Ask Us Anything January 2026: Weather, Robots, Copiers, and Why Purpose Keeps Coming Up

Ask Us Anything January 2026

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.”

Autonomous driving is quietly rewriting insurance

One of the early sparks was Tesla and Lemonade offering dramatically cheaper insurance for vehicles running Full Self Driving. The logic is simple and uncomfortable: robotic drivers get into fewer accidents than humans.

That immediately raises second-order questions. If machines drive better than people, what happens to traffic enforcement, municipal revenue, liability, and the entire ecosystem built around human error? You can ticket a person. A robot does not care.

The conversation never landed on answers, but the direction was clear. The economic assumptions underneath transportation are shifting faster than policy.

EVs, China, and the cold weather test

BYD came up, as it often does lately. Chinese electric vehicles are improving at a pace that has legacy automakers openly worried. At the same time, cold weather performance remains a real-world constraint. Batteries do not care about ambition.

That led to a blunt litmus test: show a battery-powered snowplow working all night at O’Hare in January, and then we can talk. Until then, electrification has limits that marketing slides tend to ignore.

Xerox, Ricoh, and the long unwind of print

The FMF copier news segment landed hard this week.

Xerox received a strong sell rating, with continued revenue decline, rising debt, and another capital raise just to maintain liquidity. This was not framed as a one-off stumble. It was treated as a case study in what happens when a company built on volume faces structural demand collapse.

Ricoh, meanwhile, is stretching toward cybersecurity and digital services. The question raised was not whether they can offer these services, but whether the market will ever see them as credible in that role.

The quiet takeaway: most hardware-first companies are running out of time to redefine themselves, and not all transformations stick.

Scanning is having a strange second life

One of the more grounded insights came from scanning and document capture. Print volumes are flat or declining, but scan volumes are rising.

Why? Because businesses are waking up to where their valuable data actually lives. Not in SaaS dashboards or social feeds, but in file cabinets, legacy paper, microfilm, and forgotten archives.

If companies want Ai that reflects their business, they need their own data. And for many organizations, that data still starts with a scanner.

Dealers who understand what customers are scanning, where it goes, and how it feeds downstream systems are sitting on opportunities they have ignored for years.

MSPs, agents, and the quiet automation wave

ConnectWise acquiring an Ai firm kicked off a bigger discussion about managed service providers. If work can be done remotely, it can almost certainly be automated. And if it can be automated, Ai agents will do it cheaper and faster.

That does not mean MSPs disappear overnight. It means the low-hanging fruit is going away. Ticket triage, routine fixes, basic monitoring, all of it is heading toward autonomous systems.

The uncomfortable question surfaced quickly: if a small business can buy these tools directly, what happens to the middle layer?

From service manuals to perception

A recurring theme was that future systems may not need massive historical documentation to function. Vision, perception, and pattern recognition are becoming more important than static archives.

If an Ai can see a copier smoking and understand that smoke is bad, it does not need to read a service manual to escalate the issue. That same logic scales far beyond copiers.

The implication is subtle but profound. Systems trained on patterns may rely less on stored history and more on live, real-time inputs. Data still matters, but differently than we have assumed for decades.

Purpose keeps sneaking into the conversation

Somewhere between robot dogs picking up trash and Ai-generated video, the discussion turned philosophical. Not in an abstract way, but in a very practical one.

If Ai removes a lot of routine work, what are people actually for?

The answer was not productivity. It was not efficiency. It was purpose. What someone would choose to do if the tools removed the friction.

That question kept resurfacing. In sales. In service. In creative work. Even in neighborhood cleanup. The technology discussion kept circling back to a human one.

The quiet throughline

Nothing discussed felt like science fiction anymore. Robot assistants, voice systems indistinguishable from humans, agents making decisions before people notice a problem, all of it feels close.

The show did not end with predictions or declarations. It ended the way it often does. With curiosity, skepticism, and a reminder that the future shows up first in boring places.

Copiers. Insurance policies. Scanners. Service tickets.

That is usually where the signal hides.