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A recent piece in CIO magazine made an observation that should resonate with anyone running a print operation today. The author argued that enterprise IT strategy has shifted from managing one technology change at a time to managing six overlapping waves simultaneously: AI agents, digital simulation, and memory-first data architectures, all arriving at once and all demanding to work together. The framing was aimed at large enterprise IT leaders, but the underlying pressure applies just as much to a commercial print shop with 50 employees as to a Fortune 500 company.

For most of the industry's history, technology adoption in print has followed a relatively predictable sequence. You evaluated a new system, bought it, integrated it, and then ran it until it was time to upgrade. MIS here. Prepress workflow there. A new press controller when the hardware changed. Each wave was largely self-contained, and the job of managing technology was about managing vendors, maintenance contracts, and the occasional implementation project.