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.
Dealers ask about value. We give use cases, not adjectives. In an auto shop, an AMR can feed bays with parts and carry returns back. The tech stays on the wrench. Time saved turns into invoices. Someone on the call cited a 30-day ROI in a real deployment moving tires. In property management, cleaning robots run at low traffic times and cover square footage without sick days. Construction layout bots print lines on concrete from digital plans. The point is not the gadget. The point is the minutes you stop losing and the processes you stop breaking.
Sales culture matters. Ed reminded us the industry flipped in 1982 when monthly payments took the wheel. We went transactional. Account development atrophied. Services never scaled because compensation and motions failed to change. If robotics becomes just a new SKU on a line card, it dies in committee. If we teach reps to sell process improvement and then quote a lease, it lives. The commission plan must reward discovery, pilot, and expansion. The talk track must describe tasks removed and workflows sped up, not sensor specs.
We also cut with care on pricing. Old reflexes push cost per page into every room. Robotics asks different questions. Cost per task can work in the right use case. But value must be visible in the customer’s ledger, not just ours. If a robot removes ten unbilled minutes from a tech’s hour, the dealer sells those minutes back as throughput. If a finance office moves files without analysts leaving their desks, the dealer sells non-interrupt time. Idle revenue is earned when the task is real. Otherwise, it is a fee waiting to be cut.
Security and compliance sit on the table. Robots move. LLMs retain. Regulated sites will not accept public Ai. Our answer in the webcast was direct. Private Ai on customer infrastructure for those environments. Policies first. Devices second. This is where dealers with real IT chops get paid. You will need a standard way to connect devices, log actions, constrain memory, and prove control. You will need to know what NIST requires and how to pass an audit. Crickets is building guidance, and Twain brings decades of driver and standards work to the stack.
Twain’s role is simple to state and hard to overstate. The group built the bridge between software and scanners, then MFPs. A uniform way to talk to hardware. Robots are hardware with more verbs. Left arm. Right arm. Camera up. Navigate here. A standard that abstracts those calls makes innovation faster and channel work saner. Dealers hate brittle stacks. So do customers. Standards turn one-offs into offers.
Culture again. Unfamiliar things fail when we force them to look like the past. Kodak, Blockbuster, BlackBerry. Not a technology failure. A familiarity failure. We will not dress robots up as copiers. We will start them in offices where movement is money, then scale one solved workflow at a time. We will use a pilot to teach a rep how to demo movement, write a basic statement of work, and close a lease that covers hardware, software, and service. We will make it feel like their world without pretending it is the old world.
People make or break the shift. Techs are aging out. Recruiting for “robotics tech” pulls different candidates than “copier tech.” A small in-office pilot helps you interview. Show the bot. Ask what they would improve. Watch who lights up. Train those people to bind firmware, fix wheels, set routes, and write small app glue using natural language tools that sit on top of the stack. Kevin’s point stood. These devices are sensors that learn. Tie them together with a unified interface and let dealers craft simple applications that match the customer’s day.
The near line is clear. Eight robotic OEMs. Fifty dealers. Copier OEMs who want to be part of the story. A November show in Tampa where we run AMRs in a sandbox and an HR robot that onboards a new hire from a local handbook. The mission does not change. Robots to the channel. Channel to robots. We are here to translate what you already know how to do into a market that needs it.
The leaves are turning. So is the channel. Time to move.
— Mason Bright
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