London, Kentucky.
Not a robotics lab.
Not a venture fund zip code.
A copier dealership.
Precision Duplicating Solutions started in a garage in 2002. Off-lease machines. Service calls that ran long. Contracts signed at folding tables. They built trust the old way. Thirty-three counties. Trucks on the road before sunrise. Technicians who know which side door the customer prefers.
When print slowed, they did not panic. They looked at what they already understood.
Install.
Support.
Service.
Contract.
That discipline led to water.
On Friday’s with Frank, Art Post keeps it simple.
No drama. Just numbers and patterns. IT services and production print now make up 34 percent of dealer revenue. A3 still carries margin, but the foundation feels thinner. Millennials shifted away from print quietly. Gen Z never built the habit.
No one declares print dead. No one predicts a rebound.
The message is steadier than that. The channel is not collapsing. It is changing shape. And once you see the shift, it is difficult to pretend it is temporary.
For the last two years, Ai has promised something just out of reach.
Smarter tools. Faster work. Real leverage.
And yet, for a lot of people, the feeling is still the same. You use Ai every day. You get some wins. You save some time. But the breakthrough never quite arrives. You keep scrolling releases. You keep tweaking prompts. You keep waiting for the moment it all clicks.
That tension is the point of this piece.
Weather, Robots, Copiers, and Why Purpose Keeps Coming Up
Late January gave us a familiar setup. Half the country freezing, the other half sweating, iguanas falling out of trees in Florida, and someone somewhere slipping on ice in Dallas. That was the warm-up.
From there, the conversation did what Ask Us Anything does best. It wandered. But not randomly. It kept circling the same gravity well: Ai is no longer theoretical, and the ripple effects are already hitting industries people still think are “stable.”
 |
| “The Moment It Clicks” |
That shift is why I keep circling back to service.
The device can be leased, bundled, swapped, refreshed, managed, or quietly replaced by a fleet of smaller printers and a pile of scanned PDFs. The customer’s expectation stays stubbornly old-fashioned: when they hit Print, something comes out.
In a recent piece for The Imaging Channel, I wrote it plainly: most dealers think they sell machines. They do not. They sell time. When a device has problems, time gets chewed up, and service becomes the business end of the relationship. (The Imaging Channel)
Why authority is dissolving as Ai removes friction from knowledge, judgment, and power
It sat inside law firms, newsrooms, universities, executive suites. It wore credentials and spoke in guarded language. If you wanted access, you waited. If you wanted authority, you earned it slowly, through institutions designed to ration knowledge and decision-making.
That era is ending. Not with a crash, but with a quiet loss of leverage.
