AI has promised a lot to different industries, sometimes industries that may not seem in dire need of such a tool. Printing, for example. However, as it turns out, AI offers several applications applicable to printing and printers—improving efficiency, workflow, project quality, and more. Here’s how the printing industry is using AI and how it could help your business!
Enhancing Efficiency
Predictive maintenance is just what it sounds like. Based on existing data and evidence, an AI system may predict when a machine part is likely to fail or simply require preventative maintenance. This proactive approach allows for timely maintenance, reducing downtime, and extending the equipment’s lifespan while not leaving it entirely in the hands of printer operators to guess when or if a printer requires replacement or repair.
Workflow Automation
How do you make a good system better? By revisiting what works and doesn’t work and reviewing the quality and output of the work done. But what if such analysis was automatic and ongoing? Use AI to streamline workflows by automating repetitive tasks, from prepress operations to the final production stages. AI can handle and facilitate tedious and minute tasks such as color correction, layout adjustments, and proofreading. This capability frees up human operators to focus on more creative and strategic activities. AI speeds up production and ensures consistency and accuracy.
Optimizing Resources
Every business must take stock—literally. Inventorying supplies and materials and reviewing energy usage and waste provides insight into what you can do to save time and money. AI can provide print production companies with an ongoing assessment of resources, specifically charting ink and paper use. For example, AI ensures minimal waste and optimal resource allocation by constantly running job requirement analyses and adjusting print settings during the printing process. These features reduce costs and keep a company “green”—a plus when it comes to helping the community and ecosystem.
Improving Print Quality
AI-powered image recognition tools are useful for analyzing and enhancing images, ensuring they are print-ready. AI tools detect and correct issues such as low resolution, poor contrast, and color imbalances. The human eye is still the best determiner of image quality, but automating the image enhancement process for regular and routine jobs ensures high-quality printing standards without little need for manual intervention. AI is also a wiz at quality control. AI-driven quality control systems monitor prints in real-time, automatically finding and fixing defects such as smudges, misalignments, and color discrepancies or alerting the human operators to potential problems.
Personalization and Variable Data Printing
Customized printing is big business. Creating individual prints and projects that your team personalizes or otherwise individualizes without wasting resources is also a challenge. Variable data printing (VDP), most recognizable as on-demand printing, allows for customized prints tailored to individual recipients, such as personalized marketing materials or unique packaging designs. AI can analyze customer data and generate personalized content dynamically, enhancing customer engagement and satisfaction. Even better, it can run this task on the fly or during the printing process without slowing down production.
Driving Innovation
Innovation is the one promise of AI technology that everyone is talking about. But this type of innovation isn’t about programs that create interesting, if inconsistent, images “learned” from the work of human artists. AI-powered design software can generate design concepts based on input parameters, providing visual suggestions and layout adjustments. This collaboration between humans and machines may lead to innovative and visually appealing designs.
Market Analysis and Trends
Let’s step away from the printer for a moment and look at the daily business of printing. One thing computers do well is ingest large gobs of information and produce reports on what that data means. AI offers an excellent way to identify market trends and consumer preferences. Like any business, printing companies must stay ahead of the competition. AI can gather demographics, statistics, analytics, and the like, process them, and reveal which products and services customers are looking for in the near and far future. Information is power in the business world, and AI can provide the right kind of information. Likewise, AI optimizes supply chain processes by predicting demand, managing inventory, and identifying potential disruptions. These optimizations ensure printing companies have the materials they need to meet client needs while minimizing inventory and reducing these and other costs.
Customer Service
You likely can’t be there for your customers and potential clients 24 hours a day—but AI can. Rigging your website with an AI chatbot can help customers with common questions, troubleshooting, and setting up appointments for demonstrations and consultations during regular work hours. You can help anyone, even when you’re asleep at home! These AI chatbots improve customer relations, establish a reputation for availability and professionalism, and otherwise aid your business. On a related note, you can set up AI to detect and respond to security threats to your site and system in real time, protecting sensitive data and maintaining customer trust.
Boosting Recruitment
Looking for the right people to run your printers and other parts of the company? Use AI-driven platforms to screen resumes, conduct exploratory interviews, and predict candidate success and suitability for a role, making the hiring process faster and more effective. The human touch should always be paramount during the actual interview process, but AI can help find the best and brightest candidates, picking individuals with the right skills, educational background, experience, and more to move on to the next steps of the employment process.
What’s Next?
As exciting as the AI field is, complete integration in the printing industry is still years away. The best, as they say, is yet to come, and still, more advanced and sophisticated AI tools are just over the horizon. We can look for more sophisticated AI-driven designs, fully automated production lines, and even more advanced predictive analytics for market forecasting. As AI technology continues to evolve, it will surely find greater footing in the printing world, providing newer and better opportunities for innovation and growth.
That’s a quick summary of how AI is being used in the printing industry. Want to talk about printing and printer options that can enhance your business? Contact us today! We offer Canon professional photography printers as well as other printers and materials that will optimize your projects.
