by Mason Bright
For fifty years, the office technology channel has lived on the same rhythm. Quote. Lease. Deliver. Service. Renew. Every copier in the field carried a tail that fed technicians, back offices, and sales commissions. Dealers built their culture on that cadence. But the math no longer works. Print volumes fall. Leasing cycles stretch. Technicians retire faster than replacements arrive.
At the Post Walters webcast this fall, that reality met its replacement. The conversation that began as a routine check-in became a turning point. It confirmed what a handful of dealers already suspected: the next service tail will not come from pages.
CricketsUS exists to make that future familiar enough to act on. The idea is not to romanticize robots, but to make them ordinary, to make them as practical and serviceable as a copier once was.
It will come from robots.
CricketsUS was built to make that possible. Its mission is simple enough to print on a T-shirt: We bring robots to the channel, and the channel to robots. The idea sounds bold until you realize how similar the mechanics already are. Robots need the same things copiers needed: installation, networking, firmware updates, service contracts, and local technicians who show up. The difference is movement. Instead of paper through rollers, you have payloads on wheels.
The Decline No One Can Outrun
Every dealer knows the numbers. The Cannata Report showed that roughly two-thirds of dealer revenue still comes from A3 and A4 devices. Managed IT, production print, water, and document management have all added small percentages, but nothing replaced the old volume.
The decline is structural. Hybrid work reduces page output. Offices print less even when open. Software automates workflows once routed through paper. Every tick downward eats into the service tail. Dealers have adapted through consolidation and diversification, but few have found a new mechanical base to service at scale.
Art Post put it bluntly in the session. “Dealers need to plan their legacy.” Print will not disappear, but it will no longer sustain a field force or a multi-million-dollar support desk. The next legacy will come from devices that move, see, and act.
What Robots Add
Service robots, from floor cleaners to delivery carts, share a simple economic pattern. They save time, and time translates into ROI that dealers can quantify. In auto shops, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) move tires and parts between bays, saving technicians minutes per job. In offices, they move documents, toner, and supplies. In hospitals, they carry trays and samples.
The investment is small compared to labor cost. Most sites see payback inside one quarter. That kind of metric sells itself. The challenge is delivery and support. Robotics OEMs can build the hardware, but they lack the service network to deploy nationally. Dealers already have that network.
A copier dealership manages dispatch, service desks, trucks, leases, and SLAs. It knows how to sell capital equipment as an operating expense. That’s what robotics manufacturers need. CricketsUS builds the bridge between them.
What Ed McLaughlin Saw
Ed McLaughlin has watched every boom and bust in the copier world. At the webcast he said the industry’s real problem has never been technology. It has been behavior. The 1982 tax reforms that allowed leased equipment to move off the balance sheet also turned sales into transactions. Reps stopped developing accounts and started flipping monthly payments.
McLaughlin’s warning was clear. Robotics will work only if the channel rewrites its own habits. Dealers must return to account management, understanding how a business runs, where it wastes time, and how a machine fits into that workflow. Otherwise, robots will become just another product line waiting to stagnate.
He also reminded the group that familiarity is a trap. Kodak, Blockbuster, and BlackBerry all failed not because their technology broke but because they could not recognize the unfamiliar shape of the future. “Familiarity,” he said, “is what blinds you.”
CricketsUS exists to make that future familiar enough to act on. The idea is not to romanticize robots, but to make them ordinary, to make them as practical and serviceable as a copier once was.
Chip Miceli’s Ground Truth
Chip Miceli did not speak in abstractions. He sees the labor shortage every day in the office supply business. You cannot find people to clean floors or restock supplies. He is already exploring robotic floor cleaners that run at night, refill themselves, and return to dock. He said what many were thinking: “This is the future. Stuff we can fix. Stuff we can program.”
For him, Crickets is not a theory. It is a service business waiting to be adopted. The parts are physical, the work is local, and the value is measurable. Dealers already run the trucks and warehouses. Adding robotics adds revenue without rewriting the company’s DNA.
Kevin Neal Architecture
Kevin Neal explained the technical side. Through the Twain Working Group, he is helping to write the standards that will let robots, Ai agents, and office systems communicate. Twain built the bridge that once connected scanners and copiers to software. The same logic now applies to robotics.
A robot is another hardware device, he said. Instead of 300 dpi and duplex, the commands are “move arm left,” “lift payload,” “navigate to bay three.” Dealers do not want every robot to speak a different dialect. They want a consistent driver layer and a shared way to manage devices. Standards make that possible.
He also described the dealership of the future. A place where reps conduct site surveys, map workflows, and design small automations using natural language tools. Robots become part of a wider network of Ai-enabled devices, copiers, sensors, and digital workflows, all managed from a single pane.
The Tail We Keep
Dealers love tails. It’s how they survived. The copier’s tail was long, rich, and predictable. Robotics will have a shorter one, but it will be steadier. The model looks like cost per task or managed automation service. The customer pays for uptime, completed deliveries, or scheduled cleanings. The dealer manages performance and software updates.
McLaughlin cautioned against copying the cost-per-page model blindly.
It worked in the 1980s because leases were capital-intensive and consumables created margin. The new model must price against customer value, not internal formulas. If the robot saves ten minutes per technician per hour, the savings are visible. The dealer charges for that value, not the number of routes completed.
Compliance and Trust
Kevin Frey added to the group discussing security. Robots move. They record. Ai systems retain. Regulated industries will demand strict control over what data stays local and what moves to the cloud. Frey described using private Ai deployments hosted on customer infrastructure, aligned with frameworks such as NIST 800-171-3. Dealers already fluent in print security can extend that expertise to robotics.
The ability to assure compliance will separate real players from opportunists. It also raises the value of existing managed IT arms inside dealerships. The same team that manages network security for MFPs can manage robot telemetry.
The Road Ahead
CricketsUS plans to unite eight robotic OEMs and fifty dealers by the end of 2026. The group’s first major showing will be in Tampa this November. There, a set of robots will run supply deliveries, HR onboarding demos, and proof-of-concept workflows built from real dealer data.
The bigger point is cultural. The industry finally has permission to stop defending the past. The “tail” that once defined copier profitability does not need to be mourned. It can be reengineered. The service economy that built the copier industry can now sustain robotics.
The channel does not need to chase pages anymore. It needs to move product that moves.
This is not a replacement story. It is an evolution story. Dealers already know how to sell trust, uptime, and local presence. They just need a machine worth applying it to.
The old tail served well. It is time to let it go and follow motion where it leads.
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