Keypoint Intelligence has been actively researching AI’s impact on the print sector, in this exclusive interview with PrintIT Reseller, Deborah Hawkins, Group Director Workplace Team explains how artificial intelligence is already impacting every link in the print value chain. Deborah also explores the impact of tariffs on the sector and what vendors can do to mitigate the effects, both in the short- and long-term
Michelle Ryder (MR): Deborah, you head up the workplace team at Keypoint Intelligence. What are your key areas of focus?
Deborah Hawkins (DH): I’ve been an analyst for more than 20 years now, and before that, I was on the vendor side. But there are many other things that Keypoint does that I also get involved with, for example, bliQ, the hardware database is something that almost everybody in our industry, whether from the vendor side or from the reseller side, is using daily. That’s part of my remit as well.
We are also the industry’s largest testing house we test hardware and we test software. So, there’s quite a bit of variety, not just that analyst role. Buyer’s Lab (BLI) joined forces with Keypoint about seven or eight years ago. There are still some people that want to remain in the Buyer’s Lab house or in the InfoTrends house, but we are very squarely Keypoint Intelligence and a really strong team.
MR: To what extent do you see tariffs impacting the print industry, particularly in terms of supply chain, rising costs, and pricing decisions? What can vendors do to mitigate the effects?
DH: There’s a lot of uncertainty out there in the marketplace today. Nobody knows exactly where it’s going to go. But obviously, we’re seeing that investments are not being made, they’re being held back. That causes a lot of uncertainty for our industry. It’s a very difficult thing to navigate because we don’t know exactly where it’s going to go, so our short-term recommendation is to sit and wait and see what happens. Don’t rush into things.
MR: And what can vendors do to mitigate the effects in the longer-term?
DH: There are certainly things that they can do. After the pandemic and the whole supply chain issues, there was lots of discussion around shifting manufacturing to different regions
of the world, bringing it into local regions. And that’s still a thing as we move more down the sustainability ladder, many vendors are considering localising production.
That’s one of the big things that you could do long-term as a vendor to protect yourself from any tariffs. Obviously, our industry is very dependent on manufacturing out of Asia and out of China in particular. Vendors have already spread their manufacturing plants into other areas of Asia, but it’s almost entirely coming from Asia right now, and that’s of course, the region that would be hardest hit by tariffs. So, really looking at what can I do locally in future, rather than relying entirely on Asia.
MR: Declining print volumes and the accelerating shift toward digital transformation have forced print vendors to radically change their go-to-market approach, and many are now integrating AI into their operations. Keypoint Intelligence has been actively researching AI’s impact on the print sector, perhaps you could run through some of the key findings?
DH: Part of our role as analysts is to bring some clarity around, is it truly AI? We see some ‘AI-washing’, very similar to ‘greenwashing’, and we do look very diligently at things that are called
AI, and try to sort through the weeds and see, is it really AI, or is it just an algorithm, or is it just a large learning model, for example.
Right now, in our industry, we see good examples of AI being used in software processes, particularly around capture and workflow. They really are enhancing the whole extraction process, which makes scanning and data capture much faster and also much more efficient, because it can be indexed at much higher speed. But true AI on an MFP has not been seen yet, and that is probably because it’s still quite expensive and it’s also very much in the infancy stage.
We expect with new product series, so in three to four years, we might see the first AI processes actually on the MFP. Now there’s always a question, is that of any use? Do we really need that on an MFP? We said a similar thing 10 years ago with the full iPad sized display on an MFP. But we all want things to become smarter and to become more efficient, so we are definitely going to see AI on box in the future.
The other way that our industry has really been using AI is in learn management systems. Part of the backbone of our industry is technical service, and to really bring technical service, which is often in the heads of our engineers, or it’s in technical service manuals, to collate that everywhere to a central place into a learn management system so that anybody on the ground doing technical service can get to information at much faster speed.
MR: Keypoint Intelligence offers a range of services to support the print channel, what are these and how can print channel vendors access them?
DH: Building on our hardware database bliQ, we also have a whole production database. We purchased a company called ProPrintPerformance a while back, and if any resellers are looking to get into production print, that is the place to go to in order to compare hardware.
Also behind bliQ is Software Comparison. If resellers are really looking to understand what are the different types of print management solutions that are out there or capture solutions, that’s a really good, strong product.
Then, linked to AI is our AI assessment services, which we offer for resellers to really go into their organisation and understand where they could optimise themselves in order to be more efficient, also to talk to their customers about where would customers be able to use AI, so that a reseller can really be in a position to advise their customers on AI and the implementation of AI in the future.
MR: We’ve talked about AI, but there are, of course, other emerging technologies that are going to redefine and set the new standard in our industry in the coming months and years. What do you see as having the biggest impact?
DH: Predictive maintenance is something that our industry has talked about for so many years. If you really look at those service functions and the delivery of service functions, very few are proactive or predictive. Currently, they are proactive and that they’re set to a schedule and based on historical data, but they’re not actually based on what is happening today.
It’s a big leap in actually making all of your service information available instantly, and then being actually able to twist the service function so that it could be improved for that particular customer, that exact customer, not the same as his neighbour and not the same as a large corporation next door, but really, really make it predictive for that particular customer. And I think that’s going to be coming very soon.
A lot of vendors have been working on perfecting that, and you do really need a lot of processing power to achieve that, and with advances in processing functionality, we’re going to be seeing that very soon.
MR: And for Keypoint, what’s next on the agenda?
DH: Well, hopefully lots of activity through the summer months. That’s always a time for us to catch up on some of our forecast work, we’re forecasting out some of the global print volume trends.
We also have great activity at the moment around some of the production printing areas like direct to garment, direct to textile, labels and packaging. These are relatively new areas for Keypoint that our analysts are really ramping up their knowledge. Lots of resellers identify production as a new revenue opportunity. We’ve seen vendors moving away from their direct sales channels and wanting to push production into indirect as well. So that is definitely something that resellers should be looking out for.
