You're Already Late: Ai Has Changed Copier Sales Forever

 The copier sales rep who ignores Ai isn’t competing with their peers. They’re competing with extinction.

By Celeste Dame

It begins with a simple idea. The tools we use shape the way we work. But sometimes, a new tool doesn’t just shape, it shatters everything that came before. That’s what Shopify’s CEO, Tobi Lütke, is talking about in his memo. It isn’t just a call to use artificial intelligence as a tool. It’s a declaration that Ai is the new baseline. Not optional. Not experimental. It’s the new starting line. Either you're running with it, or you're watching from the sidelines.

Now, take that mindset and drop it into one of the most resilient and, let’s face it, change-resistant sales channels in the world: copier sales.

Copier sales has always been about cycles. You lease the box, you manage the contract, you service the customer, and in three or five years you come back and try to do it again. The machines have changed, the contracts have gotten longer, and the margins have been squeezed. But the playbook? Still laminated and sitting in your bag. Prospect, demo, close, repeat. Some reps are still bragging about cold-calling on foot like it’s a rite of passage. And while there’s value in the grit, that mindset is now dangerously incomplete.

Lütke's memo doesn't just apply to digital-first companies like Shopify. It applies to anyone who sells, persuades, analyzes, creates, or thinks for a living. It applies to copier sales more than most because this industry is at a crossroads. And crossroads do not favor the cautious.

Imagine a sales rep sitting in their car outside a potential account. They’re flipping through a printed lease agreement and a product brochure. They plan to walk in and “ask for the owner.” Now contrast that with a rep who, thirty minutes earlier, asked ChatGPT to summarize the client’s website, scrape LinkedIn for recent posts from the CIO, generate a few customized insights about wide-format usage in architecture firms, and craft a hyper-specific opening line for a cold call. That second rep is already in the building, already creating a relationship, already leveraging context. That’s not just preparation. That’s modern dominance.

The moment Lütke describes is already here. In copier sales, it's not that Ai might help. It’s that not using Ai already puts you behind. Every second you spend wondering whether Ai is for you is a second someone else is using it to get sharper, faster, and closer to the customer.

But what does this mean in practical terms? Let’s zoom out.

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