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

Announcer (00:04): Welcome to Raw Data with Rob Collie, real talk about AI and data for business impact. And now, CEO and founder of P3 Adaptive, your host, Rob Collie.

Rob Collie (00:20): Hello, friends. Justin and I were part of a leadership planning meeting here at P3 last week, which created a hole in our recording schedule. So for this week's episode, I thought I would let you in on a little secret and announce that for the first time since 2015, I am writing a book. Maybe you didn't know that I ever wrote books in the past, but for a while there in the early 2010s, my books were actually the worldwide number one bestsellers on Power BI.

(00:47): It was a good run for a few years there. It was very cool for a while to literally be the guy who wrote the book. But I never wrote any more books after 2015, nor did I update any of my previous ones to keep up with the times. And today, an entire generation of Power BI practitioners has little idea who I am because my books and my blog faded from prominence, which is totally expected when you don't write any more of them.

(01:12): So why didn't I write any more books, and why am I writing another one now? Well, the foreword to my new book answers both of those questions, so I thought I'd share it with you as this week's episode. Think of it like as an audiobook format read by the author, because our first choice, Ryan Reynolds, wasn't available. Maybe there will even be an audio format version of this book.

(01:36): It's essentially an explainer, this book, aimed at business leaders and people who interact with business leaders, that helps people navigate how to achieve success with AI in a business context, so it's not going to be riddled with formulas like my previous books. Very much a plain English plus diagrams kind of thing, so it might actually lend itself well to the audio format, which was really a non-starter for my previous books. It doesn't have a title yet ... still working on that, sorry ... but I have the whole thing outlined and I'm a few chapters into writing it. Maybe I'll periodically circle back here and share a chapter or two or excerpts thereof. We'll see. And with all that said, I'd now like to read you the foreword.

(02:15): "Foreword. I swore I'd never write another book." The foreword starts with two quotes. The first one is, "If I'd known how much work this was going to be, I would have never started," and that quote is from me when I was writing any single one of my previous books. And the second quote is from the musical artist Elvis Costello. And rather than reading you that quote, I think it's better if you hear it from the man himself.

Music (02:42): Everyday, everyday, everyday, everyday I write the book.

Rob Collie (02:49): "Hello, dear reader. We're going to be spending some time with each other in these pages, so I thought I'd start on a semi-personal note and explain, both to you and to myself, why I find myself doing something I had planned never to do again. It turns out that writing a book is the surest way to cure oneself of a love for writing. I've written books three times before, and each time the labor of love also became a major grind that made me question my choices in life.

(03:17): "It goes like this. Wake up every day, work on the book from early morning into late night. Do nothing else. Hide out in coffee shops and libraries wearing headphones playing smooth jazz. Yes, people, smooth jazz of all things, because to my chagrin, it proved the most productive genre of music. Maybe say hi to the family at dinner, then disappear to the home office. Eventually go to bed after everyone else is asleep, then wake up and do it all over again for two-plus months. Even though, deep down during that process, I still loved writing and the art of crafting each page and each chapter absorbed me, the sheer endlessness of the overall process didn't seem like a thing I ever wanted to repeat. "Never again," I said to myself and to my family after my third book in 2015, and until now, that promise held.

(04:13): "Necessity is the mother of reinvention. To understand why I'm once again in the author business, first you need to understand that this book is a side effect of necessity. Our company's longstanding business model, ever since we started it back in 2013, has been to provide data and business intelligence consulting services. We're pretty unique within our space for a number of reasons, and we've always provided our customers with an exceptional ROI and speed to impact. I tend to think that if data and BI consulting firms were ever to go extinct as a species, we'd be the last ones to go. But by late 2024, a sense of AI-induced dread was creeping in on me.

(04:56): "Few lines of work are more exposed to the threats of AI than people who tell computers what to do. If your profession involves building software, dashboards, mobile apps, websites, and/or even spreadsheets, AI is getting really good at undermining your existing niche. There are a few things AI is better at, in fact, than writing code, scripts, and formulas. So if, like me, you're the CEO of a data and BI consulting firm, watching all of this unfold can be a touch unsettling.

(05:28): "The purpose of fear, getting you off the starting line. Fear isn't fun, which is why many people do everything they can to avoid feeling it, but it serves a crucial role in keeping us afloat. It spurs us into action. By telling us that the place we're standing today is about to become dangerous, fear drives us to look for safer ground before the threat becomes dire. So if we listen to it early, rather than suppressing ourselves from feeling it, we gain the advantage of a head start, so let's give fear its due. If we feel fear, we're not being weak. In my experience, it's quite the opposite. Allowing oneself to feel fear takes strength. You have to be brave to feel fear. Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? Let's see if we can make that a common phrase.

(06:20): "So if you're reading this book because you feel unsettled or worried, take a moment and congratulate yourself. Nothing's wrong with you. You're doing things right. The early warning system in your brain is working as designed. You're being courageous by listening to it, and it's going to pay off. It's still an unpleasant feeling while you're in it, of course. At the peak of my fear, I was wondering not only whether our business could survive the AI disruption, but also whether I might need to change careers completely.

(06:50): "To find the answers to those questions, I had to dive deeper into the very thing that was uncomfortable and fully immerse myself in the world of AI. This was not something that I wanted to do. I'm generally not all that into learning new tech, and AI was unlike any new tech I'd tackled previously. So this was an uncomfortable thing to even begin, but it wasn't optional. So after a few false starts, I eventually stepped off the ledge and into the dark and scary unknown.

(07:19): "Through the valley of fear, out the other side. The details of that journey and the insights gained along the way form the bulk of this book, so forgive me for not cramming it all into this foreword. The important thing to know for now is that I emerged on the other side, feeling quite confident that, one, no, I do not need to retrain for a different career field, two, our consulting business is going to do much better than merely survive the AI shift, and three, in fact, AI is the best thing to ever happen to our business.

(07:53): "Today, I'm incredibly excited about the picture I see and the opportunities ahead of us. Our company is not just in a safer place, but in a better place. I went from thinking things like, "Oh, no, AI is going to prevent us from reaching our company's full potential," to instead thinking, "My original picture of our potential was too limited." But without fear to drive the journey, we would not have unlocked this new picture, and instead we'd just be sitting there waiting for the asteroid to hit, so I want to say thank you to fear. We won't be needing its help for a while, and instead we're going to run on excitement for the next phase, which is much more fun, but I'm sure fear will be there the next time we do need it next.

(08:36): "Never would have been correct without AI. When I swore myself retired from bookwriting, I of course had no idea we were going to see anything like the AI of today. I had lived through one big disruption, the shift from glacially-paced IT-driven business intelligence to up-tempo business-driven business intelligence, and that disruption was the catalyst for my first three books as well as the reason for founding our business. But I never expected to see a disruption of that magnitude in my career again.

(09:09): "And even if something did come along, I didn't expect that I'd have a book in me that was worth sharing. The previous time around, I'd been uniquely positioned to see the disruption coming. The disruptor in question, Power BI, was designed for higher-end Excel users, and it was intended to displace the traditional BI project methodology. Lucky for me at the time, number one, I had worked on Excel at Microsoft, leading a team that designed and built functionality for precisely the users targeted by Power BI.

(09:42): "Number two, I had then subsequently worked on the first version of Power BI itself, which was then called Power Pivot, designing most of its v1 experience in Excel. And three, along the way, I had also previously been a customer of the traditional BI methodology which Power BI aimed to replace, having spent several months and tens of thousands of Microsoft's dollars on a BI project, which yielded modest results. So if you'd wanted to be positioned to see the promise of Power BI back in 2010 to 2013, I don't think there was a career path better than the one I'd happened to have followed.

(10:17): "So as a result, it made sense to me that I'd write a book and then two more, helping people navigate that transition, and I needed it to make sense to me. I've never been at all keen on trying to seize a professional role or position that is, like, up for grabs. If I didn't feel at the time that the world needed me in particular to write a book, I wouldn't have had the energy to do it. If it feels to me like there are plenty of other people positioned to fill the need just as easily, I tend to just go do something else instead. So once Power BI broke through to mainstream status and my unique career path and first-mover viewpoint were no longer all that relevant, I largely retreated from the thought leadership scene. "My work here is done, the next generation will take it from here," was my attitude. It seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime perfect storm, not something that would happen again.

(11:08): "What's old is new again. AI is just a data problem. Imagine how surprised I was then when I discovered that, one, the key to AI success isn't so much to become an AI expert, but instead to become an expert at feeding data to AI systems, and two, just as crucially, successful AI projects rely on being designed and built as close to the business stakeholders as possible. These are familiar themes to me. Data obviously is a comfort zone for me personally as well as for our company, but as close to the business as possible has also been our company's core differentiating philosophy as a data consulting firm since the very beginning.

(11:51): "Now, it may sound obvious or trivial to say that we lean into that close-to-the-biz philosophy, like of course everyone knows that and of course everyone does that, but the way we approach projects with our clients is very different from the way that 99% of other firms operate. It's far better for clients. It yields lower project costs, less exhaustion from the stakeholders, shorter time to business impact, and also actually far better final results, but it's a challenging way to operate a profitable consulting business. When you're constantly trying to work yourself out of a job and into the next one, and you don't have the luxury of parking large teams of consultants on a single project for months at a time, you need to be organized and nimble in ways that consulting firms have never had to be.

(12:36): "It is not easy operating the way we do, which explains why we haven't seen a rush of other firms adopting our approach, despite the tremendous benefits that it brings to clients. This is our core ethos, and we're relatively alone in following it. It's why our consultants come to work here, because it feels so much more honest and satisfying than operating the other way. As a call-out sidebar, I want to highlight that designed and built close to the business will appear as a central theme throughout the entire book. As a guiding principle, this was and remains a game-changer for the ROI of data and BI projects, but we've come to believe that it's even more crucial to AI success.

(13:18): "Now, don't worry. I don't plan to turn these pages into an infomercial for our consulting firm. The above merely helps explain ... again, both to you and myself ... why I'm not sitting this one out. AI success is about data and about executing in tight proximity to the business. Because of those two principles, I have once again, quite accidentally, dedicated the last 15 years of my career to the things most relevant to the next era. I never expected to have another book in me, but this one has been swirling in my head, practically demanding to crawl out onto the page. I will not be at peace until I do it. Deep breath, Rob, smooth jazz ahead. December 30th, 2025."