You Should Have Seen It When the Copier Was Busy

Art Post

Co-Founder of Crickets Global, Founder of Print4Pay Hotel, Founder of Jersey Plotters. ENX Difference Maker for 2022. 8 Times Awarded “ENX Difference Maker” for Technology.

For most of my career, the small office copier was the center of the business.

I still remember walking into offices early in my career and the copier would be the first thing you noticed. You didn’t have to ask where it was, you could hear it. The machine would be humming away, someone standing there waiting for their copies, someone else trying to figure out why their job jammed. There was almost always a stack of originals sitting on top of the feeder. That copier wasn’t just a machine; it was the heartbeat of the office.

How the Copier Industry Reached a Turning Point and Why the Continuum May Be the Road Forward

By Mason Bright | Greg Report Ai 2027

If you want to understand the copier industry, do not start with a market report. Start in a dealer warehouse before sunrise.

The lights hum on one aisle at a time. Service techs drift through the side door grabbing trunk stock for the day. Someone is already arguing across the counter about whether a call should be marked open or closed on the dispatch board. A service manager studies the ticket queue with a cup of coffee that went cold twenty minutes ago.

HP Leaving Boise and Xerox Downgrade Signal a Turning Point for the Copier Industry

By Celeste Dame 🚀🧠

Step into a dealership warehouse at 7:30 in the morning and the story of this industry is sitting right in front of you.

• Service vans lined up outside waiting for dispatch.
• Pallets of toner stacked to the ceiling.
• A row of refurbished A3 machines staged for delivery.
• Someone in the back arguing about whether a lease renewal should be 48 months or 60.

This business has always been practical. Less theory, more toner.

Which is why the recent headlines about Hewlett-Packard and Xerox are worth paying attention to. Not because the copier industry is collapsing. It is not. But because they reveal something important.

The industry is moving into its next chapter.

The Fall of the Local Hero. Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town & Hungry Heart: I Was There

Springsteen - 1977

Back then, songs over two minutes long didn't make it on the AM waves and barely got to the FM dial.

But one song did; Born To Run, By Bruce Springsteen.  The tome followed the timeless, American teenage journey of struggle and travel on the road to knowing if 

"love is wild, if love is real."

PDS Copiers: Water Coolers to AMRs By Mason Bright | Greg Report Ai 2027

London, Kentucky.

Not a robotics lab.
Not a venture fund zip code.
A copier dealership.

Precision Duplicating Solutions started in a garage in 2002. Off-lease machines. Service calls that ran long. Contracts signed at folding tables. They built trust the old way. Thirty-three counties. Trucks on the road before sunrise. Technicians who know which side door the customer prefers.

When print slowed, they did not panic. They looked at what they already understood.

Install.
Support.
Service.
Contract.

That discipline led to water.

Read it, here.

Mark my words- Feb, 2026:

1. On-prem, will be the new cloud.  Not edge, not even a server. In the palm of your hand. Air-gapped. 'Burst-Mode' to the interwebs.

2. Ai adoption, in the Enterprise, will be from the ground up.  C-Suite driven Ai projects suffer temporally; too slow.  Whiteboard, Eval, RFP, etc.  The Ai Employee will dominate.

3. Ai Agents will pass - very soon.  This week, the "Ai Agent" is getting lots of press.  Folks are building AiAgents for business process workflows, thereby creating a matrix of apps, connectors, APIs, MCPs, cloud services, etc.  A digital house of cards.

The Last Stand of A3 and the Quiet Rewrite of the Dealer Model - Art & Frank

By Grayson Patrick Trent | greg report 2027

Prolog: Friday’s with Frank

On Friday’s with Frank, Art Post keeps it simple.

No drama. Just numbers and patterns. IT services and production print now make up 34 percent of dealer revenue. A3 still carries margin, but the foundation feels thinner. Millennials shifted away from print quietly. Gen Z never built the habit.

No one declares print dead. No one predicts a rebound.

The message is steadier than that. The channel is not collapsing. It is changing shape. And once you see the shift, it is difficult to pretend it is temporary.