Media Day Brings Solutions for a Tough Market

Nobody at PRINTING United Expo's Media Day pretended the pressure on printers is easing. Costs are rising faster than prices, margins are thin, and uncertainty isn't going anywhere soon. PRINTING United Alliance’s Chief Economist Andy Paparozzi set that tone early, then made the case that waiting for clarity is the riskier move.

The exhibitors who followed took up the same question from different angles. How do print service providers do more with less? Their answers leaned heavily on automation, smarter software, and embellishment as a way to protect margins.

Labor was the thread connecting many of those answers. Experienced operators are retiring, and fewer people are coming in behind them. So the message wasn't just about faster equipment. It was equipment that's easier to learn and quicker to run, and that relies less on any one person's know-how.

What follows is a company-by-company look at what each exhibitor brought to the stage, and what printers can expect to see on the show floor.

Uncertainty, Inflation, and AI: The Forces Reshaping Print 

“Two forces are having a greater effect on the industry than anything else; they are deeply affecting every corner of the industry,” Andy Paparozzi, chief economist at Alliance Insights, said on Tuesday morning at the annual PRINTING United Expo media day. “Uncertainty, the most since COVID-19, and operating cost inflation, substrates, materials, energy, transportation, labor, overhead, and operating cost inflation created by war and erratic tariff policies. The second force is the fourth great industrial revolution driven by AI, big data, the Internet of Things, cloud computing, quantum computing, and smart robotics.”

During the opening Research Breakfast on PRINTING United Expo’s Media Day, Paparozzi  and Amy Servi-Bonner, VP of PRINTING AI, took the stage to share “The Forces Reshaping Print: Where the Industry Is Headed Next.”

Throughout the presentation, Paparozzi referenced the Alliance Insights State of the Industry (SOI) reports, sponsored by Canon USA, and described an industry squeezed by rising costs, and urged printers to pursue "ruthless efficiency” and higher-value growth. Servi-Bonner followed with a candid look at the state of the printing industry and the impact AI can have on knowledge sovereignty.

Paparozzi opened with first-half 2026 results. Sales rose 4.1%, but real sales rose just 0.5%. Operating cost inflation reached 5.7% against price increases of 3.6%, and 73.7% of SOI participants reported profitability that was flat or lower. 

The presentation projected the next six months, "and probably longer," would be "as challenging as the last six."

In terms of challenges, the SOI panel reported some of their biggest concerns moving into the second half of 2026 to be the economy and business conditions (56.2%), maintaining profitability (52.1%), and rising transportation costs (49.7%), with other concerns including increasing sales, rising substrate costs, and tariffs.

“Even if the war ends very soon, and even if we get stable trade agreements very soon … it's going to take time for those benefits to work through the economy,” he noted. “If we don't get those treaties and the end of the war, the problems are only going to deepen, and the majority of the participants in our research recognize this.”

Paparozzi shared what sets the profit leaders of the future apart from the competition. These leaders are ruthlessly efficient; creators of profitable growth; agile, innovative, and receptive to change; and AI-empowered. AI is moving rapidly, with Paparozzi noting that the industry is building a workforce for the AI era. In fact, 37.7% of the SOI panel participants expect AI skills to be "very important/essential" over the next 2 to 3 years, yet 47.2% do not offer AI training and do not plan to over the next two years.

“The profit leader of the future will be willing to move ahead during periods of extreme uncertainty, and we've got a lot more uncertainty ahead of us,” he said. “The natural tendency, during periods of extreme uncertainty, is to sit tight until there's some clarity. The opportunity, however, is to create clarity by moving ahead with capital investment plans, workforce development, diversification plans, and the other foundations of sustained profitability.”

AI Adoption Outpaces Readiness

Before turning over the mic to Servi-Bonner, Paparozzi shared a link to Alliance Insight’s latest AI study, marking the segue to the next portion of the session looking at the status of AI adoption.

Servi-Bonner then stepped up to the mic and shared a statistic as a backdrop to the conversation about AI.

“The average commercial inkjet operator in this country is 48 years old, so roughly 17 to 20 years away from retirement,” she said. “That sounds like a very long time, but if you think about it, as that window starts to close, how fast, or at all are people even trying to get that information out of those folks' heads? … If their knowledge walks out the door with them, your company doesn't just lose an employee, it loses part of its operating system.”

Amy Servi-Bonner, VP of PRINTING AI, noted that the biggest opportunity for AI is in what she describes as knowledge sovereignty.

She noted that 80% of critical production knowledge "Lives in people. Not systems," and the cost of losing one person at $80,000 to $200,000 per exit. What does that mean, and how can AI mitigate some of the risks associated with the loss of human intel.

“It's the single biggest AI opportunity in this industry right now, ahead of automation, predictive maintenance, and generative content,” she said.

The answer, she shared, is in the concept of knowledge sovereignty.

“Knowledge sovereignty is the state in which an operation's most critical institutional knowledge is owned, preserved, and deployed internally,” she said. “Not vendor dependent. Not platform dependent. Not person dependent. … This is the first step in applying AI to this industry, not the last. You cannot responsibly automate a decision, or hand any part of a workflow to AI, until you know what your best people actually know. Knowledge sovereignty isn't a nice-to-have next to AI adoption. It's the prerequisite for doing AI adoption responsibly.”

Before closing, Servi-Bonner share two examples of what PRINTING AI calls an “AI Employee,” a specific AI trained on a real operation’s actual knowledge, and the importance of this type of tool, before turning back to the benefits of using AI to address knowledge sovereignty.

"The question isn't whether you can afford to capture that knowledge,” she said. “It's whether you can afford not to.”

Adobe Wants Every File Print-Ready Before It Hits the Press

Adobe (Booth N653) opened its Media Day 2026 presentation with a problem most print service providers know by heart: files are arriving faster, from more places, and in worse shape than prepress departments can handle by hand.

"The amount of online job ordering has exploded," said Mike Scrutton, Director of Print Evangelism and Customer Liaison, Adobe. "This is the norm now. It's not the exception."

Customers now upload files built in tools ranging from Adobe apps to Figma, order runs of dozens rather than thousands, and expect delivery within days. That leaves no room for manual intervention.

"The truth that PSPs tell us is that if I have to open a file that's been uploaded by a customer once, I'm losing money on this job. There's not enough margin for me to be doing manual inspection [and] manual correction of files," Strutton said.

Mike Scrutton, Director of Print Evangelism and Customer Liaison, Adobe, discusses the company's solutions for ensuring files are print-ready.

Embellishment adds another layer of pressure. Metallics, digital foiling, and spot UV command higher prices, but Strutton argued that the additional prep work can erase the gain — boosting the top line while dragging down the bottom line. Meanwhile, experienced prepress operators are retiring, and fewer graphic arts graduates are entering the industry.

"We want our people in our print shops focusing on the relationships that they have with their customers," he said. "Making sure they're on brand, that they're understanding and delivering what the customers ask for, and not on the grunt work."

Adobe's answer is Adobe Print Services, which sits as an AI layer between document creation, whatever the application is, and the press room.

“Adobe Print Service is there to make every file print-ready before it gets to a press room” Scrutton says. It has three components.

Adobe Print Ready corrects, enhances, and optimizes incoming PDFs. Its AI-powered Smart Select tool inspects each job, identifies issues, and hands the fixes to another agent in the system. Reports and previews let operators review changes before output.

"We're always keeping humans in the loop. We're not just doing this blindly," Strutton said. Print Ready also borrows Photoshop filters for image scaling, targeting the smartphone photo that "looked fine on my phone. Why did it print blurry?"

Adobe Finish Ready handles what happens after printing: generating bleeds, including on non-rectangular signage files, creating cut paths for laser and flatbed cutters, and nesting jobs on press sheets.

Adobe Print Embellishment Ready translates embellishment data in a PDF into instructions for inline or offline finishing equipment. It can also suggest where spot UV might enhance a plain CMYK or RGB file, opening upsell opportunities. Print providers investing in high-end finishing, Strutton said, are "only going to make money from their high-end solutions if they can keep those devices fed with high-quality content."

"We're shipping it now," he said. As with Adobe's other print technologies, the suite is provided to partners as a software development kit.

Then came what Strutton called a California press conference tradition: one more thing. "The PDF print engine that you've known and loved for the last 20 years is now GPU ready," he said. He described it as "a simple drop-in for our partners."

Xerox, Konica Minolta, and ECO3 are demonstrating partner products built on Adobe technology at PRINTING United Expo this week. Adobe will also appear in the PRINTING AI Pavilion, where Strutton speaks Wednesday at 10 am on what to trust AI to do.

Fujifilm Covers Automation, Embellishment, and More

In his Media Day presentation, Andrew Gunn, head of print-on-demand solutions at Fujifilm, highlighted the company’s portfolio of multi-platform production solutions, ranging from back-office and lower-volume machines to higher-volume solutions. Several of these will be on display at booth N6042, including the ApeosPro family, the Revoria 285, the Revoria 2100, and the new Revoria Press PC2120. A virtual display of the J Press FP790 flexible packaging press will also be available.

From a broader perspective, Gunn recognized that PSPs are facing a range of pressures.

Andrew Gunn, head of print-on-demand solutions at Fujifilm, highlights the company’s portfolio that will be highlighted during the Expo.

“We’re always talking about how the pressure to do more with less is really relentless,” he said. “So, there’s faster turnaround times that are required, smaller skilled labor forces, the rising material costs, constantly evolving standards, ever-increasing competition, and squeezed margins. That’s fancy speak for ‘I want it free, I want it yesterday, and it better be good.’ At Fujifilm, one of the things that we’re always trying to figure out is how to solve for those customer pain points.”

That motivation is evident in the Revoria line of presses. Gunn specifically highlighted five ways PSPs can make more with Revoria devices:

1. Benchmark CMYK: Create more accurate, consistent print on tight deadlines.
2. Media maximization: Produce jobs efficiently on more types and sizes of media.
3. CMYK+ expansion: Enable inline digital CMYK+ embellishments to help boost impact and profits.
4. Intelligent automation: Make more sellable prints per shift with smarter workflows.
5. Consistent support: Get 360-degree support from the Fujifilm team.

Of note, Gunn pointed to the digital CMYK+ embellishment expansion as something that will grow in importance. So, Fujifilm has developed its Aspire program to help support PSPs as they design, price, market, and sell embellishments.

“The whole part of the Aspire program is helping our customers get to that next level, so when a customer says to you, ‘Well, nobody’s asking for embellishments,’ you are prepared,” Gunn explained. “… We need to kind of show the market how digital embellishments are going to be that [big] thing. And we need to make it easy for them, but easy in a way that’s repeatable and understandable.”

But, in Gunn’s eyes, embellishments alone won’t keep profits up.

“I always say the shiny stuff gets customers in the door, but it’s the automation that keeps them in the black — or the [Fujifilm] green, if you will,” he said.