The AI Foundation You Need — and May Already Have

What a New Industry Study Reveals About the Real Barrier to AI Adoption in Print — and Why Data-Ready Workflows Are the Key to What Comes Next

There’s a telling moment in a recently published case study from Alliance Insights / NAPCO Research that captures where much of the commercial printing industry stands with AI. The president of a $20–$40 million print operation describes his team using AI to calculate carton configurations, shipping methods, and carrier cost comparisons. A four-hour task was completed in two minutes. His reaction? “That got our attention.”

It should get everyone’s attention. But not because AI produced a perfect estimate—the results landed within roughly 5% of a manual one. What matters is what happened next: leadership didn’t rush to automate everything. They paused, set guardrails, and asked a more important question: Where is our data actually good enough to trust AI with the next step?

That question—not which AI tool to buy, but whether your data and processes are ready—is the real story emerging across the industry. And it maps directly to what we’ve been building at Solimar Systems for over three decades.

Deliberate Progress, Not Hype

The Alliance Insights study, AI Adoption in the Printing Industry: From Curiosity to Competitive Advantage, makes clear that printers are actively experimenting—using generative AI for content creation, accelerating process mapping after ERP implementations, analyzing profitability by customer and job type, and exploring lead scoring, pricing simulation, and inventory forecasting.

But the companies making the most progress aren’t chasing tools. They’re building foundations—defining rules, testing narrowly, expanding only when value is proven. As the featured president put it: “AI is shockingly intelligent—but also really dumb. You need a human at the wheel.” That resonates deeply with how we think about AI at Solimar.

The Real Barrier Isn’t AI—It’s Data Readiness

Here’s what stood out most: the featured company acknowledged that tasks tied to financial control, scheduling, and automation will only be pursued “once data quality and process discipline are fully trusted.” Procurement planning? “Right now, that’s all spreadsheets.”

This is a pattern we see industry-wide. Organizations want AI-driven forecasting, predictive production management, and process optimization—but they can’t get there if workflow data is trapped in manual processes, disconnected systems, or incompatible formats. The enabler isn’t a smarter AI model. It’s a smarter data foundation—one that captures clean, structured, audit-ready information at every step of the document production lifecycle. That’s exactly what the Solimar Chemistry Platform was built to do.

Where Solimar’s Chemistry Meets the AI Moment

The Chemistry Platform manages the complete post-composition document lifecycle through an integrated suite of modular tools. At its heart is SOLitrack, our web-based job visibility tool that provides real-time tracking, dashboard reporting, alerts, job batching, and SLA management. SOLitrack delivers forensic-level audit trails for every document movement, generating clean, structured workflow data that AI platforms need as input.

Consider what that means in the context of the study. The featured printer wants to move from spreadsheets to AI-driven procurement forecasting, analyze margins by job type and customer, and model pricing scenarios. Each of those ambitions requires a reliable, granular data layer beneath. SOLitrack and the broader Chemistry Platform—including SOLsearcher Enterprise for secure archiving and electronic delivery—create that layer, turning production workflows into high-quality input for external AI platforms.

Proven Where It Matters, Open to What’s Next

The case study’s philosophy—AI as assistant, not authority; governance before scale; experimentation within clear boundaries—mirrors Solimar’s own approach to generative AI.

The Chemistry Platform leverages reliable, time-tested algorithms delivering the repeatability, transparency, and auditability that regulated, high-volume environments require. Insurance companies, healthcare organizations, government agencies, and financial services firms processing billions of mission-critical documents need their production layer to behave identically whether handling one document or one million. That consistency is non-negotiable.

But this production-grade foundation also creates a powerful synergy: the granular workflow data captured by SOLitrack and SOLsearcher Enterprise serves as high-quality fuel for external AI platforms. Organizations can apply AI to forecasting, predictive management, and process optimization while keeping their core production systems rock-solid. And as generative AI matures, Solimar’s flexible, modular architecture positions organizations to adopt new capabilities seamlessly—without disrupting what already works.

AI Where It Excels Today: Meet Diego

Solimar already actively deploys AI at the customer interaction layer. Diego, our multilingual AI-powered chatbot on solimarsystems.com and Solimar University Online, has been extensively trained on industry knowledge, product documentation, case studies, and video content. Rather than requiring visitors to navigate traditional search results, Diego delivers direct answers, prompts follow-up questions, and offers pathways to live assistance—reflecting a philosophy that aligns perfectly with what the most forward-thinking printers in the study are discovering: position AI where it excels today, while building architecture ready for tomorrow.

Your AI Journey Starts with the Data Underneath

The study’s advice is straightforward: start with purpose, lead from the top, and be cautiously optimistic. We’d add one thing: start with your data.

If your production workflows already generate clean, structured, trackable data, you’re further along the AI readiness curve than you might think. If not, that’s the place to begin. Not with a chatbot or a pricing simulator, but with the workflow infrastructure that makes all of those things possible.

With over 10,000 installations in more than 60 countries, the Chemistry Platform has spent three and a half decades turning complex, high-volume document production into structured, visible, optimizable workflows. The AI era doesn’t require starting over. It requires building on what works. And that’s a foundation we’re proud to be part of.

Reference: This article references the Alliance Insights research study AI Adoption in the Printing Industry: From Curiosity to Competitive Advantage and the associated case study “Strategically Building an AI-Powered Future,” published by Printing Impressions (piworld.com), January 29, 2026. The research was conducted by NAPCO Research in partnership with Alliance Insights.