ible large-format printer powered by both cloud and on-edge AI. “Direct Job Submission sends eligible jobs straight from Production Hub to the printer, and from early 2027 AI Automatic Print Mode Selection will choose the optimal trade-off between quality and throughput.” According to Soldevilla, today’s HP customers face a massive capacity squeeze. The market demands faster turnarounds and increasingly complex jobs, yet skilled print professionals are increasingly difficult mation and colour management, with Site Flow teams able to ask for order status, throughput data, and SLA insights in natural language.” HP’s PrintOS Production Hub can also offer a range of optimisations that streamline daily productions, including an AI Order Intake function that automatically turns a customer email or file into an order, reportedly cutting average order creation time by 90%. Alongside this, the Production Hub’s AI Upscale tool can improve low-resolution artwork before production, adds complexity. “HP PrintOS Order Flow, planned for general availability from April 2027, will unify them into a single automated workflow and deliver validated orders directly into the right production environment. Through our collaboration with GoMake, print service provider (PSPs) can also streamline quotation, customer approvals, and prepress, going from request-for-quote to production in less than ten minutes.” The AI-enhanced technologies are being developed with connectivity in mind, with the goal of reducing manual touchpoints and reducing errors across the entire workflow. As Soldevilla describes: “Ultimately, this is about helping our customers create more capacity: not simply by making the press run faster, but by making the entire journey smarter.” Speaking about HP’s wider aims for its AI technologies, she says: “Our long-term vision is for print operations to become much more predictive and increasingly autonomous, while keeping people firmly in control. Many of the building blocks are already available today. Data and AI can help identify potential maintenance issues earlier, protect uptime, and give teams greater visibility into capacity and equipment performance.” She stresses, however, that AI still lacks the expertise that print businesses have built over many years. In her opinion, the future leaders of the print market will be those that can best utilise a blend of human-driven intelligence with the advan- ▲ HP aims to connect its entire portfolio under its AI enhanced Production Hub The companies that best combine expertise with AI-driven insight and automation will become industry leaders AI IN PRINT | JONATHAN PERT 38 email: editor@printmonthly.co.uk Issue 363 - November | December 2026 overcoming headaches from low-quality customer print files. The tools are printer-brand agnostic, allowing users to benefit regardless of the hardware they run. As Soldevilla adds: “We are now extending this intelligence into our hardware. The new HP Latex R530 AI printer, unveiled at PRINTING United 2026 and closely connected to Production Hub, is the first compact, all-in-one rigid-and-flexto find. In her opinion, this challenge is compounded when the valuable expertise businesses do have is tied up in repetitive, manual tasks. She explains: “That is the friction we want to remove, and it often starts before a job reaches the press. For more digitally mature customers, orders arrive from MIS systems, marketplaces, brands, and APIs, and managing those channels separately
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