Agenda

Document printing is a more complex and challenging business than ever before. Electronic competition and rising costs are making document printing a luxury product. This means print will become micro-run, delivered exactly when needed. Print must become frictionless to order, highly relevant, and exclusive. Therein lies the opportunity for the next generation of document printing: smaller-scale print provider operations, heavily favored over digital production printing, with insanely efficient software that makes ordering and producing print a frictionless operation. It’s a reinvention of the print business, for fewer but more profitable print providers.

This panel will discuss the investments inkjet production printer manufacturers are making to help print providers become more efficient, productive, and profitable.

Finishing is emerging as the next critical frontier in production inkjet performance. As print providers pursue faster turnaround times, higher-value applications, and more agile production environments, automation in finishing is becoming essential. Based on new Alliance Insight’s research, this session explores how printers are automating to improve productivity, reduce touchpoints, and increase operational flexibility. Attendees will gain insight into investment trends, application growth areas, and the finishing capabilities that deliver the greatest value for both providers and print buyers. The session will also highlight best practices for leveraging finishing automation to support inkjet adoption, workflow modernization, and long-term competitiveness.

Commercial inkjet operations are facing a workforce crisis that no hiring strategy fully addresses. Experienced operators are retiring. Junior staff are being asked to make decisions that took years to develop. And the institutional knowledge that makes an inkjet operation run well… the substrate intuitions, the color management judgment, the production instincts-built shift by shift is walking out the door with every retirement announcement.

Nobody is coming to save you. Not the labor market. Not the schools. Not the equipment vendors.

Amy Bonner, Vice President PRINTING AI at Printing United Alliance, makes the case that the only durable answer to the inkjet labor crisis is Knowledge Sovereignty – owning, preserving, and deploying your operation’s institutional intelligence as AI Employees that work alongside your human team. Not vendor tools. Not training videos. AI built on what your best people actually know, running in your operation, permanently.

The question isn’t whether you can afford to do this. It’s whether you can afford to keep losing knowledge you spent decades building.

How do you attract great employees and great candidates? Create a work environment that people enjoy and offer competitive pay. But there’s more – establish trust between management and the employees. Adriane will offer strategies for all of these with clear takeaways to help build recruiting pipelines, a great workplace, and a high-trust culture.

For production print operations, the fastest return on investment won’t come from experimental automation on the pressroom floor, but from improving how work enters your business and how it exits. Let’s put AI aside for a moment and focus on proven best practices for applying workflow and AI tools in the front of house (sales, intake, estimating, and customer service) and the back of house (fulfillment, shipping, accounting, and reconciliation), where human effort, exceptions, and rework quietly erode margins. Drawing on real-world print industry use cases and current production inkjet market trends, the session highlights practical workflow quick wins, including structured job intake, specification clarity, exception handling, and invoice communication, that reduce friction without disrupting systems of record. Attendees will leave with a realistic framework and a clear understanding of where small, disciplined changes can produce measurable operational and financial gains within weeks, not years.

Many print service providers in the commercial, direct mail, and book printing segments, as well as many in-plant shops have added a second, third, or even fourth high-speed production inkjet press. Hear firsthand experiences from our panel of veteran production inkjet press users as they discuss key considerations, next steps after inkjet adoption, and why they have continued to invest in the technology.

One of the keys to prosperity for the next generation of print providers is automated, highly efficient finishing. With us are a panel of leading finishing equipment vendors who will share their perspectives on what it takes to become a “have” in the rapidly changing print provider market.

As demand for general commercial print declines, where does one look to find growth? Market share capture is one strategy, but that tends to come at a margin cost. Finding net new revenue opportunities is typically incremental, and often comes about in unexpected ways. This session will discuss the opportunity for commercial printers and in-plants to expand into wide format graphics, labels/packaging, promotional goods, and even applications like menus and fulfillment.