By Celeste Dame
When the Stramaglio Show sat down with Andy Slawetski, you could feel the easy camaraderie of two industry veterans trading memories and sharpening ideas. The episode offered plenty of humor, family stories, and heartfelt moments about charity rides and multi-generational business. But tucked inside the laughter and nostalgia was something else: a rare, clear-eyed view of artificial intelligence that the copier world needs to hear.
Andy Slawetski is not a hype man. He is a witness. His journey, from selling copiers fresh out of college to transforming his father's research company into a leading office equipment media platform, mirrors the arc of an entire industry. Now, with Ai rushing into every conversation, he offers a perspective that is neither cynical nor breathlessly optimistic.
“We’re scratching the surface,” he said about Ai. “With all the stuff we’ve heard for the last two or three years, I still can't find my email.”
This line, half in jest and half in weary frustration, captures the essential tension: Ai is here. It matters. But the ground truth is a lot messier than the headlines suggest.
The Industry Hype Machine Meets Real-Life Friction
It would be easy to think the office equipment industry is undergoing a full-blown Ai revolution. Every week, announcements pour in: Xerox rolling out smart service hubs, Konica Minolta investing in predictive analytics, HP acquiring intelligence companies. Google Alerts are choked with press releases promising "intelligent workflows" and "autonomous print environments."
But according to Slawetski, the practical impact feels different on the ground.
Yes, Ai is creeping into operations. Yes, there are real investments happening. But no, the daily life of a dealer or a reseller is not yet transformed. If anything, Ai today feels like a very smart intern who only gets half the job done.
"We’re getting better and better at it," Andy said. "The bots are getting smarter and smarter. It’s an evolution. But it’s still a lot of work."
Dealers are not swimming in fully automated service ecosystems. They are still chasing down invoices, managing parts inventories, and fielding service calls the old-fashioned way. Slawetski’s caution is not pessimism. It is realism. The copier channel’s infrastructure is built for durability, not disruption. Real transformation moves slower here, as it should.
If there is a mismatch between Wall Street's hunger for Ai and the dealership's daily experience, it is not a failure. It is the inevitable reality of integrating new technology into an ecosystem where downtime is not an option.
Publishing, Proofing, and Ai’s Unexpected Utility
Where Ai has made a measurable difference, according to Slawetski, is not in some gleaming production floor or futuristic service desk. It is in the quiet corners of publishing and communication.
Running one of the industry’s largest newsletters, Slawetski sees the pressure to produce high-quality, typo-free content every week. Here, Ai tools have shown their teeth.
"Suddenly everybody's emails got a lot cleaner," he joked, "and the content on everybody's website looks a lot nicer now."
Proofreading, formatting, researching—tasks that once devoured hours now glide by with Ai-assisted platforms. Chat tools, grammar bots, and research scrapers are shaving precious minutes, if not hours, off the publishing workflow.
This may not sound as sexy as "revolutionizing the copier supply chain" or "reinventing the customer experience," but it matters. For independent publishers like Slawetski and for resellers producing customer-facing materials, Ai is already quietly boosting quality and freeing up time.
And perhaps that’s the real takeaway: Ai’s first big wave is invisible. It is not changing what the industry does. It is changing how fast and how well they do it. Behind every cleaner newsletter and tighter proposal is a small army of unseen algorithms doing grunt work nobody misses.
This quiet usefulness is what separates the dreamers from the builders. Slawetski does not dismiss Ai. He just uses it where it earns its keep.
Ai for Resellers: The Opportunity is in the Mundane
The other big opportunity Andy pointed to was in service management.
If you are a dealer today, you are not waiting for Ai to sell machines for you. You are looking for smarter ways to manage toner fulfillment, predict service needs, streamline dispatch, and make your back office move faster. That’s where Ai quietly slips in.
He pointed out CEO Juice, a longtime player in the copier channel, as one of the unsung Ai success stories. For years, CEO Juice has been using machine learning to dig into service call patterns, inventory management, and device performance. Dealers using their tools can spot issues before they blow up, optimize truck rolls, and get a tighter grip on margins.
Similarly, Xerox has pushed hotline-style Ai tools for a few years now. Originally built internally, these systems help service desks triage calls, predict parts failures, and assist technicians in the field. The goal is not to replace the human but to make the human faster, better, and more efficient.
Slawetski's message was clear: if you are looking for the "big Ai moment" to save your dealership, you are looking in the wrong place. The opportunity is not in some future sci-fi transformation. It is already here, tucked into the service dispatch software, the toner auto-replenishment system, and the maintenance dashboards you half-ignore.
Dealers who lean into these quiet tools who see Ai as a wrench instead of a revolution—will be the ones who thrive.
The Slow Burn of Real Innovation
Throughout the show, Slawetski’s commentary kept returning to a key idea: real innovation does not look like a parade. It looks like a slow burn. It creeps in. It reshapes behaviors before it reshapes markets.
There was a quiet honesty in his disappointment about Ai’s current state. If you believed the headlines two years ago, we were supposed to be living in fully automated digital twins by now. Instead, Andy still can’t find that one email he needs.
But that gap between expectation and reality is not a failure. It is exactly how meaningful change happens. Tools get adopted, refined, improved. Frustrations surface and drive second-generation products. Early overpromises crash into daily operational friction. And slowly, quietly, something real emerges.
That is the real story of Ai in the copier world today.
It is not some robot fleet making quarterly numbers jump. It is managers saving 20 minutes a day. It is newsletters reaching inboxes with fewer typos. It is service calls handled smarter, toner stocked better, costs measured tighter.
It is the kind of change you do not notice until one day, you look back and realize everything got a little bit better.
Conclusion: Buckle Up and Get to Work
The Stramaglio Show episode was a reminder that real leadership in this industry and real opportunity belongs to those who can embrace slow, steady transformation without getting lost in the noise.
Ai is not going to kick down the doors and hand you success. But it is going to be the hidden partner that, if you use it wisely, makes you faster, smarter, and a little more competitive every day.
“We've brought it to the surface," Andy said, "now everybody's talking about it."
The talk is loud. The work is quiet. The future belongs to the ones willing to do the quiet work.
Time to buckle up.
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