AI Digs For Insights From Unstructured Data with Philippe Dame of Recollective

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In episode 3 of This New Way, Aydin sits down with Philippe Dame, CPO of Recollective, to unpack how AI is transforming qualitative market-research, sales operations, internal knowledge-sharing, and day-to-day productivity.Phil walks through the product pivot that turned Recollective’s vast unstructured data into an “AI-first” insights engine, then demos a stack of no-code automations — from AI-powered lead scoring in Google Sheets to a self-serve Vertex AI search that makes every doc, deck, and Gong call instantly searchable.You’ll hear concrete play-by-plays, see cost breakdowns , and learn how to start small, scale fast, and turn AI into a force-multiplier across your org.

Timestamps:
00:35 Phil’s background and early web-tool days
01:44 Pivot to Recollective and focus on market-research tech03:18 Why hybrid qual + quant research matters
03:58 Unstructured data → perfect AI playground
04:50 “Roadmap reset” after ChatGPT pressure
06:00 How the team up-skilled on LLMs & vector DBs
08:12 First AI features: summarization → theme extraction → comparisons
09:05 Making space for AI work without derailing commitments
10:10 Company-wide AI wins: sales data mining & lead scoring
13:08 Relay + Google Sheets workflow for automated enrichment
16:18 Running internal “AI office hours” to drive adoption
17:05 Staying current: newsletters, trials, and cost control
20:25 Seat-based vs. usage-based pricing—Phil’s take
23:04 Perplexity as Phil’s go-to research sidekick
24:50 Cutting the “collaboration tax” with self-serve AI answers
27:24 Live demo: Recollective’s Ask-AI tab & verbatim citations
31:28 Segment @mentions for instant comparative analysis
37:04 Emotion tagging and drilling into negative feedback
38:30 Building an internal Vertex-AI search in one afternoon
42:23 Agent Builder setup walkthrough
44:34 Relay use-cases: lead workflows, news scraping, stand-up bot
53:23 n8n migrations: 4,000 Gong calls plus on-the-fly analysis
56:30 OpenAI Playground & Notebook LM for ad-hoc knowledgebases
1:02:20 Google AI Studio multimodal experiments (free)
1:04:04 Start simple—one use-case, one stakeholder, iterate

Tools & Resources Mentioned:

AI / LLMs & Model-Playgrounds
• ChatGPT (OpenAI)
• OpenAI Platform & Playground
• Claude (Anthropic)
• Perplexity Pro- Google Gemini (Workspace)
• Google AI Studio

KnowledgeBase & Search
• Vertex AI Agent Builder / Search (Google Cloud)
• Notebook LM (Google)
• Internal Vertex-powered “ask-AI” portal

Automation & Workflows
• Relay (no-code workflow tool with AI steps)
• Zapier (reference point)
• n8n (open-source automation + AI agents)

Data, CRM & Sales Enablement
• Google Sheets
• Salesforce
• Outreach
• Gong (call recordings)

Collaboration & Productivity
• Slack (AI channel, human-in-the-loop flows)
• Notion (company intranet)
• Google Drive & Google Calendar
• RSS feeds + custom “Article Extractor” scraper

Core Product
• Recollective (Phil’s qualitative-research platform with built-in AI features)

Developer / Engineering Utilities
• Cursor IDE (AI-assisted coding, briefly cited)