The print sector continues to transform, and the adoption of AI continues to grow apace. Here, we look at how AI-powered technology is supporting innovation in a commoditised marketplace, how it is influencing channel vendor’s go-to-market strategies and enabling efficiencies within their own business
PrintIT Reseller: Do you see the use of AI in the print industry becoming more widespread in the coming year and in what areas?
Olaf Lorenz, General Manager Global Brand Experience, Konica Minolta: The use of generative AI and automation will continue to become more widespread in 2025. These technologies will help streamline operations, enhance productivity, and improve employee experiences.
Popular AI-powered tools can help create and compose written collateral such as marketing content, reports, or emails. To accompany this, AI can be used for image creation to produce specific high quality (and often royalty-free) images that are quick to produce and use.
On the operational side of the business, AI-powered chatbots are commonly used by retail and other service providers as part of online customer service to produce instant responses for customer inquiries, which also helps to alleviate some of the pressure on human customer service teams and allows them to concentrate on more bespoke customer needs. Elsewhere, generative AI can be used to analyse large datasets to generate insights and reports, helping businesses make better and more accurate data driven decisions. It can also be deployed to process electronic invoices or to help automate HR recruitment processes, helping to find suitable candidates by screening resumes/applications.
Arjan Paulussen, Managing Director UK, Western Europe and South Africa, Lexmark: AI is rapidly transitioning from a niche technology to a core component of the print industry. In the coming year, expect to see even greater integration of AI across various functionalities. Predictive maintenance and automated supply replenishment are already becoming standard, but the future holds much more. AI will play a larger role in the design phase, optimising printers for longevity and serviceability, much like our approach with the Lexmark A3 9-Series, which boasts a 40% longer lifespan over competitors.
Image optimisation will also see advancements, with AI automatically enhancing scanned documents and marketing materials, cleaning up imperfections and optimising resolution. Content creation and translation will be streamlined through generative AI, enabling on-device translation in over 100 languages, as demonstrated by the Lexmark Translations Assistant. Predictive diagnostics will become more sophisticated, further minimising downtime by proactively addressing potential issues. Most critically, AI will bolster printer security by continuously monitoring network activity for suspicious behaviour targeting printers as entry point devices into organisations.
Ryan Green, Digital Services Director, Carbon: Yes, I think it will become more relevant, we are already seeing a greater uptake in the Intelligent Document Processing space, giving the ability to process and manage documents more efficiently, reducing manual intervention and errors.
Shaun Wilkinson, Managing Director, UTAX UK: The adoption of AI in the print industry is accelerating and already transforming operations. Predictive maintenance, powered by AI, is now integral to device management systems, enabling real-time analysis of consumables and device status. This ensures potential issues are addressed before they cause downtime.
Automated workflows are now commonplace across a variety of software offerings. These are typically accompanied with wizards to set up rules, filters or software settings based on findings and best practices. They offer intelligent recommendations and speed up the onboarding process. Print management software increasingly uses AI for anomaly detection, identifying changes in print behaviour and adapting settings accordingly.
Document capture software benefits from AI for tasks like classification, data extraction, and conversion, automating processes traditionally requiring significant manual effort. In cloud solutions, AI monitors resources, ensures real-time adjustments, and identifies underutilised features to add value for the user.
Kerry Rush, Product Marketing Manager, Sharp UK: We anticipate an increased number of AI-enabled functionalities becoming more widespread in the coming year. In the print sector, we’ll see trends around AI simplifying and personalising the use of technology within an organisation, streamlining print processes, enhancing digitisation and improving efficiency.
The world of AI is exciting and there is no doubt that it will have real value in print, particularly for productivity, workflow and capture. It will also impact how machines are serviced, monitored and maintained by enabling proactive and remote device optimisation. For workflows and automation, we’re already seeing AI being used. As this technology becomes more embedded, document classification and information extraction will become more efficient. This means there will be even fewer barriers for organisations wanting to digitise their paper documents with ease.
While new technology can be daunting, we’re committed to navigating the AI journey with our clients and partners, supporting them in exploring new opportunities securely and safely.
Daniel Maddox, Owner, Evolve Document Solutions: Yes, definitely. AI is going to keep pushing forward in the print industry. We’re really curious to see how it unfolds. We expect to see big improvements in things like predictive maintenance, where AI can spot equipment problems before they happen. This will help cut down on downtime and make things run smoother. Plus, AI-based analytics will give us better insights into printing processes, allowing for smarter decisions and more efficient operations.
John Green, Managing Director, Commerce Business Systems: AI is definitely playing a growing role in the print industry, particularly in preventative maintenance, the automated replenishment of supplies, and AI-driven print security. We can see that the adopting of AI is still in its early stages, we think more businesses will explore AI for analysing print volumes and environments, the reduction of waste, and to enhance data security.
Daniel Gilbert, Managing Director, Key Digital: Yes – but it’s hard to say where will see the biggest impact yet.
We’re coming across more and more AI-based applications and software solutions to integrate with, across multiple industries and varying departments.
I think process triggers, workflow automation, and service response are where customers will feel the most benefit. It’s down to us to find the most effective solutions that will make real-world impact, then pass those efficiencies on to our customers.
PrintIT Reseller: How are you leveraging or planning to leverage AI to differentiate and improve productivity in your own business – whether that’s automating key processes or improving sales, marketing, and service delivery functions, and how is that enabling you to drive efficiencies and give you a competitive edge.
Olaf Lorenz: AI is already being used in many of Konica Minolta’s document management and process optimisation solutions to support workers in their daily work. For example, M-Files helps employees summarise documents or ask questions about documents with its Generative AI assistant Aino. Additionally, as part of Microsoft 365, Copilot can be used to quickly create drafts on any topic in Word, transform long email conversations into short summaries in Outlook, or produce fine-tuned presentations quickly in PowerPoint.
With Copilot in Microsoft Power Platform, applications, workflows, and websites can also be created even more quickly and easily with Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Pages. With Copilot Studio as part of the Power Platform, chatbots can be developed for customer service, for example. In addition, Workplace Pure allows workers to have documents translated with AI support. Konica Minolta also uses AI and machine learning to automate data extraction from documents such as invoices, contracts and orders, and to analyse and evaluate contract data.
Arjan Paulussen: At Lexmark, AI is already a key differentiator and a driver of increased productivity across our operations. We have implemented AI-powered solutions that deliver tangible business benefits. For example, generative AI automates RFP responses, saving us valuable time and projecting a $5 million annual benefit by allowing us to address more opportunities. Our sales team leverages AI for targeted prospecting, tailoring emails based on individual prospect profiles and increasing response rates by 2-3x. Customer service has also seen significant improvements, with AI assisting our 800 agents to reduce call handling times by 50%, resulting in substantial cost savings.
Beyond these areas, AI powers our predictive maintenance capabilities, analysing sensor data from over a million network printers sitting on customer to anticipate and prevent potential failures. This proactive approach has significantly improved printer uptime.
AI is optimising our manufacturing processes via smart cameras doing automated visual inspection of the newly minted printers running off our assembly line. This effort has yielded a 40% improvement in inspection speed, a 99% reduction in errors and a return on our AI investment within three months.
Ryan Green: At Carbon, we have been early adopters of AI tools to enhance our service call management, stock control, and resource planning. This strategic move has been instrumental in our ability to scale our business across new UK geographies and markets.
Additionally, we are leveraging Intelligent Document Processing to automate sections of our accounts payable processes and workflows, significantly improving efficiency and accuracy. With AI integration providing the link between our Vantage Online and XERO accounting systems, we have streamlined our financial operations, ensuring seamless data flow and enhanced accuracy.
Recently, we also very successfully implemented a digital AI platform to streamline the integration and sharing of our sales and marketing materials with clients digitally. This platform is already proving invaluable to our sales teams, enabling them to easily find, personalise, present, and share sales content, thereby helping to close more deals. Furthermore, it provides analytical insights into which content resonates best with buyers, driving revenue growth.
By integrating these advanced AI solutions early, I firmly believe we are not only enhancing our operational efficiency and that Carbon have also gained a competitive edge over traditional dealers with outdated practices in our market.
Shaun Wilkinson: At UTAX, we use AI to improve service delivery, particularly through predictive maintenance. By analysing device performance data, we are able to anticipate potential issues and proactively schedule maintenance thanks to U.FS (UTAX Fleet Services). U.FS is a powerful, web-based service designed to perform remote maintenance across our managed fleet. This minimises downtime, extends device lifespans, and reduces costly on-site visits.
AI also supports automated toner replenishment, learning user patterns to ensure timely supply deliveries. For our sales and marketing teams, we see potential in using AI-driven analytics to identify customer needs, personalise communications, and optimise campaigns.
Overall, the use of AI in our processes allows our teams to focus on more important tasks by automating repetitive processes. This allows us to deliver superior service and maintain a competitive edge in an evolving market.
Kerry Rush: AI is undeniably transforming businesses across a range of industries, and we recognise the importance of harnessing its potential to stay competitive and deliver value. At Sharp UK, we’re actively developing, testing and implementing AI across multiple areas to optimise our operations, enhance security, and improve efficiency.
On the IT Services side, we’re helping our clients unlock the full potential of AI tools like Microsoft Copilot. By leading conversations through initiatives such as our webinar, ‘Microsoft Copilot – Your Everyday AI Companion’, we’re helping guide businesses in safely integrating AI into their daily operations for greater productivity and efficiency.
AI tools are no longer a future consideration, particularly given their rapid evolution. AI is a present day necessity, and we are committed to both using and championing the technology to drive efficiencies.
Daniel Maddox: We’re looking into AI solutions to help automate everyday tasks like responding to and prioritising emails, which will give our team at Evolve more time to focus on building strong relationships with our clients. By using AI in our service processes, we hope to respond faster and tailor our interactions with customers, making them happier. Who wouldn’t be?
We’re already using AI marketing tools to work together, conduct research, and create engaging content. Data is everywhere, and with a clever approach, AI can be a great partner in helping us make the most of it!
John Green: We are starting to explore AI to see how it could possibly improve the efficiency of our business as a whole, and whether it can enhance any aspects of our customer service.
One area of potential is in AI‑driven virtual assistants to support customer queries but, we have a great team of people who do that, so we are just interested to see what might come to light in the future. Maybe AI analytics could help our team continue to expand their understanding of our customers’ needs and help to provide even more tailored services. Daniel Gilbert: The speed of data analysis within our sales and marketing teams is vastly improved by using AI functionalities within our CRM system.
We’re able to be more dynamic and explore the effectiveness of sales activity to understand where we are best to focus our efforts. By inputting the activity data and success rates, we can drive our sales teams to target those that are most likely to convert to a sale. We can respond faster to trends without just going off “feel”. We can even identify early in a sales cycle any potential objections we may come up against later and how best to mitigate them early on.
Sales success is always going to be a numbers game, but if we can make that process more efficient, then the rate of success will be higher. It’s not just about doing more; it’s doing more of the right thing.
PrintIT Reseller: How are you harnessing AI to transform the delivery of MPS – think AI-powered analytics, predictive maintenance, automated supply replenishment, integration with business processes and workflow automation?
Arjan Paulussen: AI is at the heart of our transformed MPS offerings. Our global IoT platform, coupled with AI-powered analytics, provides unparalleled insights into printer usage, performance, and potential issues. This data-driven approach allows us to optimise print infrastructure and proactively address customer needs.
Predictive maintenance, a cornerstone of our AI-driven MPS, analyses sensor data from over a million printers to anticipate and prevent device failures, minimising downtime. This is a major factor why we have a 97%+ customer retention rate. AI also streamlines supply replenishment, predicting toner levels and automatically triggering cartridge shipments, eliminating manual intervention, and ensuring uninterrupted printing.
Beyond these core functionalities, AI is being integrated with business processes to automate document workflows, further enhancing efficiency, and optimising print environments.
Ryan Green: We already leverage AI to enhance our Sustainable Managed Print Services in several areas. Predictive Maintenance – AI continuously monitors our print fleet, identifying patterns that precede equipment issues. This has allowed us to schedule maintenance proactively, preventing unexpected breakdowns and minimising downtime for our clients. This ensures that any hardware provided by Carbon operates at peak performance, extending reliability.
Automated Supply Replenishment – AI-driven systems predict when supplies are running low and trigger automatic replenishment orders. This reduces the risk of downtime and eliminates any need for manual inventory management.
Business Process Integration – As mentioned, we have integrated AI with our business processes to streamline operations and improve efficiency. This includes linking our Vantage Online and XERO accounting systems through AI integration, ensuring seamless data flow and enhanced accuracy in financial operations.
Sales and Marketing Integration – AI helps manage the integration and sharing of sales and marketing materials, enabling our sales teams to easily find, personalise, present, and share content with clients. The content analytics provided have revolutionised our sales process by providing valuable insights into how our sales and marketing materials are being used. By analysing engagement metrics, we now understand which content resonates best with our buyers, allowing us to refine our strategies and create more effective and relevant materials.
Sustainability – AI contributes significantly to improving sustainability in our operations by optimising resource usage and reducing waste. Predictive maintenance and automated supply replenishment reduce the need for emergency service trips and excess inventory, leading to fewer wasted resources and lower carbon emissions.
This commitment to innovation and sustainability not only helps protect the environment but also aligns closely with our clients’ growing demand for eco‑friendly solutions, meeting needs and expectations.
Shaun Wilkinson: We are using AI to reshape our managed print services by automating time-consuming tasks and improving accuracy. Predictive maintenance reduces downtime by proactively addressing potential device issues. AI-powered analytics enable more accurate supply replenishment, ensuring just-in-time delivery while minimising waste and costs. This is all possible through U.FS – our device management platform.
Integration with business processes is another key area of transformation. AI can analyse document content and automatically route it to the appropriate destination, streamlining workflows and reducing manual intervention. It can also extract data from documents, classify them, and trigger automated actions, such as data entry or approval workflows.
We can also use AI to generate valuable dashboards, enabling us to monitor our customers’ print usage, optimise resources, and uncover cost‑saving opportunities within U.FS.
By adopting these AI-driven advancements, we can identify new opportunities, expand our service offerings, and help drive business growth.
Kerry Rush: Within our managed print and service operations, AI plays a critical role in ensuring timely and effective toner replenishment based on real-time usage and coverage data. This not only enhances our operational efficiency but also ensures seamless service for our clients. Additionally, we’ve implemented an internal ‘Acceptable AI Use Policy’, which governs the appropriate and secure use of AI technologies within our organisation.
Daniel Maddox: We’re using AI to change how we handle our managed print services. With AI-powered analytics, we get real-time information about how printers are being used and how they’re performing. This helps us do maintenance before any issues arise, which cuts on downtime.
We also replenish our stock automatically, so toner and other supplies are bought in time, making everything run more smoothly. Plus, by combining AI with our business processes and automating our workflows, we make document management easier. This results in a better and more productive experience for our clients.
John Green: As I said earlier, we are still on the outside of AI, looking in, and while the MPS market is trying to develop in terms of AI use, we are interested to see how it will help preventative maintenance and consumables and spare parts replenishment. Maybe AI can help analyse print usage patterns, which can help us in reducing product downtime and making sure customers always have the supplies they need. Our IT team is interested in seeing how AI based document workflow software can help businesses automate paper biased processes and how it can help integrate print with the transformation to digital systems.
Daniel Gilbert: We’ve always had an automated supply replenishment service, but we can now integrate AI into this service to provide replenishment based on expected levels remaining after larger print runs – beneficial to our commercial print customers. When a print run is selected, we can anticipate the remaining levels and work out whether supplies need to be sent out now or if they have enough supplies in stock to cover the job.
In the office setting there are smaller-scale applications but still just as handy. Using AI to identify document types and then suggest sending locations or to initiate a workflow – it might save a couple of minutes here and there, but our customers love it!
All of these time saving applications are 100% what businesses and their employees are looking for right now. With resources being stretched thinner and thinner, the time savings can add up to be significant.
Andy Muskett, Director of Channel Partners, Xerox: The quality and quantity of MPS data has improved massively over recent years. Applying AI and machine learning to this data has improved the quality of our MPS services. Predictive supply replenishment can now be calculated in days remaining, rather than the traditional approach of triggering when supply reaches X% remaining, allowing deliveries to larger sites to be consolidated into fewer deliveries. Engineers are informed when components are near end-of-life, and these can now be proactively replaced before failure occurs. The benefits include reduced consumable storage, increased uptime and reduced environmental impact.
Xerox’s DocushareGo makes it easy for partners to deliver affordable document management and workflow solutions to their clients. Workflows that would have previously taken weeks of coding, design and testing can now be quickly generated using the integrated AI toolsets. If there is a good understanding of the process being optimised, this can often be done by some without coding skills, reducing the cost of delivery and implementation. It also allows the solution to be trialled in a specific department and then quickly expanded to provide new workflows in other departments within the organisation.
www.konicaminolta.co.uk
www.lexmark.co.uk
www.carbon-group.co.uk
www.utax.co.uk
www.sharp.co.uk
www.evolvedocumentsolutions.co.uk
www.commercebusinesssystems.co.uk
https://key-digital.co.uk
www.xerox.co.uk