Rob Collie, a former Microsoft engineering leader, spent 13 years at the company and was one of the founding engineers behind Power BI. He has written a book about organizational AI strategy, “Fair Game,” which will be published on August 11. According to Collie, most companies are approaching AI the wrong way.
The future isn’t simply buying more AI-powered software or rushing to build your own large language model. Instead, the real opportunity is teaching today’s AI models how your business actually works and empowering the right people inside your company to do it.
When Collie started figuring out his own AI strategy, he kept running into a disconnect. Everyone says AI will change everything, but when business leaders try to use it, they often struggle to make it useful. The first wave of enterprise AI adoption assumed companies could simply buy AI-powered software and call it transformation.
However, this approach isn’t delivering on the promise. Businesses have to customize AI to fit the way they actually operate. Satya Nadella is right when he talks about every company eventually building its own AI, but that’s not where most organizations should begin. They should focus on customizing AI for their specific needs.
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Today’s large language models are already incredibly capable if you treat them like a new employee instead of expecting them to automatically know your business. They don’t know your internal processes, your strategy, or your institutional knowledge. It is essential to teach them how your business works.
Instead of building a new model, companies should build systems around existing models that feed them the right context at the right time. Think of commercial LLMs as Lego bricks. If you connect them to your company’s data, workflows, and software, you can generate enormous returns without training your own model.
Mastering customization first and then worrying about building your own models is a more practical approach. The biggest AI opportunity isn’t necessarily hiring more AI researchers. It’s finding the people already solving problems inside your business. They are the ones who will drive AI adoption forward.
Software developers and data professionals will be incredibly valuable because connecting LLMs to business systems is fundamentally a software and data challenge. But there’s another group that leaders overlook, which Collie calls “crafters” in his book. Crafters are the people who build the spreadsheet everyone relies on, automate tedious work, create dashboards, and write scripts.
Crafters are embedded inside the business, solving problems that IT never had time to tackle. About 1 in 16 people fit this crafter profile, and there are actually more crafters than professional software developers. For years, they were limited by their technical skills, but AI changes that.
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The crafters of the world can now write real software with the help of AI. The combination of vibe coding and these business insiders is a secret weapon. When looking for AI leaders, Collie wouldn’t start by asking who knows the most about AI. He’d ask, who’s the Excel guru, who’s the person everyone goes to when something breaks, who keeps inventing clever solutions that make the business run?
Those are the people already thinking like builders. You can also find them by looking for the artifacts they’ve created — the spreadsheets, dashboards, automations, and tools that quietly keep critical business functions running. Companies shouldn’t wait for a top-down AI strategy before getting started.
Organizations run on thousands of individual workflows, and no CEO can redesign all of them from headquarters. The companies that succeed will start with small customization wins close to the business, learn from those successes, and expand from there. This approach will allow them to generate enormous returns without having to build their own large language models.
As Collie notes, the key to successful AI adoption is to focus on customization and empowering the right people inside the company. By doing so, businesses can achieve significant benefits. They will be able to teach AI models how their business works and make the most of their investment in AI technology.
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