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.

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.

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.

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