By Cassandra Balentine
In general, artificial intelligence (AI) technology enhances efficiency, reduces errors, and eliminates production bottlenecks in a wide format print environment, especially at the prepress stage, while improving overall productivity.
This is typically based on the type of AI a client chooses—narrow, general, or superintelligent.
Marc Raad, president, Significans Automation, explains that narrow AI can perform defined tasks. “We utilize AI to automate narrowly defined sets of tasks within a workflow. For example, AI can handle repetitive tasks such as prepress checks, layout optimization, and smart ganging.”
General AI can simulate thought processes. “We simulate thought processes within the workflow by reverse-engineering production processes. This involves using a series of conditional statements to automate decision-making tasks. For instance, during the preflight stage, AI can automatically clean up and auto-fix files well before they proceed to production, ensuring that they meet quality standards without manual intervention.”
Superintelligent AI can exceed human capabilities. “Our custom solutions will eventually leverage superintelligent AI to perform tasks at speeds beyond human capabilities, particularly in workflow computing. At some point, we believe that supercomputing will be able to sustain superintelligent AI and allow faster processing of massive volumes of data, enabling quicker turnaround times and improved print production efficiency.”
Overall, it’s not an exaggeration to say that AI can literally transform a printing business, says Raad.
He offers one example of a customer, Work House Signs, a PA-based online signage printer with over 500,000 designs for sale on five different platforms.
With a staff of only eight, it creates thousands of signs every week. But there were too many time-consuming touch points and repetitive tasks, which prevented any growth.
“We deployed a combination of Enfocus Switch, PitStop, and Phoenix software to integrate with the company’s order delivery software. The Enfocus Switch application, created by Significans, included Fuzzy Matcher. This AI technology identifies similar but not identical elements in large sets of data. In this case, it drastically reduced the time required to search the over 500,000 sign options available online. The results were game changing. With the new technology, staffers created 38,000 signs in just one evening, that would have previously taken about four months. In other words, 3,024 hours—18 weeks—of job processing was reduced to just six hours. Today, employees spend more time growing the business instead of processing orders. In fact, management predicts that business will eventually increase tenfold without adding staff or new equipment,” says Raad.
Sep2025, Digital Output
