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Widthwise 2020
it will always be better than the average human. Humans are prone to mistakes. They get tired and lazy. They can even get bored. A machine will never do this. It can perform the same tasks over and over again every day without fail.” The expert who wrote this essay was hardly unbiased - it was a machine - an AI-powered neural network known as GPT3.
Will any of these technologies transform PSPs between now and 2030? The short answer is: maybe, but it’s complicated. The structure of the wide-format sector reduces the incentive for printers to automate. More than half of the respondents to the 2020 Widthwise survey employed between one and five staff. Less than one in ten firms had more than 50 staff on the payroll.
In other words, there is not a lot of labour cost to save to make a return on
investment. Smaller print companies may have to wait until these technologies - par- ticularly AI and RPA - become so ubiqui- tous and cheap they can be installed on the desktop as if they were part of a software suite such as Microsoft Office.
Full automation may also require some companies to change the way they see themselves. Some PSPs, such as Stuart Maclaren’s Your Print Partner, actively sell themselves as tech companies and look to automation to help them sell direct to con- sumers. Yet many would probably echo the view expressed by Andy Wilson, owner of PressOn, at the 2018 Widthwise round ta- ble: “Automated production is not palatable for our generation. The likes of me enjoy the craft part of the business.”
Other PSPs, arguing that the risks attached to automation will significantly outweigh the rewards for the foreseeable future, have gone as far as to predict that it will not have a great impact on wide-format printing in the next 10-15 years.
There are three reasons to think au- tomation may happen sooner than that. First, the oldest reason in the book, is that PSPs may have no choice. Larger corporate customers are already using AI to manage their procurement networks. They are not doing this for fun but to save costs, drive ef- ficiencies and, after the pandemic exposed the flaws in the global supply chain, build resilience. Many of these companies believe that AI can make better, more informed decisions exponentially faster than people and, if these systems become self-learn- ing, continuously improve performance. Wide-format printers who cannot integrate into these systems may lose business.
Secondly, many printers are experiencing what you might call ‘creeping automation’ as, at their customers’ behest, they experiment with such technologies as building scanning tools. The Internet of Things - or Industry
4.0 - can be an unhelpfully amorphous term but if you think of it as using digital technol- ogy to pursue manufacturing excellence, it is probably already in use and will, as industry suppliers embrace it further, become wide- spread. When wide-format printers can digi- tally identify the bottlenecks in their business, they are much more likely to see the benefit in robotics, automation and VR.
Many print companies have already iden- tified one major bottleneck: dealing with the customer. As Richard Clark, managing director of Edenbridge-based PSP Raccoon, told Image Reports earlier this year: “We
all need to work out how to connect to our clients in a more streamlined, automated way. At the moment, it is too manual and too time consuming.”
One of the buzzwords in the retail indus- try, which still buys a lot of wide-format print, is ‘frictionless’ - as in transactions that require no effort - and there is still too much friction involved in purchasing print. This is one area where AI and, further down the line, AR and VR could help.
The second reason automation may hap- pen faster than predicted is the iPhone fac- tor. In 2006, the gadget didn’t even exist as a commercial product. Yet it has, as Apple’s Steve Jobs predicted, changed everything. Today, more than three billion of us own a smartphone and we have downloaded more
There is still too much friction involved in purchasing print. This is one area where AI and, further down the line, AR and VR could help
than 200 billion apps to use on them. These apps help us do routine stuff - e.g. shop
on Amazon - but they also enable us to bank, purchase services and products and improve project management.
Developers have only just begun to explore the transformational potential of business apps which as they become more common, more capable and less expensive could encourage automation. There is also the possibility that in the next decade a ‘wild card’ technology as unexpected and transforma- tional as the iPhone could emerge.
What if an app could run your business? Or take on nine out of ten things you need to do to run your business? As absurd as that may sound, many consultants - not
all of whom have dipped their bread in
the tech sector’s gravy - do believe that, by 2030, AI will be sophisticated enough to make day-to-day operational decisions. That may alarm some PSPs and intrigue others. Not all science fiction predictions come true - none of us are yet driven to and from work by a simian chauffeur in a car sped along a pneumatic tube - but this forecast has the ring of a ‘science fact’.
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