Welcome to Significans Ai3: The future of profitable printing
At Significans Automation, AI (1) + Artificial Intelligence (2) + Amazing Integrations (3)
= Additional Income!
Our workflow solutions are not out-of-the-box, one-size-fits-all. They are totally client-driven, therefore are highly customized to address the specific production setup and unique needs of each customer. AI is an amazing tool, but when added to our team’s 400+ years of combined vendor-neutral, shop-floor experience in customized workflow automation, the combination has been a powerful game-changer. How powerful?
Game-changing results
Imagine a 30% – 300% increase in capacity, hours of labor reduced to minutes, prepress throughput increased from 10 to 50 jobs a day, labor costs cut by 50%,
73 siloed time-consuming workflows reduced to just 3, and so on. In fact, one Pennsylvania-based online signage printer reduced about 4 months of job processing to just 6 hours! That’s about 3,000 hours of tedious job processing reduced to just 6 hours. Only customized workflow software in combination with an AI strategy at minimum, can yield unprecedented results like this.
How we leverage AI technology
Significans used AI to enhance and streamline workflow processes for our print and packaging print clients. Our approach, generally speaking, involves aggregating automated workflow technologies into workflows to enhance efficiency, reduce errors, significantly improve overall productivity, and at the end of the day, boost profits. Here are some distinct advantages of these 3 forms of AI:
Narrow AI can perform defined tasks. We utilize Narrow AI to automate acutely defined sets of tasks within a workflow. For example, AI can handle repetitive tasks such as prepress checks, layout optimization and smart ganging. Significans has been programming this form of AI for its clients since its inception in 2018.
General AI can simulate thought processes. While this form of AI is sometimes morphed into other defined forms like Agentic, that can seemingly simulate programed 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, programmed AI automatically cleans up and fixes files well before they proceed to production, ensuring they meet quality standards without manual intervention.
Superintelligent AI can exceed human capabilities; this form of AI is still futuristic but is intended to perform tasks at speeds well beyond human capabilities, particularly in workflow computing. This allows for faster processing of massive volumes of data, enabling faster turnaround times and improved print production efficiency.
We have been deploying two specific AI technologies into our workflows for some time now. Patterning (or Aggregate AI with Advanced Logic) leverages advanced logic and pattern-recognition capabilities. This approach allows us to, for instance, analyze large datasets, convert from legacy data, identify meaningful patterns, and make informed decisions based on data insights. We incorporate Generative AI only for validation purposes thus far.
Automation + AI: Opportunities limited only by your imagination
From experiences with our successful printer clients across North America, the new reality in 2026 and beyond is now crystal clear. That is, customized automation in an AI era isn’t just the best path forward; it’s the ONLY path forward! AI is showing strong potential to transform just about every segment of the print and packaging industry. These initiatives will become more and more commonplace. Essential areas of print shops already impacted by AI include, but are not limited to:
Overall Workflow. AI is improving workflow automation by further speeding up production processes and reducing manual touchpoints. This facilitates leaner production and faster order processing, assists with shipping and other logistics, tracks inventory, automatically places re-orders, and generally eliminates much of the mundane, repetitive work that erodes a printer’s profits.
Prepress. A customized prepress workflow in combination with AI dramatically reduces costs and substrate waste, facilitates faster turnaround times, improves print quality, boosts accuracy by minimizing human errors, increases throughput, and can maintain brand consistency across all printed materials.
Quality Control. AI can read press proofs, accept web-to-print orders, spot issues with client artwork before printing, and so on. Advanced analytics also allows for the ability to monitor any network for anomalies which can reveal security breaches or evident mistakes / failures– before they become major problems or devastating cyberattacks.
Creative & Design. The Graphics Industry as a whole is starting to use AI to brainstorm branding and marketing ideas, test the effectiveness of different headlines and promotional campaigns, suggesting the best visuals in such things as presentations to assemble more compelling creative proposals. AI can also perform creative tasks much more cost-efficiently and reliably than humans. It can create images and videos, write feature articles, emails, blogs, essays, social-media posts, and more. This greatly reduces creative costs.
Personal Assistance. Print shops can fine-tune and deploy AI software as an ‘assistant’ to help them in their day-to-day tasks. Printers are using AI as a ‘thought partner,’ asking it for help instead of asking Google. AI can even attend meetings and take notes in someone’s absence!
Sales. AI can pinpoint and validate important information about your sales prospects – including their needs, preferences and more. This is an enormous help in day-to-day marketing and sales decisions. AI can take direct-mail response rates to unprecedented new levels. Users can add PURLs to each mailer and generate analytical reports by tracking responses. AI can micro-target advertisements. It can reveal Internet browsing habits, social media posts, and other information from a prospect’s ‘digital data trail.’ Printers can then create highly targeted ads for specific audiences and prospects.
- AI can write code, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Python, etc., making your on-site developer(s) much more efficient.
Personalization and Variable Data. AI is showing strong capabilities to take personalization to new heights – even to the point of suggesting which day of the week a direct-mail piece should arrive at a prospect’s home to elicit the best response, as well as which formats are likely to drive the most sales. Such is accomplished through programmed AI algorithms to ultimately enable seamless integration of personalized data such as names, addresses, images and other graphic elements, into printed products.
Robotics. AI improves shop-floor efficiency, as already proven by its role in modern robotics – especially in the publishing, packaging print, and wide-format sectors.
Waste. AI-assisted ‘smart’ print layouts and nesting capabilities can reduce substrate waste by automatically maximizing the capacity of each printed sheet, calculating the best use of sheet space for even the most complex and irregular patterns.
Press Monitoring. AI can make real-time on-press adjustments based on sensor feedback. This includes detecting and correcting common issues like paper alignment and image quality. AI-powered cameras and sensors are already performing quality control tasks and machine maintenance. Imperfections, color issues, and printing errors are detected and corrected in real time. This not only reduces waste but also ensures that every printed product meets the highest quality standards.
Data optimization. As mentioned, AI can better deal with massive, overwhelming amounts of data, streamlining processes that would have previously taken months or weeks, and reducing them to just hours or even minutes.
Analytics. By analyzing historical sales data, market trends, and other relevant factors, AI-powered analytics tools provide insights into what types of print materials are likely to be in demand in the future.
The future of AI in the Print & Packaging space
As AI technology continues to advance, we expect even more innovative applications that will further transform the printing industry. Printing companies that integrate AI into their processes will remain competitive in the long run. AI is destined to improve just about every conceivable production process in any type of printing business, regardless of size, sector or complexity. In fact, the larger and more complex a printing operation, the greater the need for Artificial Intelligence will become.
Printers should plan to understand how they will embrace AI soon and get clarity on where it is still evolving. This will allow them to:
- Discover its enormous benefits and possible limitations
- Inspire, upgrade and retain current employees
- Get the most from their existing equipment
- Stay ahead of the technology curve
- Gain an immediate competitive advantage
- Ultimately future-proof their printing business
Welcome to AI3: The future of profitable printing
At Significans, AI = Artificial Intelligence = Amazing Integrations = Additional Income!
For more information on how Significans can transform your business through customized workflow integration and/or customized AI solutions, please visit www.significans.com or call 1-877-463-4465. You’ll be directed not to a salesperson or a third party, but to one of our regional workflow automation and integration experts who has years of production-floor experience.
