been really busy lately. I've been doing this. I had to go in for surgery." And Rob's been finishing a book and it sounds like Rob's been finishing reading a book. Reading a book is a huge challenge. And so I always have to jump in and say, "Just be clear, I'm writing a book."
Host : Paul Barnhurst (05:41):
It's funny when you snip that, the first though that came to mind was almost like I had to go in for surgery, but Rob was busy reading a book.
Guest : Robert Collie (05:49):
Yeah, one word at a time. I'm still sounding it out.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (05:52):
You and me both. No, okay. In all seriousness. So I'd love to ask you a question. I know you were one of the founding engineers of Power BI. Obviously you worked on Power Pivot. Would love to learn a little bit about that experience, how it came about. Just tell us a little bit of that journey.
Guest : Robert Collie (06:06):
A lot of credit really in a lot of ways, all the credit goes to Amir Nets. You hear the term visionary used a lot and it's thrown around a lot. Amir Nets at Microsoft is a true visionary in every sense of the word. And so he had basically been watching the price of memory, literally been watching the price of RAM drop over the years and was waiting for his moment to do this new thing. So he had been the architect behind the original SQL Server analysis services, predates the DAX and tabular model and all that kind of stuff. And that technology was the market leader in its space, but it was really, really, really hard to use. I tried to learn it and I couldn't. I learned how to write formulas. I couldn't write a formula in MDX. I sit down and -
Host : Paul Barnhurst (07:00):
That MDX. That's what I thought. I've played with MDX a little bit in Excel. Okay.
Guest : Robert Collie (07:07):
I don't think it was beyond my intellectual capacity, but it was definitely beyond my combination of intellectual capacity and enthusiasm. I'm trying to write an if and I'm 15 minutes into a tutorial from someone on how to write an if. And I'm like, wait, if an if is this hard, I'm out. So he had been waiting to essentially do a version two, like a reboot of analysis services that wasn't so hard. And also one that took advantage of end memory storage technology, which again, which is why he was watching the RAM prices. And they reached this critical threshold where they were cheap enough, RAM was cheap enough that enough data would be able to compress and fit into main memory on a computer that he said, okay, now we actually have a viable product that we could go and build. And the end memory component was really important because the Excel crowd, which is who he was targeting, he wanted the Excel crowd, the highest end of the Excel community to be able to build these new versions of these at the time were called OLAP cubes, OLAP models, data models.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (08:10):
Yep. Pivot formulas, the cube formulas from... Yeah.
Guest : Robert Collie (08:13):
So we know today that this was just an absolutely raging success. Power BI has taken over. And the idea that we now have millions and millions of people worldwide building dimensional semantic models and writing reusable DAX calculations, it's kind of breathtaking how we almost take it for granted now. It's just part of the baseline of our world. That was not at all a guaranteed outcome. I mean, this was crazy. This was a crazy, ambitious, crazy project that... And I'd worked on a lot of version one stuff at Microsoft and most of it never amounted to anything. Well, there's never version two. Or the other famous thing about Microsoft is it's version three before it's good. And so I was fully expecting it to be one of those things, but version one was a world beater even just still when it was just in Excel as Power Pivot.
(09:09):
I mean, it blew my hair back. Been there for such an ambitious project that not only delivered, but actually over-delivered. It over-delivered, I think, relative to even our ambitious expectations of it was really kind of life-changing. And to watch these guys, because a lot of people who were working on this project had been part of the first one, had been part of the original MDX OLAB project. Watching them retrace their steps and unmake mistakes that they had made that had made the prior version too complicated, too stubborn was also a really fascinating sociological experience. And what we ended up with is just, I don't know, a couple years ago we did a podcast we titled The Software Hall of Fame. It was a podcast that was like, okay, so Power BI belongs. What else? VisiCal can Excel clearly belong and things like that. But I mean to be there at the formation of something that if there was a Software Hall of Fame, it would be in it was quite an experience for sure.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (10:20):
Glenn, what do you think? Should we create a Software Hall of Fame? That could be pretty cool with the old boxes, the original micro people come in and -
Co Host : Glenn Hopper (10:28):
Oh yeah.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (10:29):
We could charge, I don't know what we could charge per ticket, but that could be a new business for us.
Guest : Robert Collie (10:33):
Not very much. Yeah, turns out. You
Host : Paul Barnhurst (10:36):
Right.
Co Host : Glenn Hopper (10:36):
Next to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Guest : Robert Collie (10:38):
We put up a website with the episode, the Software Hall of Fame, and it gets five visitors.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (10:45):
Yeah, exactly.
Co Host : Glenn Hopper (10:46):
As you're going through and talking about all that, I'm thinking great new products doing really cool things at Microsoft. You're at a Fortune, I don't know what they were, Fortune 10 company or however big Microsoft was at that time. And you're sitting on top of the world and then you say, "I think I'm going to go do my own thing." That seems like an interesting time to pivot. Can you tell us a little bit about what led to doing great work at Microsoft and it's a reliable position and you're probably on the upswing there, but you get the call to go start P3, to go start your own thing. How did all that go about?
Guest : Robert Collie (11:25):
The real story here is that in, you're right, Microsoft is only thing I'd ever known. I'd worked there straight out of college. I had a very good reputation there so I could move around, I could get new jobs, et cetera. So I was safe and being paid well and on a good trajectory and all that kind of stuff. So basically in 2009, I had gotten divorced in Seattle and my ex - wife moved to Cleveland and took my children, our children with her. And the courts in Seattle didn't really see my side of things. So I had a choice to make. I could either be with my children or I could continue my Microsoft career. This was before remote work.
(12:08):
This wasn't an option. And so in 2009, I moved to Cleveland and said, okay, now what? But even then, the idea of starting a company around PowerPivot, that wasn't the idea. Again, at the time I still thought PowerPivot wasn't out yet, wasn't even released. I wasn't even in beta when I moved. And they let me stay on for a while. So I still had not a full year, but I stayed on for another nine months as a Microsoft employee. And that gave me time to play with it. They gave me time to play with the product. The analogy I use is that if you spend all day building race cars, you don't learn how to drive them. And this is why a lot of people who work on Power BI aren't as good at it as people in the community. And same thing is true of Excel.
(12:55):
And so I had time to play with it and I started a blog. The whole point of the blog at the time was just to be my digital resume to get me some sort of job in the middle of the 2008, 2009 financial recession, depression, whatever you want to call
Host : Paul Barnhurst (13:13):
It. Meltdown, whatever you want to call it.
Guest : Robert Collie (13:15):
In Cleveland, Ohio, not exactly the hotbed. I used to do all the "Do you know that Cleveland's kind of the Silicon Valley of the Midwest?" And people would go, "Really?" I go, "No." And I just needed a job. I didn't have high hopes for what I was going to do. But somewhere in the course of writing the blog, I was like, "Oh my God." I actually remember the night that the electricity hit me, not lightning, but there is sort of an origin story moment where I wrote this formula in Power Pivot that I remembered. I had happened to build this exact same formula via consultant with the old school technology. And I remember that version of the formula had taken two weeks real time. In the real world, it had taken two weeks to get the formula right. And I got it right in 30 minutes or less.
(14:03):
And it was like this virtual lightning bolt. Oh my God, the world is going to change. And from that point forward, all idea getting some sort of boring IT job in Cleveland was gone. And so at that point, I knew my career was going to be at the forefront of this new thing. That's where it really... It was really funny, by the time I got really excited about this, Microsoft came to me and said, "Hey, we have actually some really cool remote positions for you. " That if they'd offered them to me six, seven months before, I'd have been thrilled. I'd have taken them. But instead I'm like, "No, I'm too excited about this other thing." I turned down going back. So I could say, "Hey, I left Microsoft to found this company and all the important parts of it, that's still true, but it does leave out the fact it makes me sound more courageous and more entrepreneurial than what I actually am.
(15:00):
This one found me. I didn't go looking for it.
Co Host : Glenn Hopper (15:06):
Isn't it great though when it just feels like the stars aligned and you ended up doing exactly what you were supposed to and now this many years on later, clearly that you made the right choice on that. I wonder though, are you now... Because the data and analytics and what's been the core of your work, that's not going to go anywhere because of AI. It's going to only become more important. Are you seeing that same sort of holy cow moment around AI with what you guys are doing today? Or how does this shift feel compared to what you were seeing in those early days?
Guest : Robert Collie (15:43):
We were joking earlier about swearing I was never going to write another book. And even the first book felt almost like I owed it to the world. Of course, writing a book benefits you professionally. Of course it does. But I'm not the kind of person who can finish writing one for that reason. I need to have an emotional driver as well as some sort of professional incentive. If I don't have an emotional driver, that project's going to drag for years. It's never going to finish.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (16:12):
I've had a few projects like that.
Guest : Robert Collie (16:14):
Yeah. Well, I do too. But I felt like as you're describing, Glenn, I think you're really picking up on exactly the kind of feeling I was having then. It was these silly things. It's almost like my whole career had been building to that moment and people needed to know the things that were in my head. And I knew that other people were going to be able to do this. There wasn't something special about me. It was just that I had an early glimpse. And yeah, I am feeling that again today. And this book that I'm releasing soon, I didn't go into this process of diving deep into AI so that I could write a book. It really started a little over a year ago really diving really super deep into AI because I needed to know what our company was going to look like. It was my responsibility as the leader of this company to plot us, of course.
(17:14):
And I agree with you that data and analytics just going to become more important. And at the same time, AI is making it easier and easier and faster and faster. And I think one of the things that all of us need to internalise as data professionals and BI professionals, it's an uncomfortable truth, but it's something that we need to just start trying to get comfortable with, is that whatever our existing job is today, it's kind of already gone. In the same way that if something happened at the sun right at this moment, we wouldn't know for eight minutes.
(17:53):
It's already gone moment has happened, but it's taking a while to work its way through the system to us. Now that doesn't mean that we're going to be left without jobs, but if you sit still, you might. So the reason for this adventure that I went on over the past year plus was to figure out what our new jobs were. And it turns out there's a tremendous amount of opportunity. The new jobs for people who are wired like us who are in this data and analytics space, the new jobs are probably better than our old jobs and there's going to be even more demand for it than our old jobs. So it's very exciting, but you kind of have to first internalise that the place you're standing at the moment is the tsunami flood zone. You can't sit still. And then again, in the course of all of this process, I'm like, oh my God, the things that I just learned about AI, no one's explaining them as simply as they could be.
(18:49):
If I'd had the book that I just wrote at the beginning of this process, I wouldn't have needed to go on a year deep dive of understanding what AI is all about. And so I was like, oh God. I literally felt it like now I owe another book and told my wife about it. She was very unhappy because she remembers what it's like when I'm writing a book. I'm not a great husband when I'm writing a book. She's like a book widow. So it's not the most pleasant realisation, but it is very pleasant to be done with it.
Co Host : Glenn Hopper (19:21):
Well, and actually while you're talking about it, let's be sure that everybody knows the name and it sounds like we have a pretty good idea of what it's about, but maybe a little bit more detail about what it's about and release date and where people can find it and all that.
Guest : Robert Collie (19:33):
Appreciate it. So it's called Fair Game. That's the main title, and it's a very visual title. So the A and the I are highlighted in Fair Game. But the subtitle is Customizing AI to Your Business is Easier Than You Think. And it just takes people on the... It's not aimed at the same technical level that my Power BI books were. The Power BI books were aimed at the formula writers. This is aimed at explaining. I wrote it at a level that is relevant to a technical audience, but also relevant to a business leader, business thinker audience, because they need to understand it too. In the same way that we all kind of understand software, all of us have an intrinsic understanding of what's possible with traditional software. And we've grown up with CPU style computing. We know more about it. If you were going to write a book about what software could do, it'd be a 400-page book before you knew it.
(20:33):
And you just don't understand how much you know about software. It's crazy. AI LLMs are for the first time in our, really in humanities history, it's the second kind of computing. It's a new kind of computing and it's brand new. And it turns out that it's much easier to understand than I anticipated it would be. But just understanding how to... The fact that you don't need to be an AI expert able to develop LLMs, able to be a researcher. You don't have to be able someone who works in Anthropic in order to build an agent that helps your business. And guess what folks? It just comes back to traditional data, traditional information and traditional software. It's all the stuff that you wrap around this magic, I call it the magic Lego brick, the LLM. The stuff that you wrap around it is all stuff that we understand.
(21:24):
It's stuff that we all grew up with. We all understand it. Whether we're technical or just as a business leader, we understand what those things are like. And understanding that an AI system, a customized system for your company is really just, in the air quotes, for just, is just us taking normal regular information and wrapping it around the LLM. It's kind of a mind-blowing moment when you start to piece that story together.
Co Host : Glenn Hopper (21:48):
And Rob, you're really preaching to the choir here because one of the things I can be a pedantic SOB at times, right, Paul?
Host : Paul Barnhurst (21:55):
I will vouch for that, Rob. I will go on record.
Co Host : Glennn Hopper (21:58):
You're spot on with the direction of the book because I always tell people, look, you don't have to be a data scientist. You don't have to be a machine learning engineer. Like you said, you don't have to be qualified to work as an AI engineer at Anthropic. But if you're going to be using these tools, it's not like your phone or this camera or microphone that are passive kind of just pass through. I'm not offloading decisions or at least decision support to them. If I've got this magic black box that's going to be answering things and looped into all of my work processes, it's incumbent on me as a leader or even as someone who's using the technology to have pretty solid understanding of what's happening under the hood so that you know where its limitations are, where to apply it and where not to and all that.
(22:47):
I think from everything you're saying, it sounds like the book will resonate really well and it's much needed. So I'm really looking forward to that. And
Guest : Robert Collie (22:55):
I've been doing it by testing it on civilians, giving it to people who are not in the tech industry and engaging their reaction. And they've been coming back to me and saying, "Hey, even the 70-year-old woman who has never worked in tech in her life and when her webcam needs fixing, she needs to call someone. She read it and said that she had a party and someone was talking and she's like, " Actually, no, that's not actually quite right. She started correcting someone a little bit about AI at a social gathering and she told me about that. It was one of the most heartwarming moments of my mind.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (23:35):
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Co Host : Glenn Hopper (24:43):
Grainy, you got to love those.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (24:46):
Kind of speaking of fun moments. So I saw your post where you started to see Cowork and how big of a deal it was, how you believed in it. I believe you went out because Cowork at first was only on the Mac and bought your whole family Macs as a former Microsoft employee. That's almost treason. But talk about that experience. What made you go out and do that? What was that kind of whole adventure like?
Guest : Robert Collie (25:13):
Yeah. I'm talking to you on a Mac right now. I'm on a Mac on this podcast. Do
Host : Paul Barnhurst (25:20):
We have to hang up on him, Glenn? No,
Co Host : Glenn Hopper (25:22):
I've
Host : Paul Barnhurst (25:22):
Been doing
Co Host : Glenn Hopper (25:23):
Mac since 1999. That was the only finance path.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (25:28):
I think we got
Co Host : Glenn Hopper (25:29):
Listening by the way. He's not happy.
Guest : Robert Collie (25:32):
Yeah, we need to talk, Glenn, because even though I have recently converted, I have some complaints about the Mac platform, but I started using Cowork to train my own editor for the book. And I ended up with an editor that I call Eddie. And Eddie, it's a very original name. And Eddie is amazing. In fact, Eddie is the first word in the book because the first sentence, the first title in the book is Eddie didn't write this book because he didn't. But I was getting such incredible value even just in the early going. So they did release it on the PC cowork. It just didn't work very well. It was constantly crashing and dying. And it worked just long enough for me to see the promise of it. The ability for me to provide durable instruction to an editing partner saying, "Okay, here's what my voice is.
(26:31):
Here's what I'm trying to do. Here's what I'm going for. " I want you to be my editor, not some stuffy business voice editor. If I got a real editor at a real major publisher, they would try to remove all of the risk from the book. They would try to take all of the tone and the voice and everything out of the book, which is really one of the things people really liked about my previous books, but it's different. And one thing that's safe is to conform. So you give us all this pressure to conform if you had a real editor. But honestly, even a real editor wouldn't have had time to do what I had Eddie do. I could send Eddie three paragraphs and ask him what he thinks. I'd be like, "You see what I'm trying to do here, Eddie, but it's not coming out right.
(27:22):
What is it that's not working?" And I could go back and forth with Eddie five times in a row like that, just micro-focused on crafting these three paragraphs, which is not something that you could ever, ever, ever do with a human editor. You could maybe send a chapter at a time and you get one bulk review and one back and forth and eventually one party or the other just gets exhausted and gives up. And so you end up with what you end up with. It's really, really, really funny and kind of eye-opening that at the end of the project, the end of the book, I went back and had Claude assemble all of our conversations. It's over 300 conversations, 308 conversations between me and my editor and coworker. And the size of those conversations is 10 times the size of the book. And 7X of that is Eddie because I would say things like, "Hey, Eddie, I just finished a bunch of edits, please review them." So I would contribute just a tiny little bit, and then Eddie would give me all kinds of feedback.
(28:22):
So of course, it makes sense that Eddie said a lot more in those conversations than me. But even my interaction with Eddie is three times the volume of what I wrote in this book. I wrote a 675-page book for Eddie and a 225-page book for everyone else. And so when I realised that I could be getting that experience on the Mac without these batch scripts that I was writing that were trying to clean things out and make cowork work, I just thought, okay, I'm just going to go get a Mac. And having it work, having co-work just work seamlessly without having that crash dynamic in it in those early days. This is back in March, I think. I mean, it was really striking. The reason people bought PCs was the spreadsheet.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (29:15):
That's why I still have a PC.
Guest : Robert Collie (29:16):
Yeah. I mean, in the 1980s even, spreadsheets was the reason to have a PC other than games. The reason to have a PC in business was the spreadsheet. And it's funny, if you go back and look at the ads for the PCs in the 1980s when they're trying to convince people to buy PCs for business for the first time, all of it is spreadsheets. It's all charts. It's all -
Host : Paul Barnhurst (29:40):
The guy in the elevator?
Guest : Robert Collie (29:42):
All of it. They
Host : Paul Barnhurst (29:42):
Redid a copilot recently.
Guest : Robert Collie (29:44):
Yep. And they did, didn't they? And I had that same kind of feeling that co-work was the reason I got a Mac. And I don't change platforms. I'm the last person in the world who would change from PC to Mac, not because so much of a PC style is more just like I don't change foundational parts of my life. It messes me up. It's an inconvenience. I don't play around with tech for the fun of it, but I just roll right over that Mac obstacle like, "Yep, yep, absolutely. We're all going
Co Host : Glenn Hopper (30:17):
To get Macs." When I first got my Mac, I was running because Excel obviously on a PC is still much better than a Mac. So I was just running a Windows environment because I was using bootcamp back in the day or whatever. But then once I became a CFO, I wasn't as much of a hardcore Excel. Yeah. Yeah, but switching costs on anything. I mean, if I had to go from my iPhone to an Android at this point, I would lose my mind. It's like I've got to learn a whole other operating system. I couldn't imagine what that would be
Guest : Robert Collie (30:51):
Like. That's what I did. My first few days on the Mac were also asking Claude, "Hey, how do I do this thing I used to do on Windows?" I could see that.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (31:02):
So you also had your daughter on your podcast recently about how she used Claude Cowork to help her do a job search. Talk a little bit about that.
Guest : Robert Collie (31:11):
That's the third Mac in our family. It was right in the middle of... In fact, I think I was still on the PC at the moment when I started helping her with her job hunt. But yeah, when I started a cowork project to help her with her job hunt, everything from resume revisions to cover letters to literally also even giving the Chrome extension the ability to go and start browsing the web for her and finding jobs that she wasn't finding. It was finding dozens of jobs. And she was sitting there really diligently searching. She's got a high motor. She's not lazy. She's driven. And this thing, cowork, once it knew what her background was and understood like, oh, she's pivoting from med school to this and all that kind of stuff, was like a strategic counsellor. We recorded that podcast on her second day with her Mac and she was already like, I could just tell.
(32:06):
She's got the itch. And so John Punt's still in progress because it's hard, but for the next few months, she's going to intern with us and she's going to be here learning about AI and doing AI stuff with us and shadowing some of our projects and helping us with the back office and things like that. She's downstairs right now because she's visiting for the next six weeks. He's downstairs with her with her Mac. I'm sure there's some sort of clawed window open at the moment.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (32:35):
No, that's awesome. Well, we're going to excuse Glenn and we're going to wrap up here in a minute because he has to run to the airport. We don't want his wife to come down and hang up on us, so we'll let him go. But I have one more question I ask and then we'll do our fun little AI section. I'll make sure to do yours for you, Glenn.
Co Host : Glenn Hopper (32:53):
Thanks Glenn. It's a pleasure. Great meeting you.
Guest : Robert Collie (32:56):
Likewise, have a good trip to the airport.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (32:58):
Nice. Drive safe. Talk to you later, Glenn. No, that's great that she's going to be interning with you. Sounds like that'll be a really good experience for her. The one last kind of question I want to ask before we move into our fun AI section is how are you using AI in your company and how do you think it's going to change your business? You mentioned how it's already kind of changed it and how you had to figure out what that looks like in the future. So maybe talk a little bit about how you see it impacting your business, data analytics, what you've learned that you see at least right now as those changes. Obviously it could be different in two years, three years with the rate things change these days.
Guest : Robert Collie (33:38):
At a high level, there's at least two ways. So one is if you think of your existing job in data, BI, FP&A, there's a lot of technical work that you perform in that space. And all of that gets just tremendously faster, which is mostly a good thing. I think it does represent, I believe, the end of hourly billing. Any business that's going to charge by the hour to perform work like that is not going to have enough work.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (34:12):
Yeah, you make less money on it unless you can double your rate, which odds are you can't.
Guest : Robert Collie (34:18):
The longest chapter in my new book is the one about data. And it starts off talking about Power BI semantic models. And I think you've probably, I've watched with delight for many years, many BI companies haven't had a semantic model like Power BI does and they've gotten away with it. They've gotten away with not having one. So Tableau has had one, but they never really emphasised it. They were always just writing some sequel over some data, making a new rectangle of data, and making a dashboard. That's their process. Well, everyone, even Tableau, every single vendor is now all in on semantic models because if you want AI to work at your company, it needs to have access to all that structured data.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (35:11):
It needs that context that
Guest : Robert Collie (35:13):
Comes with that
Host : Paul Barnhurst (35:14):
Semantic model.
Guest : Robert Collie (35:15):
That's right.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (35:16):
And
Guest : Robert Collie (35:16):
Companies that haven't adopted Power BI or at companies that have adopted Power BI but not really built good semantic models, their first step in a lot of AI scenarios is going to be building good semantic models. The world's need for semantic models, Power BI semantic models. And by the way, 99% of the world's semantic models today are Power BI semantic models. There are new competitive standards fringing up. Tableau's got one now and they're sharing it with a bunch of other companies and things like that, but they're still starting the world's installed footprint of semantic models is right in our wheelhouse. And so the realisation that ultimately led to me writing the book was that AI really is a data problem. It's about getting the right information to the LLM at the right time. So all of us in data are so well positioned to be the people who actually make AI a real thing.
(36:18):
And I talk about on the one hand, there's this absolute necessity that data people move sort of, let's call it upstream, in the value chain. We need to be able to create more value for the business than what we have been. And at the same time, we're being given this opportunity in the form of AI in which to do that.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (36:37):
Pretty amazing what you can do. We're going to move into our fun AI section. And in honour of Glenn leaving us, I'm going to give you two options. We each take different approaches to this. We'll do one question, but you can choose the approach. So my approach is one of two things. So what we've done is we've fed an AI your bio information from the internet, the questions we were going to ask, and asked it to come up with 25 fun, personal, a little bit of quirky questions we should ask you. We use different models all the time. I don't remember which model we used here for these ones. It was a few weeks ago. So option one, I can use a random number generator or you can pick a number between one and 25. So I have humans in the loop, no humans in the loop.
(37:21):
Glenn's approach was I go out to an AI and I ask it what the best question is to ask and I ask that question. So you want to use my approach or Glenn's?
Guest : Robert Collie (37:30):
I think that the pretzel self-folding of asking another AI what the best question is out of the 25 AI generated questions. But here's the key thing though. Will the new AI have the context that the original one had when they were making the questions? No,
Host : Paul Barnhurst (37:49):
They just get to like the questions and they get to pick from the questions.
Guest : Robert Collie (37:52):
But a random number generator is also dumb, so it has no context either. Do the AI thing.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (37:57):
All right. So I did that and the first one came back, you'll ask, question three, which we're going to skip because we covered it, but I'll read the question so you know what it is. It says question three, family tech patron. You bought Macs for your whole family to use Claude Cowork. What was the first family reaction and the funniest outcome so far? So you could answer that if you wanted, but we spent quite a bit on Claude Cowork. Or I can go to the second one because I said, give me one more. Question 13, office mascot. If Pink3 Adaptive had an official mascot, what would it be and what would its job description read?
Guest : Robert Collie (38:35):
Well, okay. So I think the mascot for our company would have to be named something to do with Ven. We might call this mascot Venny, not Vinny, Ven. Because we have this principle internally we call good people and good business. And the and is important. It's the intersection and.
Host : Paul Barnhurst (39:00):
That Venn diagram?
Guest : Robert Collie (39:02):
Yeah, the overlapping Venn diagram. We have an emoji in Slack that is the Venn overlapping circles. And what we have found is that when we align the company's interests with the employee's interests and we do a good job of it, that's when we're most successful. So we definitely have a good human ethos at our company, but finding the places where that overlaps with good business is the key. Because if you're just nothing but good human, you go out of business. And if you're nothing but good business, you don't take care of the people. And also I think eventually you go out of business. But I don't see most companies treating this as an engineering discipline the way that we do. And it's a lot of work and it also takes constant maintenance. It's not something that you solve and it just stays solved. One of the reasons why we have the word adaptive in the name of our company.
(39:25):
It would definitely be, you can sort of imagine some cartoon version of a Venn diagram running around going, "Hey kids." Maybe someone at a mascot at a football game or a basketball game, but really nerdy because it's a Venn diagram. And
Host : Paul Barnhurst (39:44):
I think - I like it. I'm looking forward to seeing this mascot come alive and I'll see it at some kind of event someday. That pretty much wraps up where we're at. So I was just going to kind of wrap us up here and let you go.
Guest : Robert Collie (39:58):
Can I give you one last little plug?
Host : Paul Barnhurst (39:59):
You can.
Guest : Robert Collie (39:59):
So we're offering on our website, our new website for the book, fairgamebook.ai. We're offering a bundle where you get the hardcover, the ebook and the audiobook all at release for one price. It's cheaper than buying all three separately from Amazon. And if you pre-order, you get access to the first, I think the first four chapters immediately, even today. Yeah, I would really, really encourage you to check out if you're interested in the book. Don't get it from Amazon, get it from us. Better deal to get it through fairgamebook.ai.
Host: Paul Barnhurst (40:46):
Perfect. Well, awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining, Rob. Appreciate you joining us for the episode today, and good luck with the new book, and continue to enjoy your Mac. Thanks for listening to the Future Finance Show and thanks to our sponsor, qflow.ai. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave a rating and review on your podcast platform of choice, and may your robot overlords be with you.