The Last Stand of A3 and the Quiet Rewrite of the Dealer Model - Art & Frank

By Grayson Patrick Trent | greg report 2027

Prolog: Friday’s with Frank

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.

The End of SaaS - 2027

The End of SaaS, or Just the Quiet Demotion?

In October 2025, I wrote that SaaS was ending.

That line raised eyebrows. It still does. Yet the product roadmaps and the earnings calls are starting to rhyme.

The claim was never that spreadsheets, forecasts, proposals, invoices, or CRM records disappear. The deliverables stay. The engine shifts.

Agents as the Unit of Work

Satya Nadella said in 2023, “The next generation of SaaS is agents.” 

Read that carefully. The agent becomes the unit of execution. The application becomes storage, permissions, and transaction rails.

Still Haven’t Found What We’re Looking For in Ai Work

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.

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.”

The Demo Is the Deal: Why Copier Sales Can Be Won on Camera, Not on Paper

“The Moment It Clicks”

For decades, the copier demo followed a familiar ritual. Schedule the truck. Clear half a day. Roll a machine into an office that was never designed to be a showroom. Hope the network cooperates. Hope nothing breaks on the way back out.

That ritual is still treated as proof of commitment in some dealerships. In reality, it has become one of the least efficient, most fragile parts of the sales process.

What has quietly changed is not the copier. It is the buyer.

The “Death of the Copier” Still Has a Service Department

“Copier sales” sounds like a hardware job until the first device goes sideways in the middle of a workday. Then it becomes a time-and-trouble job, measured in minutes, callbacks, and how quickly someone shows up with the right part.

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)

The department everyone references and few people learn

The Last Gatekeepers

Why authority is dissolving as Ai removes friction from knowledge, judgment, and power

By Charlie G. Peterson IV | Greg Report Ai Predictions 2025

For most of modern history, power lived behind desks.

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.

CRICKETS and the Rise of Humanoid Robots in the B2B Channel

 

How CRICKETSUS Aims to Bring Humanoid Robotics to the U.S. Through the B2B Channel

by Nathan DubeDecember 9, 2025

Overview

As the United States stands at a critical crossroads in the global race toward humanoid robotics, this article explores the technological, logistical, and economic forces shaping what comes next. It examines why America has lagged behind countries like China in robotics deployment and identifies supply chain infrastructure as the missing link. 

The piece introduces CRICKETSUS, a new startup founded by industry veterans Greg Walters and Art Post, and details their plan to leverage the existing B2B office technology channel to accelerate the adoption of humanoid robots nationwide. 

Through insights from the founders and a forward-looking analysis of MPS, MSPs, and robotics OEMs, the article outlines how a new American robotics industry could emerge from proven business models.

Read the Entire Article, here.

New to Copier Sales: How to Train Your LLM to Train You

Sales managers chase training like it is a traveling circus. A new seminar. A four-hour webinar. A three-month program with worksheets nobody fills out. Someone always promises a breakthrough. Someone always has a new acronym. 

Then Monday morning hits, and everybody goes right back to pounding out emails, dodging gatekeepers, guessing their way through objections, and retaining 3% of that expensive “How to…” content.
Meanwhile, that twenty-dollar AI sits on your desk the whole time, waiting patiently. Not as a guru. Not as a trainer who shows up with a clicker and a 350-card deck full of clip art. As something simpler. A system you can teach to teach you.

Continuously.

The Xerox Dundalk Closure and the Next Category for Copier Dealers

Xerox’s Dundalk closure is not a local story. It is a measurable signal for a channel built on pages.

By Mason Bright | Greg Report Ai 2025

In Dundalk, County Louth, there is a building that once did the sort of work you only notice when it stops. It made toner. Not the abstract idea of “supplies,” but the black powder that kept invoices, patient charts, school packets, and lease agreements moving through the world.

That facility is closing at the end of the year. Xerox has sold the site. The last remaining workers have received redundancy packages. A Xerox spokesperson confirmed the plant “will close at years end,” and explained the decision as part of an effort to simplify the business and align with what clients need today. Some of the toner manufacturing will move to Xerox’s Webster, New York facility.

It reads like a small corporate note, the kind that lands in a regional paper and disappears under holiday headlines. For anyone who owns or runs a copier dealership, it lands differently. This is the supply chain talking out loud.

Why Copier Dealers Are Becoming the Backbone of the Robotics Boom

By Celeste Dame | Greg Report Ai 2025

I have watched the copier channel carry companies through more uncertainty than most people remember. Every transition from analog to digital, every shift in workflow, every surprise request landing late in the day. Dealers always found a way to keep customers steady. They made complicated equipment feel manageable because they showed up, listened, and solved what was in front of them.

That same experience is shaping the next chapter. Robotics is gaining attention, but what matters is how businesses absorb new tools without losing momentum. Dealers understand that part better than anyone. They earned trust door by door, meeting by meeting, and now those relationships are becoming the bridge to a technology most companies are still learning to understand.

Did you miss TWAIN Converge 2025?

Last week, industry leaders, technologists, and futurists gathered to witness something remarkable: the transformation of document scanning from a peripheral function into an essential data ingress point for AI and the digital future.

By Art Post

Our roster of speakers delivered strategic insights that are already reshaping the industry:

When Clicks Die and Robots Walk In

Remember when paper was king and every copier was a cash machine? Yeah. That party’s over. And now, it’s not just about fewer prints. It’s about dealers asking themselves what’s left when the pages vanish.

I just wrapped a full read of Celeste Dame’s latest deep-dive: Beyond the Page: Reinventing the Copier Channel in a Less-Print World. And let me tell you, this isn’t your average vendor-padded puff piece or PR-massaged forecast. This thing is loaded with actual numbers, actual insights, and one brutal truth: the clicks are drying up—and they’re not coming back.

We’re talking a nearly 50% drop in U.S. paper usage since 2011. Copier/MFP unit sales? Down 20%. Post-COVID? Even worse. Hybrid work hit print volumes like a freight train, and they’re not bouncing back. Service contracts are thinning out, meter reads are tanking, and even the diehard lease-renewal crowd is pushing back.

But here’s the kicker. This report isn’t mourning the death of the copier. It’s lighting a torch under what comes next. And surprisingly? That next thing has legs. Wheels. LiDAR. 

A name tag.

Robots That Dealers Can Sell - A Very Cool Webinar

Register Here

Robots just left the lab and walked into the channel. The Crickets Continuum will be joining BPO Media to talk all things robots and show copier and IT dealers where they fit, which use cases move first, and how the service model, GP, and training actually work. This webinar will show you how to turn copier know-how into robot revenue.

We’ll discuss three dealer-ready use cases, display a live movement demo, and provide the next steps for piloting. And as always, we will have live Q&A, and we know there will be questions!

Wednesday, November 19 at 10 a.m PT/1 pm ET

Why Copier Dealers Are Becoming the Backbone of the Robotics Boom

By Celeste Dame | Greg Report Ai 2025

I have watched the copier channel carry companies through more uncertainty than most people remember. Every transition from analog to digital, every shift in workflow, every surprise request landing late in the day. Dealers always found a way to keep customers steady. They made complicated equipment feel manageable because they showed up, listened, and solved what was in front of them.

That same experience is shaping the next chapter. Robotics is gaining attention, but what matters is how businesses absorb new tools without losing momentum. Dealers understand that part better than anyone. They earned trust door by door, meeting by meeting, and now those relationships are becoming the bridge to a technology most companies are still learning to understand.

New to Copier Sales: What’s this Robot Thing?

The Imaging Channel

 November 13, 2025 Greg Walters

“You are not competing with a robot. You are competing with a dealer that sells one.”

This month, something a bit different. Robots. Specifically, selling robots. More specifically, selling against robots. Have I got your attention now?

First things first. This is not about smart AI voices on the phone, automated emails, or cool AI-generated copier videos. Selling against robots here means machines that move in the real world. They lift. They navigate warehouses, service departments, and cube farms on their own.

This is not science fiction. Not “The Terminator” or Will Smith running around in “I, Robot.” These are wheels, trays, carts, and floor jacks. No robot is going to cold call your contact at the auto dealership, conduct a needs assessment, run the site survey, build a proposal, and demo a duplexer. 

That is not the competition.

Send the Scanner, Not the Staff

You know the walk. Print. Stand up. Cross the floor. Wait at the device. Shuffle pages. Walk back. Do it again because a page jammed or the wrong tray fed. Multiply by an office. Multiply by a day. That is lost margin with a badge on it.

Here is the pitch in one line. Put the capture to work where the work lives. Roll a scanner to the desk, the counter, the bay. Scan once, name right, route right, and be done. Dealers win because this looks like everything you already do, only on wheels. Clients win because people stop burning minutes on errands and start closing the loop at the point of need.

Production print stole headlines last week. Good. The heat on show floors tells you something real is moving. The same current is running through front offices and service counters. Paper is not gone. It has shifted shape. Receipts. IDs. Insurance cards. Repair orders. Contracts that still need wet ink. The traffic pattern is the problem, not the paper. Fix the pattern.

Open Standards for Office Robots: Lessons from Copier APIs

By Gabriela

Every closed console starts the same way: protection disguised as precision. Copier manufacturers built walls around their panels to guard reliability, security, and brand identity. For years, it worked. Then those same walls slowed progress. Integrations broke. Developers left. Dealers learned to live in translation between machines that refused to speak.

Now the robots are coming. And the question repeats: will we make the same mistake?

Post Walters: The Friday That Changed the Conversation based on Oct24

Friday nights in this business used to mean two things: catching up on service tickets and cracking open a bourbon. This one started the same way. Then Art, John, and Dion sat down, and by the time the hour was up, the whole copier world felt like it had tilted a few degrees toward the future.

We started with the usual;

Print United news, production sales, and who sold what on the show floor. 

But somewhere between Ricoh’s Android panels and Sharp’s rebranded Fujis, the talk got real. The old guard is still chasing speed, volume, and print quality while the next generation is talking open standards, autonomous systems, and robots that learn from service logs.

Standards Make The Sale: Twain, Dealers, And Robots That Behave

by Mason Bright

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.