Collide AI 2025 Wrapped Part 1: Why Forward Deployed Engineers Ship When AI Pilots Fail

Collide AI 2025 Wrapped Part 1 turns into a real talk on why forward deployed engineers win where AI pilots stall, with Michael Cortez, John, and Nick Smart swapping war stories from completions, geophysics, and the startup trenches while they map out how Collide Enterprise moves past basic chat tools into search plus workflows that actually hold up in the real world.

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00:00 Setup and intros
 00:45 Michael’s path and joining Collide
 01:59 Nick’s background and role shift
 03:08 Collide Enterprise vs community
 04:16 Search, RAG, and workflow evolution
 06:31 Why out of the box AI falls short
 08:41 Time savings and real work focus
 11:39 Single source of truth vision
 13:16 Small teams scaling bigger assets
 17:18 AI adoption vs past tech hype
 19:26 Digital transformation missing link
 20:20 Why FDEs make pilots work
 23:36 Biggest learnings this year
 31:52 What’s next in 2026
 38:57 Bold predictions for 3 to 5 years
 47:37 Fine tuned models teaser and wrap

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