#301: It Turns Out Analysts Are Natural AI Crafters

There's a certain type of person who first encounters Excel and, instead of running in terror, leans in and grins. Rob Collie has spent his career-from the Excel team at Microsoft to helping birth Power BI to now running P3 Adaptive—building things for exactly those people. He calls them "Crafters," and his new book, Fair Game: Customizing AI to Your Business Is Easier Than You Think, makes the case that this same crowd (hi, it's us) is uniquely positioned to do something genuinely remarkable with AI. Not because we're developers, not because we've cracked some secret, but because we've always lived on the boundary between the business and the tech-and that's precisely where the real AI work happens. The conversation covers the two "voids" crafters need to jump to go from chatting with Claude to actually building useful custom solutions, why the off-the-shelf AI tools are mostly useless for business purposes (and what to do about it), the faucets-first philosophy for semantic models, and why the developer isn't dead-just moving to the suburbs. Also: Tim built a quiz about his marriage and let his adult children take it. That happened. This episode is brought to you, in part, by our sponsors, Stape and Prism from Ask-Y. For complete show notes, including links to items mentioned in this episode and a transcript of the show, visit the show page.