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.
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.
“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.
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.
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?
