Robots in the Office: We’ve Seen This Before

Back in the 1980s, Xerox built an empire on a simple formula. Sell the machine at thin margins, but lock in every cartridge, drum, and service call for years. Dealers thrived because they didn’t just sell boxes. They serviced them. They showed up when the machine broke. They built relationships that outlasted product cycles.

Now look at what just landed. Figure, the humanoid robotics startup, has cut a deal with Brookfield, one of the largest property managers in the world. More than 500 million square feet of office space, plus 160 million of logistics facilities, are being turned into a training ground for humanoids. Forget showroom floors or TED stages. These robots are heading into lobbies, cafeterias, and mailrooms, everywhere copier dealers dominate.

The parallels are hard to miss. Copiers once had to prove themselves in hostile environments full of dust, heat, and operator abuse. Robots now face offices full of glass walls, elevators, coffee spills, and people in a hurry. The same questions apply:

Can the equipment survive in the wild?

Who services it when it fails?

How do you prove ROI to skeptical customers?

What standards separate the serious OEMs from the toys?

This is why CORR™ matters. The Certified Office Robotics Reseller program isn’t window dressing. It’s the same gatekeeping function that service manuals and factory schools once played in the copier world. Without CORR™, any vendor can make promises. With CORR™, only those who meet capability, reliability, compliance, and ROI standards will earn the trust of building owners and tenants.

Think about how copier sales worked. The flashiest demo rarely won. What closed deals was the dealer who showed up, installed the machine properly, trained the staff, and kept it running month after month. That’s the same model robots will need. The ones that succeed won’t be the slickest humanoid shown on CNBC. They’ll be the robots installed, serviced, and certified by a local dealer who already knows how to keep mission-critical machines running.

The Figure–Brookfield partnership is a reminder of how quickly the frontier moves once scale players get involved. Brookfield provides data, space, and credibility. Figure provides robots built for real-world environments. But the bridge to adoption will be the channel. Dealers who prepare by training staff, building service contracts, and certifying through CORR™, will be the ones who turn early trials into long-term revenue.

We’ve seen this before. We know how it plays out. The first wave is messy, the standards are unclear, and the skeptics are loud. But once the machines prove themselves, customers stop asking “if” and start asking “who.” In the copier era, the answer was the dealer who showed up with parts in the trunk and knew how to fix the jam. In the robotics era, it will be the CORR™-certified dealer who shows up with the right diagnostic tools, the right service contract, and the proof that the machine saves more than it costs.

The history of the channel is about turning technology into trust. The opportunity now is to do it again.

this time with robots.