4 Ways Printers Can Work Smarter With AI

By Kalie VanDewater

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been making waves across the printing industry. In fact, it’s one of the most impactful new technologies that the printing industry has seen in the past several years.

“I’ve seen computer-to-plate and digital proofing and digital presses and all that stuff,” Joe Marin, senior vice president of member services at PRINTING United Alliance, said during a session at the PRINTING AI Pavilion at PRINTING United Expo 2025 in Orlando, Florida. “That was all game-changing in our industry in specific areas, but this is game-changing across the board.”

Marin’s session, “AI in Print: Practical Ways to Work Smarter, Not Harder,” offered printing and packaging professionals a rundown of why AI is so crucial, practical use cases, and tips for getting started.

Why AI Matters

AI consistently proves to be a time-saver, especially when it comes to the less exciting items on your to-do list.

“There’s a constant churn of stuff that drags me down into the weeds,” Marin said. “It’s not that it’s not important. It’s just mind-numbing. What I use AI to do is to help me plow through some of that stuff.”

That time and energy saved, Marin explained, can now be used for higher-value tasks and projects that have a bigger impact.

Marin encouraged attendees to start using AI now for three reasons:

AI is often cheap or free. Tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Grammarly, and many others are publicly accessible for free.
Your competitors may already be using AI, and because of the time it can save users, printing and packaging professionals who leverage it will have more time to focus on growth and strategy.
Every role can benefit from AI. Marin described it as “having a digital assistant that’s never asleep — ever.”

Practical Uses for AI

So, how can you use AI in your day-to-day routine? Marin highlighted how AI can support four key areas of your company.

1. Sales

In sales, you can prompt AI to carry out prospect research. You can ask it to provide a summary of a prospect and their business, along with the capabilities you offer that they could use.

Other AI opportunities for sales include preparing for discovery calls with prospects and identifying where you can add new value to a job.

“You can … take a PDF of the printed piece of that customer, drop it into ChatGPT, it’ll look at what’s on there, and it’ll give you feedback about the piece, and it'll give you ideas for conversations that you can have with that customer,” Marin said. “Like, ‘Hey, you might consider doing this [piece] with embellishments or that [job] with variable data, etc.’”

2. Customer Service

AI is an excellent tool for handling repetitive tasks, which makes it a great fit for customer service representatives (CSRs). One prompt Marin suggested using it for is to create generic, reusable answers to frequently asked questions while keeping things polite and educational. An AI tool can help answer:

Why do I have to approve a proof if it’s just a reprint?
Why has the price gone up?
When will my order ship?
And more.

Another way CSRs can use AI is to help explain different printing options to customers, who likely don’t have deep knowledge about printing and finishing techniques and therefore need guidance on what to choose.

3. Prepress

AI can also help with troubleshooting — which Marin noted there is a lot of in the prepress world.

“If you work in prepress, … you have to assume that everything you get is wrong until you make sure it's right,” he said.

For example, if you’re having an issue with file rendering (e.g., a PDF looks right in Adobe Acrobat but not your RIP), AI can help you identify the root cause and the solution.

AI can also help prepress technicians identify the causes of missing glyphs or characters.

4. Leadership

One of Marin’s reasons to use AI is that it can help in every role — meaning that even the people highest up on the org chart can find value.

Marin emphasized that leaders can use AI to support big-picture thinking, such as identifying market trends that will help their company stay competitive and drafting a strategy to introduce AI across the rest of the organization.

How to Get Started

Ready to get started with AI? Marin outlined a few simple, practical steps to dive in.

Practice Writing Prompts

Make sure to be clear and specific about what you want, add context (i.e., who it’s for and what it’s about), and indicate what format you want the answer in (e.g., bullet points, table, email). Importantly, don’t be afraid to revise or clarify; this is how you will refine the AI’s output to be exactly what you’re looking for.

Be Smart So You Can Stay Safe

Because AI typically trains on the data it is given, it’s critical to your company’s and your clients’ security that you don’t upload any sensitive data, such as personal information, financial data, or customer information.

Additionally, you want to be cautious about the content AI provides you. AI is known to sometimes provide inaccurate information — aka hallucinate — which won’t help with whatever task you’re working on. Marin suggested attributing credit to AI when it helps create content or ideas; treating results as drafts rather than final answers; and validating important content with internal experts.

Require Human Oversight

That leads into Marin’s next tip for applying AI to your business: keeping the human in the loop. While AI is a powerful tool for working through monotonous tasks, troubleshooting, and brainstorming new ideas, it should not be used without human oversight.

Marin pointed out that AI is great for general knowledge, first drafts, structure, and idea generation. Where it falls short is in specific information and legacy knowledge, in finding the right tone, in accuracy, and in creative judgment — all things people excel at.

The bottom line is, you should start implementing AI now, so you don’t fall behind your competitors who already use this time-saving tool. But Marin stressed that taking small steps is the best strategy.

“I think some people get caught up in, ‘OK, there's this AI thing, and now I've got to figure out, how do I implement this throughout my entire workflow?’” he said. Instead, you should have each person on your team test — and share — what works and what doesn’t, then build from there.