9/11/2026 and 250 Years

Since 2012, I've posted this video on DOTC and whatever platform de jour -

It was the song, written for America well before 911, it was the Super Bowl, it was the people, it was the time, and it was the flag on the inside of his jacket.

What Breaks When Office Technology Dealers Acquire Each Other

Nearly half of office technology dealers say they plan to buy another dealership or service company. The purchase agreement is not the hard part. The hard part starts about 90 days after close: two customer files, two serial histories, two dispatch boards, and two item masters are still running while customers expect the same technician tomorrow.

Not the least of these challenges is the daunting task of integrating two businesses’ systems into a single management point of truth, efficiency, and execution. But there are other obstacles along the way that even the most discerning business executive may overlook.

Follow the Cart, Part 1: Your Next Sale May Have Wheels

For most of my career in the office equipment business, I could walk into a building and spot a copier before I found the receptionist. I suspect most experienced copier salespeople can do the same thing. We notice the logo from 50 feet away, whether it has a finisher, and probably wonder who owns the lease before we’ve even been offered a cup of coffee. We take a quick look at the model number and start doing copier math in our heads. Is it three years old? Four? Five? Is that their machine or somebody else’s? What’s the monthly volume, and when does the lease expire? After enough years in this business, it almost becomes a sixth sense.

BTA at 200: What the First 100 Years Tell Us About the Next 100

By Mason Bright | Greg Report Ai 2027

In January 1926, independent typewriter dealers met in Kansas City and formed the National Association of Typewriter Dealers. Annual dues cost $10.

A dealer in that room sold machines with keys, ribbons, platens, gears, and a carriage moving across the page. His customers needed those machines to run their offices, and his business depended on knowing how to sell them, finance them, repair them, and keep them working.

BTA returns to Kansas City in 2026 for its centennial.

Ray’s BTA Question Leads to Another Question: Why Now?

 Celeste Dame 🚀🧠 | greg report 2027 Jul 13, 2026

A Seat at the BTA Table

Ray recently reviewed the Business Technology Association’s Form 990 and raised concerns about the amount of money the association holds in reserve.

The figures may be accurate. The argument built around them belongs to Ray.

My first reaction was simpler: Why now?

Become a member. Attend the meetings. Submit a proposal. Work with the committees. Convince other members that a different direction is needed.

The BTA is celebrating its 100th anniversary. The organization has more attention around it than usual, and Ray has found a public filing that gives him a timely subject for the big Sharp board.

OFFICE TECH & AI – The Buyer Has a Machine Now, Too

In the “olden days,” we walked into an account knowing more than the prospect. We knew the speeds and feeds, the lease ex-dates, the service costs, and the components of the monthly payment.

All the buyer knew was that the old device jammed Friday afternoon, the invoice “never matched” the quote, and the office manager had stopped believing the service promise sometime around the third callback.

That conversation has evolved, especially in this new AI/LLM world.

I wonder how many prospects are using AI now, and how much that changes the sale.

From Copier Sales to Ai: The Long Journey of the Modern Salesperson

I started writing about the future of selling in 2008, although it did not feel like the future at the time.

The copier business was still built around equipment, territories, quotas, leases, service contracts, and the belief that the salesperson controlled the information. Customers needed us to explain speeds, feeds, finishing options, duty cycles, and cost per page. We carried brochures, made demonstrations, and waited outside offices hoping someone would give us twenty minutes.

Sales-side Ai use cases that mirror buyer-side purchasing agents

Sales-side Ai becomes powerful when it helps the rep validate demand, pressure-test the proposal, and prepare for a buyer whose purchasing machine may already be reading the deal. 

 Yes, sales already has use cases that operate in a similar manner to buyer-side purchasing Ai. 

The strongest version goes far beyond “write me a better email.” That is table stakes now. 

The real seller-side use case is this:

 Use Ai to understand the buyer’s world before the buyer’s Ai reviews the seller’s proposal. 

Purchasing Ai will inspect proposals, compare pricing, study vendor behavior, and question demand. Sales Ai can perform similar work from the seller’s side, helping the rep validate need, stress-test assumptions, prepare for procurement scrutiny, and build a proposal that survives a sharper buying process.

How Copier Reps Book the First Robot Appointment

Robotics is moving into the same buildings copier dealers already know.

Not someday. Now.

Offices, schools, healthcare facilities, restaurants, hotels, campuses, light warehousing operations, and service-heavy customer environments are all looking for ways to reduce repetitive movement, improve workflow, and protect staff from work that drains time without adding much judgment.

That creates a real opening for the dealer channel. But there is a catch.

A robot sale does not begin with a product lecture. It begins with an appointment.

Marco. The Next IKON?

Executive summary

Marco Technologies is building the kind of platform the office technology channel has seen before.

The comparison to IKON is not exact. IKON was larger, public, multi-vendor, and eventually acquired by Ricoh. Marco is privately held under Norwest Equity Partners ownership and operates as a broad business technology provider across print, managed IT, security, voice, video, document management, and managed services.

The comparison still deserves attention.

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Over the last decade, Marco has followed a recognizable path: private-equity backing, acquisition-led expansion, regional stitching, broader technology services, national account capability, and now centralized logistics infrastructure designed to support customers across the United States.

That is the platform-dealer model.

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The Webinar: Robots Move Into the Dealer Conversation By Mason Bright | Greg Report Ai 2027

Office-ready robots are entering the channel. The dealers who learn the service model early get the better shot.

It wasn’t our first rodeo. It was our second.

The May 13 webinar with Keith Garrett from Pudu Robotics, Greg Walters with The Continuum hosted by the lovely Queen of the Webinar, Patricia Ames of The Imaging Channel, gave copier dealers a clearer view of where office-ready robots fit inside the channel.

The End of Org the Chart - By Mason Bright | Greg Report Ai 2027

A new framework for designing Ai organizations around capability, context, and clear decision movement.

Companies are spending heavily on Ai, then jamming it into the same old bureaucracy.

Why would one imprison an LLM/Ai inside a spreadsheet?

That is the trap.

The first wave of enterprise Ai is already taking a familiar shape: sales agents, marketing agents, finance agents, legal agents, HR agents, manager agents.

They are creating Ai in their own image: failure

Xerox, Aston Martin, and the Dealer’s Long Walk Back Into the Room

By Celeste Dame | Celestial Sales Singularity

Xerox beside Aston Martin Aramco Formula One makes for an easy photograph. Racing green. Carbon fiber. Clean lighting. Expensive shoes on polished floors. The kind of place where nobody admits they once jammed a copier by feeding letterhead upside down.

Still, the partnership deserves more than a quick eye roll from the copier channel.

There is something useful happening under the shine.

Xerox is trying to change the room it gets invited into.

That sounds simple until you remember how long a name can drag its own history behind it. Xerox is one of the rare brands that escaped the product category and became common language. That kind of fame helped build the company, but fame ages strangely. It hardens. It turns into a museum tag if nobody refreshes the meaning behind it.

From Tripoli to Hormuz: Tribute Returns

The Strait of Hormuz has the same hard smell history always carries at sea: diesel, salt, hot metal, and fear moving quietly across a bridge wing at night. A captain does not need a lecture on geopolitics when mines may be in the water and armed boats are somewhere beyond the radar glow. He needs passage. He needs law to mean something. He needs the world’s navies to remember their original job.

That job began for the United States in the Mediterranean. 

From Copiers to Robots - PUDU & The Continuum

A practical dealer conversation about service robots, PUDU, and the next connected machine category in office technology

Register here.

The copier channel has always been built around machines that live inside real businesses.

Not theory. Not hype. Real machines. Machines with serial numbers, service histories, lease paperwork, parts, training, customer expectations, and somebody’s name attached to the account when the thing stops behaving.

That is what makes From Copiers to Robots an interesting webinar. It is not treating robotics like a moonshot. It is treating robotics like a new equipment category moving toward a channel that already understands connected hardware, local support, recurring agreements, and customer trust.

Xerox: King Lear or The Odyssey

By Robert G. Jordan | greg report Ai

Xerox has the old-king problem.

A once-commanding name gave away too much authority, got stripped down by market weather, watched its kingdom fracture, and now stands in the storm asking what power remains when ceremony, size, and reputation no longer protect you. That is Lear on the heath. The crown still means something, but only after the storm reveals what was real and what was theater.

For Xerox, the “storm” is the decline of print, the stock price, activist pressure, leadership turnover, the Fujifilm break, the Icahn years, and the Lexmark integration. The old court is gone. The robe is wet. The old script no longer works.

Xerox and Blade Runner - By Robert G. Jordan | greg report Ai

Xerox and Blade Runner share the same uneasy question: what remains human, useful, and valuable after the original world has moved on?

In Blade Runner, the future is built from old architecture, neon, corporate towers, rain, decay, and machines that behave too much like people. It is a world where the past never really dies. It just gets rewired, renamed, and left humming in the dark.

That is Xerox.

OFFICE TECH & AI – Artificial Intelligence in Your World: No Experts, Just Opinions

I felt a tingling sensation in my chest—the kind you get when you realize you’re witnessing a major historical event. It is not just a chatbot. It is a portal to a future where we no longer have to do the ‘boring’ work of thinking.” — Kevin Roose (The New York Times, December 5, 2022)

The fear of COVID had faded, but the power struggle between leadership and a remote workforce was in full swing. For the knowledge workers, the ones who used to stand in front of our photocopiers, the office was now a commute away. In this chaos, AI arrived. It wasn’t just fuel for the fire; for the salesperson, it was the most significant tool to arrive since Act! customer relationship management platform in 1987.

Xerox Is the Canary Now

By Charlie G. Peterson IV | greg report 2027

The old dealer-floor joke had teeth: when HP caught a cold, everyone else got the Zombie Flu.

It worked because HP had mass. Shelves moved when HP sneezed. Toner pricing twitched. Buyers paused. Competitors suddenly found themselves explaining why their “strategic direction” looked suspiciously like a man sweating through his polo beside the demo unit.

That metaphor feels dated now.

Xerox has taken the perch.

Not because Xerox dominates the room. That crown wandered off years ago. Xerox matters because its numbers expose the weak boards underneath the old channel floor: print volume, equipment placements, post-sale revenue, managed print stickiness, debt, service economics, and the nasty question of what happens when a legacy print company buys scale because time has grown expensive.

The Q1 2026 earnings statement opens with a recovery story. Revenue hit $1.846 billion, up 26.7% year over year. Adjusted operating income reached $72 million. Adjusted operating margin climbed to 3.9%, up 240 basis points from last year. Xerox reaffirmed full-year guidance: revenue above $7.5 billion, adjusted operating income of $450 million to $500 million, and free cash flow around $250 million.

ECS 2026: The Legacy Embedded in the Future

ECS 2026

Twelve years ago, I attended the 2014 ECS. I’m not the only one who can wax nostalgic about an Executive Connection Summit from over a decade ago, but here I am.

Post and Walters, Ask Us Anything

This episode of the Crickets show featured Greg, Art, and special guest Keith from PUDU Robotics discussing the company's new products and go-to-market strategy. 

Keith introduced PUDU's latest cleaning robot, the BG1 series, which features AI object detection, wet/dry area recognition, and fleet communication capabilities, with pre-orders expected to ship in late April and mass distribution in June. 

The discussion covered PUDU's U.S. market strategy, including their new Dallas headquarters and existing warehouses in Los Angeles and New Jersey, as well as their upcoming presence at the Modex trade show in April. 

The conversation also touched on PUDU's quadruped robot (D5) for potential security and inspection applications, and the growing interest in robotics within the office equipment dealer community.

You Should Have Seen It When the Copier Was Busy

Art Post

Co-Founder of Crickets Global, Founder of Print4Pay Hotel, Founder of Jersey Plotters. ENX Difference Maker for 2022. 8 Times Awarded “ENX Difference Maker” for Technology.

For most of my career, the small office copier was the center of the business.

I still remember walking into offices early in my career and the copier would be the first thing you noticed. You didn’t have to ask where it was, you could hear it. The machine would be humming away, someone standing there waiting for their copies, someone else trying to figure out why their job jammed. There was almost always a stack of originals sitting on top of the feeder. That copier wasn’t just a machine; it was the heartbeat of the office.

How the Copier Industry Reached a Turning Point and Why the Continuum May Be the Road Forward

By Mason Bright | Greg Report Ai 2027

If you want to understand the copier industry, do not start with a market report. Start in a dealer warehouse before sunrise.

The lights hum on one aisle at a time. Service techs drift through the side door grabbing trunk stock for the day. Someone is already arguing across the counter about whether a call should be marked open or closed on the dispatch board. A service manager studies the ticket queue with a cup of coffee that went cold twenty minutes ago.