If there is one honest thing we can say about AI in the office technology equipment channel in 2025, it is this: while some dealers started to embrace it, most did not.
That may sound a little blunt, but it is the truth.
AI was absolutely part of the conversation in 2025. It was on stage at events, in office technology dealer meetings, in side conversations, and in plenty of “we should probably be doing something about this” discussions. But for the majority of office equipment dealers, 2025 was not the year of deep adoption. It was the year of experimentation, committee building, dabbling, and cautious observation.
And as we all know, dabbling rarely creates real outcomes.
Many dealerships spent the year testing a few tools, setting up AI committees, and talking in broad strokes about what might be possible. There is nothing wrong with curiosity. In fact, curiosity is a fine place to start. But curiosity without structure usually leads to scattered activity instead of momentum. Many organizations dipped a toe in the water without ever deciding whether they were truly going to get in.
As a result, a lot of what happened in 2025 stayed surface-level.
Internally, many dealers did not make major operational gains with AI. Externally, most were not yet looking at AI as a serious client-facing opportunity either. The mindset was often, “let’s play around with this and see what happens,” rather than, “how do we build capability, solve real workflow problems, and create a new revenue stream?”
That distinction matters.
Now, to be fair, there absolutely were progressive office equipment dealers in 2025. We worked with quite a few of them. And the ones that made the most headway tended to have one thing in common: they did not start by trying to sell AI. They started by trying to understand it inside their own four walls.
That is a very different approach.
The more forward-thinking dealers began with assessments. They looked internally first. They asked where AI could save time, reduce friction, improve communication, support service, strengthen sales operations, speed up internal processes, or make company knowledge easier to access. They treated their own business as the proving ground before trying to position themselves as experts to their customers.
That was smart for a couple of reasons.
First, it gave them practical experience. There is a big difference between talking about AI and actually using it to improve workflows. Second, it helped them build credibility. If you want to help customers adopt AI, you had better have a solid grasp on where it works, where it does not, and what implementation really looks like. The dealers that approached AI this way had a keen eye on the end goal, which was to monetize it, yes, but to do that by genuinely helping clients solve real problems.
That is the key.
Misguided direction in the office technology channel?
We also saw some predictable missteps in 2025. One of the biggest was the tendency to equate AI strategy with Microsoft 365 Copilot rollout conversations. Now, to be clear, Copilot has a place. It can be useful. It is part of the mix. But for too many dealers, the AI conversation became overly centered on out-of-the-box productivity tools instead of broader workflow transformation, industry-specific use cases, and more bespoke solutions.
In other words, a lot of people were looking for the easiest thing to attach AI to.
Everybody wanted something neat, simple, and ready to plug in. They wanted AI to show up in a box, behave predictably, and instantly create value. Unfortunately, that is just not how AI rolled in 2025.
The AI that tends to create real value usually requires discovery first. It requires workflow analysis. It requires understanding where people are losing time, where handoffs are breaking down, where information is trapped, and where manual effort is slowing down the business. Those are not usually problems solved by flipping on one license and calling it transformation.
That made some dealers uncomfortable in 2025.
2026 is going to be different
The office technology channel is moving into a more serious phase, and this time it is not just the curious few. The mega dealers, for lack of a better term, are actively engaged in figuring out how to bring AI solutions to their customers. They are not just talking about it in theory. Many have already rolled out meaningful internal initiatives and are now taking a much more aggressive stance around AI as both a business capability and a customer offering.
That matters, because once the bigger players start moving with intent, the pace changes.
We are also seeing OEMs dive in headfirst. The manufacturers that sit at the center of print, copy, document management, and workflow conversations are looking hard at where AI can deliver meaningful value. And, interestingly enough, the opportunity is not in the cute stuff. It is not about sprinkling AI into a copier interface and hoping that gets people excited.
The real opportunity is much more practical.
How can AI improve production print workflows? How can it help service teams respond faster and more accurately? How can it improve technician support, internal knowledge access, dispatch logic, ticket triage, quoting support, or customer communication? How can it help sharpen the saw for sales teams by improving lead lists, surfacing better-fit prospects, reducing research time, helping reps personalize outreach faster, and giving them more actual time to sell instead of hunt and peck for information?
That is where the value lives, and I believe we are going to see a lot more of that in 2026.
And that is an important point, because many dealers have already shown they are willing to branch out when they see a real revenue opportunity. We have seen dealers sell drinking water solutions, air filtration systems, audio/video, and all kinds of adjacent offerings. Those can all be good options. But AI is different. AI is not just another adjacent thing to add to the bag. AI is going to touch everything they sell.
It is going to affect sales. It is going to affect service. It is going to affect dispatch. It is going to affect proposal generation, customer communications, onboarding, knowledge management, analytics, and the way clients think about productivity and workflow improvement. So, in my opinion, not having an AI practice in 2026 is going to be a little like not using email or cell phones. It is not optional.
I also think we are going to see something important happen at the dealer level this year: actual AI practice groups.
And, I do not mean a committee.
I mean a real practice. A team. A function. A business unit with accountability. In some cases, these groups will carry their own P&L, or at the very least have direct responsibility for revenue generation. Once that happens, the mindset changes fast. AI stops being a side project and starts becoming a line of business.
Frankly, that is exactly what needs to happen.
Office technology equipment dealers already have the customers. That is one of the most overlooked parts of this whole conversation. They have longstanding relationships. They understand workflow. They know how to sell complexity when it ties back to outcomes. And they already sit in accounts where there are real process problems, service problems, document problems, knowledge problems, and operational headaches that AI can help solve.
That is a big deal.
AI and managed IT are different
There is a natural tendency to compare AI to managed IT, but I do not believe the growth path is going to be the same.
Managed IT took time to grow legs because, in many cases, it required a different kind of customer and a different sales motion. Office equipment dealers often sold into organizations with print, copy, and document management complexity. MSPs traditionally built their businesses serving organizations that often did not have the budget or appetite for a large internal IT team. Different buyer. Different problem set. Different motion.
AI is different.
AI maps back to complexity in a way that feels much more native to the office equipment channel. Dealers were built to help customers manage workflows, information, and business friction. That is in their DNA. AI simply gives them a much more powerful toolkit to solve many of those same classes of problems.
That is why I believe 2026 is the year the office technology channel starts to find its stride.
Not because every dealer is suddenly going to become an AI expert overnight. That is not going to happen. But because more of them are finally going to understand the real gameplay: assess customers, identify the workflows with the most friction and complexity, prioritize the high-value use cases, and bring forward a suite of solutions that actually helps.
That is the unlock.
And that is one of the reasons we launched BizVantage.ai. We saw firsthand that dealers and MSPs needed a more repeatable, more scalable, and more economical way to perform AI readiness assessments without reinventing the wheel every single time. BizVantage.ai was built to make that motion easier to replicate at scale while helping partners deliver structured assessments, clearer recommendations, and a stronger starting point for customer conversations. It is not the whole answer by itself, of course. It still takes judgment. It still takes discovery. It still takes people who understand workflows and know how to connect pain points to practical next steps. But it does reflect where the market is going: less random experimentation, more structured assessment, more repeatability, and more commercial discipline.
The office technology winners in 2026 will not be the ones with the flashiest AI deck or the most buzzwords on their website. Even those websites now need to be rethought for AI search because more buyers are using AI to shorten search time and get past ads, sponsored results, and noise. They will be the ones that get good at diagnosing workflow pain, matching the right solution to the right problem, and talking about AI in the language of business outcomes instead of hype.
They will stop asking, “What AI tool can we sell?” and start asking, “What business problem can we solve?”
That is a much better question.
And it is also a much more profitable one.
So yes, 2025 was a mixed bag. There was interest. There was experimentation. There were bright spots. But there was also hesitation, confusion, overreliance on boxed solutions, and a lot of activity that did not turn into traction.
2026 looks different.
The serious office technology players are getting serious. OEMs are moving. Dealers are beginning to organize around AI in a more disciplined way. And perhaps, most importantly, the office equipment channel is starting to realize that AI is not just another thing to bolt onto the line card. It is a capability to build, a set of customer problems to solve, and a revenue engine for those willing to approach it with structure and intent.
The office technology equipment channel has always been at its best when it helps customers navigate complexity.
That is exactly why AI belongs here in the office technology channel.
And if you are behind, now is the time to close the gap. The question is, are you ready to do so?
West McDonald
About the author: McDonald is the founder of GoWest.ai.
