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.
The channel wins when integration risk drops. Twain’s history shows how. Before standards, every scan app had to own every edge case. After standards, developers targeted the abstraction. The number of working combinations exploded. That same math applies here. If robots from five OEMs can accept a common set of movement and status calls, a dealer can build repeatable offers. If Ai agents can exchange messages cleanly with devices and with each other, you get orchestration instead of a thicket of point-to-points.
Security and compliance thread through standards work. The question is not just how to move a bot, but how to prove what it did, who told it, and what it learned. Regulated environments will require private Ai, local control, and logs that satisfy auditors. A standard that defines message formats, authentication, and retention helps a dealer sell into finance, healthcare, and energy without reinventing trust every time. When the nuclear plant story came up, the answer was private infrastructure and policy alignment. That is a pattern standards can encode so smaller teams can follow it without writing a whitepaper each time.
Standards remove vendor lock without killing differentiation. Drivers did not erase the difference between scanners. They let applications see them as a class. The same can be true for robots. A base layer handles motion primitives, safety stops, and telemetry. OEMs compete on payload, endurance, perception, and high-level behaviors. Dealers map use cases across brands without living in translation hell. Customers keep optionality. Everyone sleeps better on cutover night.
What does this mean for the sales call. It shrinks fear. Buyers hate fragile systems. They have been burned by one-off software that no one can maintain. They like to know a standards body with a track record is sitting behind the curtain. When a CIO hears Twain is involved, they do not need a lecture. They remember scanners that just worked. That halo belongs in robotics.
It also means your services line can get real. A standards-based stack lets you productize. You can sell a discovery plus pilot bundle that includes route mapping, safety review, Ai policy setup, and help desk integration. You can define SLAs that span mixed fleets. You can price by task or by managed instance with confidence because you are not rolling a new integration model each time. Standards are margin’s quiet friends.
There is a cultural side. Dealers built MPS and then stalled because the model got abstract and the stack got brittle. We cannot repeat that. We need a spec that a mid-market IT team can read and implement. We need tooling that lets a rep show a customer how a robot and a copier talk without a two-week sprint. Twain’s habit of writing clear, implementable specs matters. So does the community model. A working group with dealers at the table keeps the language grounded in field reality.
In the webcast we used a simple loop to make it tangible. A copier needs toner. It signals the system. A robot receives a task. It goes to supply, picks up the box, and drops it next to the device. It reports status to a small help desk. Every step can be defined in messages a standard could cover. Device alert. Task creation. Navigation state. Safety event. Delivery confirmation. Audit record. None of this requires magic. It requires agreement.
The other half is Ai to Ai. Agents will handle dispatch and exception handling. They need a way to talk that does not depend on a vendor’s private API. Common schemas for task intent and device capability make multi-agent orchestration possible across brands. Twain’s experience writing ISO-grade documents helps here. The group knows how to shepherd language into a place where OEMs sign off and developers can build.
Standards alone do not sell a robot. They remove reasons to say no. They give dealers a platform to build services on. They shorten pilots and simplify support. They let a customer choose what fits the site instead of what fits a brittle integration. In an industry learning to sell process again, that matters.
We write the rules now or we live inside other people’s constraints. The channel works best when it owns the connective tissue. Twain has carried that weight before. Time to do it again, this time for devices that move.
The quarter you save might be your own.
— Mason Bright
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