Power BI Founding Engineer Rob Collie Releases Fair Game, the Result of Remaking His Own Company with Custom AI

Collie writes from inside AI implementation. His firm builds custom AI systems for major companies, and Fair Game reveals what it really takes.

NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, August 11, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Rob Collie, CEO of P3 Adaptive and one of the founding engineers behind Power BI, announces the release of his new book, Fair Game: Customizing AI to Your Business Is Easier Than You Think, publishing today from Holy Macro! Books. The AI bookshelf is crowded with journalists, academics, and strategy consultants writing from the outside in. Collie writes from inside the work: his consulting firm builds custom AI systems for mid-market and Fortune 1000 companies, and Fair Game explains, in plain language, what those projects actually require – and why it’s far less than most leaders fear.

Collie, the author of three bestselling books on Power BI, didn’t intend to write another one. When the AI wave demanded he set a new course for his own company in late 2024, he found a shortage of the fundamental explainers he needed, so he began developing them for himself and his employees. Collie discovered that the innards of successful AI are far simpler than the noise suggests, and spread that picture across his team. P3 Adaptive remade its own practice around custom AI and proved the approach with paying clients along the way.

Fair Game is the book he wished he’d had at the start. “I felt I owed it to others in my same position – despite having promised myself in 2015 that I’d never write another book,” Collie says.

“AI success isn’t really an AI problem. It’s a data problem, and a traditional software problem,” Collie writes. “I want to make AI ‘fair game’ for you – to bring it within your reach, to empower you to pursue it, and to prepare you to lead its adoption. Right now, AI capability often feels like an ivory tower priesthood, beyond the comprehension of the rest of us who make the world run. That’s just a temporary information advantage masquerading as expertise.”

The book’s central argument is that most companies are approaching AI backward: buying off-the-shelf AI subscriptions and wondering why the promised returns aren’t yet materializing. The real value comes from everything around the AI – the data, the instructions, and the ordinary software that teach a generic model how a specific business actually works. Industry analysts have recently given that work a name, “context engineering,” and Fair Game is the first book to explain it to business readers rather than engineers: how off-the-shelf AI works under the hood, why it falls short inside a business, and the patterns that separate AI projects that deliver from the ones that stall.

Just as newsworthy is the book’s answer to who should lead that work. Not AI researchers, Collie argues – a specific kind of employee already inside every company. He calls them “Crafters”: roughly one in sixteen knowledge workers, the people who build the spreadsheets, automate the processes, and solve the problems IT never gets to. “Teaching today’s AI models how your business actually works – and empowering the right people inside your company to do it,” is how Collie described the real opportunity in a recent first-person Business Insider feature.

The book also doubles as proof of its own thesis. Collie wrote every word himself – but he built a custom AI editor, nicknamed “Eddie” and built on Anthropic’s Claude, to challenge his drafts, hold him to his own arguments, and catch inconsistencies across chapters. True to the book’s argument, Eddie required no LLM development or research – just data, instructions, and ordinary software. “Eddie is impossible. And yet he exists anyway,” Collie writes. “That’s custom AI. That’s an agent. And by the time you finish this book, you’ll know how to build your own.”

Early reaction spans the C-suite and the front lines. “Off-the-shelf AI is a demo. Custom AI is the business,” writes Diego Oppenheimer, AI investor and former CEO of Algorithmia. John Hancock, CEO of Hubstream, calls it “the roadmap – and a hell of a lot of fun to read.” Mike Nichols, former CMO of Bing and Xbox, says it “should be required reading in every MBA program,” while Jamie Cool, former head of GitHub Enterprise, calls it “the clearest explanation for non-engineers – takes the mystery out of AI without dumbing it down.” Advance copies are already circulating inside Fortune 500 leadership teams, with early readers ordering additional copies for their executives.

Fair Game is available now at FairGameBook.ai. The book will also be available wherever books are sold, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, and Porchlight Book Company. The book will be available in hardcover, audio and as an e-book.

About Rob Collie

Rob Collie is the founder and CEO of P3 Adaptive, a Microsoft Solutions Partner for Data and AI that serves hundreds of mid-market and Fortune 1000 clients. A former Microsoft engineering leader on the Excel, Bing, and Power BI teams, Collie spent 13 years at the company and was a founding engineer on Power Pivot, the engine that became Power BI. After leaving Microsoft he led the Power BI wave from the outside, authoring three business-technology books (92,000+ copies sold), including the #1-selling book on Power BI, Power Pivot and Power BI (co-authored with Avichal Singh). Through P3 Adaptive’s widely read blog and training programs, Collie and his team have trained tens of thousands of business professionals in data and AI skills. He co-hosts the weekly podcast Raw Data with Rob Collie, now more than 220 episodes deep, alongside P3 Adaptive’s Justin Mannhardt. His perspective has been featured in Fortune, CNBC, Business Insider, Chief Executive Magazine, America’s Small Business Network, and Authority Magazine.

Lauren Cobello
Leverage with Media PR
+1 315-591-2176
lauren@leveragewithmedia.com

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