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

Subscribe at Thisnewway.com to get the step-by-step AI workflows.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 days01:44 Pivot to Recollective and focus on market-research tech03:18 Why hybrid qual + quant research matters03:58 Unstructured data → perfect AI playground04:50 “Roadmap reset” after ChatGPT pressure06:00 How the team up-skilled on LLMs & vector DBs08:12 First AI features: summarization → theme extraction → comparisons09:05 Making space for AI work without derailing commitments10:10 Company-wide AI wins: sales data mining & lead scoring13:08 Relay + Google Sheets workflow for automated enrichment16:18 Running internal “AI office hours” to drive adoption17:05 Staying current: newsletters, trials, and cost control20:25 Seat-based vs. usage-based pricing—Phil’s take23:04 Perplexity as Phil’s go-to research sidekick24:50 Cutting the “collaboration tax” with self-serve AI answers27:24 Live demo: Recollective’s Ask-AI tab & verbatim citations31:28 Segment @mentions for instant comparative analysis37:04 Emotion tagging and drilling into negative feedback38:30 Building an internal Vertex-AI search in one afternoon42:23 Agent Builder setup walkthrough44:34 Relay use-cases: lead workflows, news scraping, stand-up bot53:23 n8n migrations: 4,000 Gong calls plus on-the-fly analysis56:30 OpenAI Playground & Notebook LM for ad-hoc knowledgebases1:02:20 Google AI Studio multimodal experiments (free)1:04:04 Start simple—one use-case, one stakeholder, iterateTools & Resources Mentioned:AI / LLMs & Model-PlaygroundsChatGPT (OpenAI)OpenAI Platform & PlaygroundClaude (Anthropic)Perplexity Pro- Google Gemini (Workspace)Google AI StudioKnowledgeBase & Search Vertex AI Agent Builder / Search (Google Cloud) Notebook LM (Google) Internal Vertex-powered “ask-AI” portalAutomation & WorkflowsRelay (no-code workflow tool with AI steps)Zapier (reference point)n8n (open-source automation + AI agents)Data, CRM & Sales EnablementGoogle SheetsSalesforceOutreachGong (call recordings)Collaboration & ProductivitySlack (AI channel, human-in-the-loop flows)Notion (company intranet)Google Drive & Google CalendarRSS feeds + custom “Article Extractor” scraperCore ProductRecollective (Phil’s qualitative-research platform with built-in AI features)Developer / Engineering UtilitiesCursor IDE (AI-assisted coding, briefly cited)