The Green Sheet Online Edition
July 27, 2026 • 26:07:02
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Is that a product or capability? Part 2
This series explores our changing relationship with hardware in a software-driven world. Part 1 opens a decade ago, when applications began to gain dominion over machines. Terminals and PIN pads became interchangeable, depending on environment and use case. Hardware was relegated from a leading role to supporting infrastructure.
Part 2 enters the future, fittingly with Deb Reuben, founder and CEO of TomorrowZone and author of Enter the Tomorrow Zone: How to Inspire Breakthrough Innovation and Shape Your Future. We met in 2016 at Singularity University's Exponential Finance conference in New York City and reminisced about the event on her podcast in June 2026.
Technology as language
When Reuben asked if I'd ever rethought any assumptions about technology, I recalled my bylined articles in The Green Sheet and the story they tell. From hardware-centric musings in "Bold new mode in modems," to broader contemplations in "Editing Paytech DNA," the headlines show my concept of technology evolving from tools to integrations to capabilities, and finally, to seeing technology as a language.
This intrigued Reuben, who noted that language, particularly machine language, is a primary interface to computation power and invisible, omnipresent elements of payments. "It's really interesting to think about technology as a language," she said. "And if we think way back, language is actually a technology."
Purpose-built and personalized
When technology moves faster than language, we frequently assign new meanings to old words. Zehra Cataltepe, founder and CEO of TAZI AI, used the machine-age term "purpose-built" to describe digital agents that are built to specifications but malleable enough to react and adapt to individual workplace environments.
- Retain Agent helps businesses understand customer behavior, transactions and product usage while improving data quality and AI readiness.
- Grow and Acquire Agent drives retention and segmentation, highlighting loyalty, upselling and acquisition opportunities.
- VoC Agent listens to publicly available comments and call-center communications to understand customer needs, product usage and competitor behavior.
- Account Take Over (ATO) Agent helps organizations catch and resolve fraud before it happens.
Despite their uniform design, each agent conforms to its respective environment, making its manufactured purpose seem more a personality trait than a fixed specification. A Retain Agent, for example, can also react in real time and prevent an attack.
"Every hyper-personalized recommendation TAZI creates draws on the client's past data, predictions across multiple drivers (attrition, loyalty, upsell/cross-sell, sentiment, fraud), explanations and insights behind those predictions, and the next steps the agents generate," she said.
When worlds collide
Ammad Sohail, technical project manager at InvoZone, summarized the primary differences between hardware and software as time and money. "Manufacturers have hard costs of materials, assembly and shipping, no matter how many units they sell," he said. "But software, once it's built, is free to duplicate and forgiving of mistakes. A software bug can be patched and pushed out the same day it's discovered." Sohail further noted that hardware teams test products before release to avoid costly recalls and replacements. Software teams, on the other hand, can afford to ship and iterate faster. And finally, it takes time, capital and factory relationships to tool and prototype hardware, he stated, noting that a manufacturer can spend a year or more creating a single sellable unit while software can go from idea to working version in a week. "Payments is one of those spaces where hardware and software collide," he added. "A POS terminal is a hardware device but increasingly, the real value and margin are the software running on it."
If technology is a language, perhaps its real value lies not in products, but in the capabilities they create. Software powers payments, while hardware keeps them agile, secure, connected and tokenized. POS devices are the wind beneath software's wings. In the middle of the TomorrowZone Catalyst podcast, I surprised Reuben by unveiling "Postcards from payments 2026," an October 2016 cover story in The Green Sheet. Inspired by a sci-fi workshop we'd attended a decade ago, the story featured dispatches by Reuben and other industry leaders from an imagined future. 
Dale S. Laszig, content strategy director at The Green Sheet and founder and CEO at DSL Direct, is a payments industry journalist, creator and consultant. Connect via email at dale@dsldirectllc.com and LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/dalelaszig.
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