Premium Commentary & Analysis
In commercial print shops, email is both a lifeline and a bottleneck, overwhelming customer service teams with unstructured job requests and urgent messages. While automation has transformed the production floor, AI is now poised to revolutionize how print businesses manage email communication. Here are some guidelines for how AI-powered tools can triage messages, extract job specs, suggest replies, and eliminate delays, freeing up staff for high-value work. If you’re ready to reduce quoting errors, speed up response times, and boost customer satisfaction, this is your guide to getting started.
Tuesday, November 11, 2025
Continue reading your article
with a WhatTheyThink membership.
Less than $4/week.
Get unlimited access to in-depth commentary and analysis covering the latest trends, emerging technologies, operational strategies, and key events across every segment of today's printing industry.
Stay informed. Stay competitive. Stay ahead.Pat is a well-known evangelist for inkjet productivity. At McGrew Group, she uses her decades technical and marketing experience to lead the industry toward optimized business processes and production workflows. She has helped companies to define their five-year plans, audited workflow processes, and developed sales team interventions and education programs. Pat is the Co-Author of 8 industry books, editor of A Guide to the Electronic Document Body of Knowledge, and a regular contributor to Inkjet Insight and WhatTheyThink.com. Ryan McAbee is Chief Analyst at Pixel Dot Consulting LLC.
10 Things PSPs Should Consider Before Adopting Robotics: What You Need to Know to Begin the Journey
Why Highly Targeted Communications Make Digital Print Essential to Modern Marketing
Wide Format in 2026: How Technology Is Reshaping Competitive Advantage
The production inkjet market continues to mature at an impressive speed. Vendors are delivering genuinely capable platforms, and the hardware argument has never been stronger. And yet print providers continue to miss due dates, chase customer inquiries, untangle billing disputes, and absorb remake costs that have nothing to do with the press on the floor. Pat McGrew and Ryan McAbee explain how money is leaking from the workflow that surrounds the equipment. Read More
The productivity promises of robotics and AI sound almost too good to be true, and yet somewhere between the trade show demos and your actual production lines, there’s a gap that nobody seems to want to address, but understanding it is the single most important thing you can do right now to position your operation for success over the next decade. Pat McGrew and Ryan McAbee talk about the J-Curve. Read More
The smartest operations have stopped thinking about labels as print jobs. Today, they treat them as enterprise data problems. Pat McGrew and Ryan McAbee explain. Read More
There’s a phrase that has echoed through prepress departments for decades: garbage in, garbage out. The same principle now applies to AI adoption across your entire operation, and most print service providers are missing it. Read More
Too often, conversations about Gen Z center on what they lack: experience, patience, or deep technical understanding of legacy systems. That framing misses the opportunity. Gen Z represents the industry’s best chance to rebuild institutional knowledge, modernize workflows, and redefine print as a technology-driven manufacturing career. Doing so requires a shift in how companies recruit, onboard, develop, and retain talent. Read More
