Microsoft Vet Says Your AI Needs Excel Gurus, Not Robot Overlords

KEY POINTS

•Rob Collie, author and former Microsoft Power BI engineer, said AI should be customized to fit a company's unique operations.
•Collie emphasized identifying 'crafters'—employees who build critical spreadsheets and automations—as key to leading AI adoption inside businesses.
•He advised companies to focus on small, local AI wins before attempting to develop their own large language models.

Rob Collie, a veteran Microsoft engineer who slung code on Power BI for 13 years before launching his own AI consultancy, just dropped the AI hot take of 2026: stop splurging on shiny 'AI-powered' software and start training your AI like it’s a college dropout hired last Tuesday. With his book 'Fair Game' coming August 11, Collie compares your AI to a baby PhD who knows everything and nothing — clueless about your company’s chaos until your internal Excel wizards ('crafters') tutor it. Spoiler: one in sixteen employees are these spreadsheet sorcerers who actually keep the business from imploding, and they’re the unlikely AI saviors, not the pricey researchers or Satya Nadella’s dream of custom large language models. Moral of the story? Build Lego-like AI systems around your company’s messy data first, then maybe you can float in Satya’s deep AI pool, but splash carefully in the shallow end–where the Excel gurus reign supreme.