Ask Us Anything January 2026: Weather, Robots, Copiers, and Why Purpose Keeps Coming Up

Ask Us Anything January 2026

Weather, Robots, Copiers, and Why Purpose Keeps Coming Up

Late January gave us a familiar setup. Half the country freezing, the other half sweating, iguanas falling out of trees in Florida, and someone somewhere slipping on ice in Dallas. That was the warm-up.

From there, the conversation did what Ask Us Anything does best. It wandered. But not randomly. It kept circling the same gravity well: Ai is no longer theoretical, and the ripple effects are already hitting industries people still think are “stable.”

The Demo Is the Deal: Why Copier Sales Can Be Won on Camera, Not on Paper

“The Moment It Clicks”

For decades, the copier demo followed a familiar ritual. Schedule the truck. Clear half a day. Roll a machine into an office that was never designed to be a showroom. Hope the network cooperates. Hope nothing breaks on the way back out.

That ritual is still treated as proof of commitment in some dealerships. In reality, it has become one of the least efficient, most fragile parts of the sales process.

What has quietly changed is not the copier. It is the buyer.

The “Death of the Copier” Still Has a Service Department

“Copier sales” sounds like a hardware job until the first device goes sideways in the middle of a workday. Then it becomes a time-and-trouble job, measured in minutes, callbacks, and how quickly someone shows up with the right part.

That shift is why I keep circling back to service.

The device can be leased, bundled, swapped, refreshed, managed, or quietly replaced by a fleet of smaller printers and a pile of scanned PDFs. The customer’s expectation stays stubbornly old-fashioned: when they hit Print, something comes out.

In a recent piece for The Imaging Channel, I wrote it plainly: most dealers think they sell machines. They do not. They sell time. When a device has problems, time gets chewed up, and service becomes the business end of the relationship. (The Imaging Channel)

The department everyone references and few people learn

The Last Gatekeepers

Why authority is dissolving as Ai removes friction from knowledge, judgment, and power

By Charlie G. Peterson IV | Greg Report Ai Predictions 2025

For most of modern history, power lived behind desks.

It sat inside law firms, newsrooms, universities, executive suites. It wore credentials and spoke in guarded language. If you wanted access, you waited. If you wanted authority, you earned it slowly, through institutions designed to ration knowledge and decision-making.

That era is ending. Not with a crash, but with a quiet loss of leverage.

CRICKETS and the Rise of Humanoid Robots in the B2B Channel

 

How CRICKETSUS Aims to Bring Humanoid Robotics to the U.S. Through the B2B Channel

by Nathan DubeDecember 9, 2025

Overview

As the United States stands at a critical crossroads in the global race toward humanoid robotics, this article explores the technological, logistical, and economic forces shaping what comes next. It examines why America has lagged behind countries like China in robotics deployment and identifies supply chain infrastructure as the missing link. 

The piece introduces CRICKETSUS, a new startup founded by industry veterans Greg Walters and Art Post, and details their plan to leverage the existing B2B office technology channel to accelerate the adoption of humanoid robots nationwide. 

Through insights from the founders and a forward-looking analysis of MPS, MSPs, and robotics OEMs, the article outlines how a new American robotics industry could emerge from proven business models.

Read the Entire Article, here.

New to Copier Sales: How to Train Your LLM to Train You

Sales managers chase training like it is a traveling circus. A new seminar. A four-hour webinar. A three-month program with worksheets nobody fills out. Someone always promises a breakthrough. Someone always has a new acronym. 

Then Monday morning hits, and everybody goes right back to pounding out emails, dodging gatekeepers, guessing their way through objections, and retaining 3% of that expensive “How to…” content.
Meanwhile, that twenty-dollar AI sits on your desk the whole time, waiting patiently. Not as a guru. Not as a trainer who shows up with a clicker and a 350-card deck full of clip art. As something simpler. A system you can teach to teach you.

Continuously.

The Xerox Dundalk Closure and the Next Category for Copier Dealers

Xerox’s Dundalk closure is not a local story. It is a measurable signal for a channel built on pages.

By Mason Bright | Greg Report Ai 2025

In Dundalk, County Louth, there is a building that once did the sort of work you only notice when it stops. It made toner. Not the abstract idea of “supplies,” but the black powder that kept invoices, patient charts, school packets, and lease agreements moving through the world.

That facility is closing at the end of the year. Xerox has sold the site. The last remaining workers have received redundancy packages. A Xerox spokesperson confirmed the plant “will close at years end,” and explained the decision as part of an effort to simplify the business and align with what clients need today. Some of the toner manufacturing will move to Xerox’s Webster, New York facility.

It reads like a small corporate note, the kind that lands in a regional paper and disappears under holiday headlines. For anyone who owns or runs a copier dealership, it lands differently. This is the supply chain talking out loud.