By Gabriela
Every closed console starts the same way: protection disguised as precision. Copier manufacturers built walls around their panels to guard reliability, security, and brand identity. For years, it worked. Then those same walls slowed progress. Integrations broke. Developers left. Dealers learned to live in translation between machines that refused to speak.
Now the robots are coming. And the question repeats: will we make the same mistake?
We started with the usual;
Print United news, production sales, and who sold what on the show floor.
But somewhere between Ricoh’s Android panels and Sharp’s rebranded Fujis, the talk got real. The old guard is still chasing speed, volume, and print quality while the next generation is talking open standards, autonomous systems, and robots that learn from service logs.
Standards are boring until they save your quarter. Anyone who ever wrestled a mystery driver on a Friday at 4 p.m. knows what I mean. Twain’s name lives on that quiet bridge between an application and a device. Software talks to a driver. The driver talks to the scanner or the MFP. Millions of machines run that way because a volunteer group wrote the rules and kept them current. That same discipline belongs in robotics if the channel is going to scale.
On the webcast, Kevin set the table. A robot is another hardware device. Not 300 dpi and duplex. Different verbs. Raise the mast. Turn left ninety. Pause until the corridor clears. Open a gripper. The application does not need to speak each dialect if a clean specification sits in the middle. Dealers do not want bespoke spaghetti in every account. They want an interface that survives an update. They want to write simple logic once and reuse it.
by Mason Bright
The new hire sits down and stares at a stack of forms. Benefits. Direct deposit. Code of conduct. Policies that matter yet drown people in paperwork. HR teams do what they can. They lose hours anyway. Dealers know this rhythm because they live it with their own reps and techs. So we asked a plain question. What if a robot handled the rote and gave humans back the hard parts.
The pilot is simple. We trained an LLM on a dealer’s HR manual. We loaded it onto a robot we already use for office demos. The bot can move like any AMR. It can also talk. It knows the handbook down to the last line break. A new employee sits with it. The robot answers questions, collects information, and walks the person through an orientation flow. When done, it writes back to the system and logs what it did.
In the webcast, we did not pitch it as a cure-all. It is a force multiplier. It turns three hours into minutes for routine cases. It runs after lunch when HR is pulled into something urgent. It can point a human to anything sensitive or nuanced. It does not fall sick. It does not forget a step. It becomes another member of the office that never needs a calendar hold.
Pages are falling. Everyone in the room knows it.
A3 and A4 still carry most dealer revenue, yet the slope points down. MPS never filled the gap. Managed IT helped some, not all. Water coolers add margin, but not a model. The tail that once followed every copier placement is thinning. So we built Crickets with a simple line that fits in a single breath. We bring robots to the channel and the channel to robots.
Start with what dealers already do well. Prospect. Run site walks. Map workflows. Quote leases. Deliver hardware. Stand it up on the network. Dispatch. Close the loop with a help desk that knows the difference between a ticket and a truck roll. That muscle does not disappear because paper drops. It repoints. AMRs and early humanoids give that muscle a new job.
Art laid it out clean. Dealers need to plan a legacy. If you want your company to matter five and ten years from now, you need a service tail that matches the way you already operate. Robotics offers it. Not a replica of 1986 copier economics. A modern tail. Firmware. Software. Training. Cybersecurity. Recurring support. Revenue that renews because movement never goes out of style.
We are not selling science fiction. We start with carts on wheels that move where you tell them. Tires to bays. Batteries to lifts. Paper files from desk to desk in places that still run paper. On the show floor in November, we run a simple office proof. A robot leaves home base, hits supply, goes to a device, drops a box next to the MFP, heads home. It reports into a small help desk app. Tickets pop as tasks complete. No heroics. Just movement, confirmation, and a repeatable loop.
By Celeste Dame
A quiet experiment inside OpenAi just made every CRM, ERP, and SaaS platform, and those who argue for or against one or another,
irrelevant.
The next revolution belongs to the questions we ask, not the software we buy.
Prolog:
In every industry, the same story plays out. Vendors promise the next platform will fix what the last one broke. But a quiet revolution inside OpenAi has already rendered that cycle meaningless. What began as a tool to study customer tickets has become the clearest proof yet that the age of SaaS is ending. The Research Assistant, developed by OpenAi, shows what happens when every business owner can speak directly to their data. It doesn’t need reports or analysts. It listens, reasons, and answers in real time. All that is required is curiosity.
And it exists today, right now.
The business owner who once waited on consultants and dashboards now simply asks a question and receives insight, instantly. The Research Assistant demonstrates a future where curiosity replaces code and reasoning replaces reporting.
This article was inspired by Ray’s latest podcast, which raises fair concerns about the latest ERPs but misses the larger point. The world no longer needs CRMs, companies like CEO Juice, or the cottage industry of pundits and consultants decoding data that has been machinated by legacy SaaS. The debate over which platform will save us is meaningless. The system itself no longer matters, only the intelligence behind it.
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.
By the time most industries notice their decline, the ground has already shifted. The copier channel is lucky. It still has time to steer. At the Post Walters webcast, that steering began in public view.
The conversation pulled together the full spectrum of experience. Art Post and Greg Walters spoke for the bridge-builders. Kevin Frey represented the technical architects. Ed McLaughlin and Chip Miceli carried the institutional memory. The topic was robotics, but the subtext was survival. Could the copier channel, with all its trucks, techs, and tenacity, become the distribution and service backbone for an entirely new class of machines?
CricketsUS exists to answer that question with action. The coalition now represents the most coordinated effort yet to convert copier and IT dealers into robotic resellers, local partners who can sell, lease, install, and service autonomous machines in the same way they once handled MFPs.
By Mason Bright
The numbers do not lie. Print volumes fall each quarter. Managed IT helped but never replaced pages. Water and VoIP filled some gaps. Production print flared, then flattened. Dealers keep diversifying, but the mix still leans 65 percent A3 and A4. Service tails shrink. Technicians age out. Recruiting stalls. The question hangs in every service bay and boardroom: what replaces the copier as the hardware that keeps the channel alive?
CricketsUS exists to answer that question. Our mission fits on a single line: we bring robots to the channel, and the channel to robots.
That means giving copier and IT dealers a bridge into the emerging world of service robotics, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) and humanoids that move, learn, and generate recurring service revenue. It also means showing robotic manufacturers how to reach real customers through the field-service networks you already run.
In 2013 I wrote about convergence as a meeting of formerly distinct domains. Now, in 2025, that framing feels quaint. The question has shifted: we no longer approach convergence.
We live it.
