Widthwise 2024


Q23. Do you expect AI to have a significant impact on the wide-format print sector in the next two years?


Yes No


Maybe/don’t know 54%


24% 22%


derstandable - restraint on digital printing’s capital spending over the next two years is the existential uncertainty surrounding the impact of AI. More than half - 54% - of respondents to the Widthwise 2024 poll expect it to have a significant impact on their business but what those impacts might prove to be is, at this stage, much less clear (see article on 17). Tere is obvious scope to improve


efficiency (a key focus for half of print service providers in the market for new kit, according to this year’s Widthwise survey) and deliver customisation and personalisa- tion. According to a recent Vision Report by Futureprnt, the seminar and workshop organiser, “there is a wave of optimism within the [whole] printing industry that AI will be a catalyst for positive change.” We also know that many industry suppliers (such as Canon, Elitron, HP, InkTec and Zaikio to name a few) are already exploring how they can best use it. And yet, as ever with such transforma-


tional and revolutionary technologies, it is hard for business leaders to understand how and when these opportunities will be realised - and, for that matter, at what cost. From bitter experience, many wide-format printers have learned that new technology’s leading edge can, all too easily, become a bleeding edge. Most emerging technologies progress through the famous hype cycle identified


by management consultants Gartner: a technological breakthrough quickly inspires inflated expectations which, inevitably, are followed by a trough of disillusionment, then a quiet rediscovery of what made the technology so exciting in the first place and, finally, as it approaches maturity, mainstream adoption. Te cycle works in different ways and over different timelines - it is not, for example, clear at what stage the likes of such relatively recent technol- ogies as 3D printing, augmented reality or virtual reality have now reached presently at - which can constrain decision-making, especially among smaller private compa- nies. (In the same vein, suppliers and tech- nologists have been talking up the advent of completely automated print plants since the mid-1980s and they are still rare.) If anything, the degree of uncertainty is


magnified when it comes to AI because of the colossal scale of investment (in America alone, it is conservatively estimated to have attracted $290bn in private funding over the past five years), the cornucopia of potential applications (across every industry we can imagine and quite a few that we can’t yet envisage) and, given the complexity of the technologies involved, how effectively these systems will perform. (One oſten overlooked aspect of AI, as Max Roser, the German-born director of global development at the Oxford Martin School, has pointed out, is that it could be a


powerful technological weapon in the fight against climate change.) At the same time, print service providers


cannot afford to ignore the ‘carpe diem’ factor. One of the favourite axioms of management consultants is that businesses which are quicker to anticipate a recovering market, and invest accordingly, can put clear blue water between themselves and those which don’t. Although retaining and recruiting staff doesn’t, on the evidence of the 2024 Widthwise survey, seem as much of a worry for the sector as in recent years, technology that digitises and automates processes that were once done manually offers both a decent return on investment and significant protection against volatile labour costs. What print service providers need to


remember is that the purpose of technol- ogy is to enable change, not drive it. As one expert put it: “Machines don’t build businesses, people do”. Paradoxically, this is even more relevant in the age of AI. Tey also need to recognise the profound dif- ference between investing in a new printer or design soſtware package and adopting technologies such as AI - and, for that mat- ter, whatever comes aſter it - in that they won’t just improve a particular department, they could transform the entire business, if they adopt it in the right way, emphasising consultation rather than issuing diktats from the top.


www.imagereports.co.uk | Widthwise 2024 | 19


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