Artificial Intelligence - Coming to a printer near you

Although a robot takeover doesn’t appear to be on the horizon any time soon, there’s no doubting that artificial intelligence (AI) is already making its presence felt in our daily lives.

Most importantly - and as predicted by PwC - AI is finally working hard for us. It’s actually doing things as opposed to being hypothesised about, and this is already making a huge difference to printing.

4 definitions of AI

Artificial intelligence comes in four flavours, and you’ll benefit from gaining a little insight into how each one is defined, before we head into the benefits for printing:

1. Reactive machines: This is the most basic form of AI, where software only reacts to specific scenarios, without the ability to inform decisions based on experience.
2. Limited memory: Refers to decisions made based on observations of the environment in which the machine resides. Think self-driving cars.
3. Theory of mind: We’re heading into the future, now; this refers to AI that can understand thoughts and emotions and react based on a predefined set of instructions.
4. Self-aware: This is the most advanced form of AI and one which (perhaps fortunately) doesn’t exist yet. It refers to machines that have their own consciousness. Think Terminator 2.

While the latter two are still the stuff of science fiction, reactive and limited AI are significantly improving the end-to-end printing process by automating tasks that were once bottlenecks.

This increases the daily output, but also enables businesses to offload some of the more routine jobs, enabling everyone to focus on the more strategic work. For instance:

• Job submission can route jobs to available devices if the current destination is too busy (great for print businesses operating presses)
• Print waste can be minimised with smart algorithms that suss out document layouts without human input, such as optimising imposition
• Sensors are now put to use in order to make real-time adjustments to paper alignment and image quality while jobs are in progress, thus providing the best possible print outcome
• Device data is sent back to manufacturers where they can analyse how their hardware and software is used in order to develop software updates or changes to future product iterations

Combined, the above elements of AI are enabling complex print jobs to be automated and future devices to be even smarter. This means partners are becoming faster and capable of printing high value at volume with next to no human interaction.

How Xerox is helping print adopt AI

Xerox is working hard to make AI more accessible to businesses, and they’re doing so with deep research into the Internet of Things (IoT), machine intelligence and the safety and security challenges surrounding such technology.

With so much data provided by the latest range of printers, the resulting reports and decisions made by AI need to be transparent; as users, we need to know why a particular decision or recommendation is made.

Thanks to the research undertaken by the likes of Xerox, AI will continue to become easier to adopt and play a crucial yet unobtrusive role in both our working and personal lives.