Eliminate Print Servers to Clear the Path for AI
Scott Lee, Chief Product Officer, Vasion
June 15, 2026
5 mins
Throughout 2025, employees of Vasion customers worldwide sat down at their workstations and clicked File > Print 4.3 billion times. This simple process, carried out as part of a day-to-day workload, yielded roughly 16 billion printed pages. This statistic indicates that printed documents remain a significant part of business operations across all industries, and that paradigm isn’t going away anytime soon. Even now, with organizations rapidly implementing artificial intelligence (AI), print is still very much a part of the operational infrastructure.
I dug into this in a recent Beyond Print episode. The short version: your print infrastructure is quietly deciding what your AI strategy can actually deliver. Most AI conversations skip right past the document cycles and data flow that decide the outcome. To see meaningful progress in your AI strategy, you have to address these issues at the source.
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Print Is Necessary–Print Servers Are Not
Printing is a core function for nearly every company in all industries. There is a common notion that with companies going digital, there is no longer a need for printing and paper documents. This is not true. Manufacturers use manufacturing execution systems (MES), but need printed labels, forms, and shipping documents. Many healthcare facilities have electronic health records (EHRs), but still print prescription labels, instruction documents that accompany prescriptions, and hospital discharge documents.
Companies still need print.
What they don’t need is the infrastructure that has traditionally made it hard to manage. Print servers and associated issues no longer exist when using a direct IP print solution. IT teams save hundreds of hours annually from the reduction in print-related helpdesk tickets and companies no longer have to waste money acquiring and maintaining print servers, or deal with the security risks they present.
Quocirca reports that 67% of organizations experienced a printer-related data breach in 2025, up from 61% in 20231. The average cost of a breach is around $1.25 million dollars. There’s also the physical risk; documents are often left unattended in a printer tray waiting to be picked up. In many cases, there’s no audit trail, no chain of custody, and no accountability. In environments like government agencies, you can't just leave documents on the tray. Removing print servers significantly reduces the security risks and costs associated with printing.
AI Runs on Structured Data and Print Destroys It
Industries worldwide are getting on the AI bandwagon, but there are a variety of opinions about how and when to implement AI. One concern is rushing headlong into an AI transformation without examining all the necessary factors. For example, the AI we're using today is trained primarily on publicly available internet information. The real opportunity is for companies to train on their own data, securely, privately, and relevant to their business. But that only works when your documents are trainable—structured, visible, and readable. I was talking to our CIO the other day and he told me roughly 80% of enterprise data is unstructured. Much of that includes printed pages. Once printed, it's unstructured. This is a big limiter for proprietary models giving you the power of AI about your business, on your business.
Lack of or poor quality data is one of the biggest challenges in AI deployment. Legacy print environments fall short of what is necessary for a company’s AI strategy. When you're trapped in on-prem print infrastructure, how do you apply AI at the speed and scale that the moment demands? It's ironic that the organizations investing heavily in AI transformation right now are simultaneously maintaining legacy print infrastructures that silos the very data they need for AI to transform the organization.
Intelligent Print Automation Is the Missing Piece Between Print and AI
At Vasion, we’ve had a major role in getting documents to printers reliably without downtime and lost productivity. We’ve modernized print infrastructure so you can replace print servers with a cloud-native, serverless architecture with Zero Trust security built in, no GPOs, no scripts, and no hardware. Every document is now visible, every print event is auditable, and the platform is already making intelligent infrastructure decisions from day one. That’s what modernizing print looks like, and that's what we do every day.
To make AI technology more useful, documents must be intelligent all the way through their movement lifecycle. When documents go through some kind of print motion, where that data is not structured and readable by AI in the moment it’s used, it limits what it can contribute to the AI technology.
This is where Vasion Intelligent Print Automation (IPA) comes in. It’s the only solution that connects getting documents to the printer, routing them beyond the printer or scanner into workflows, getting signatures on them, then delivering them to storage or elsewhere. All with an audit trail, and secure enough for the federal government’s FedRAMP® High Authorization certification which we have. With a modernized, consolidated foundation, it unlocks the ability to automate. AI’s classification, extraction, and agentic workflows can activate on every document already flowing through the platform. Documents become structured data and multifunction devices become intelligent workflow triggers. The data previously existing as flat files and invisible to every downstream system, starts feeding your organization’s AI instead.
At that point, you can consolidate and unify end-user printing and critical system printing or output via SAP, Epic, ERPs, etc. And you can do it on a single control panel, with full visibility into everything happening in print across the organization.
Structured data is the ceiling on what your AI can do, and addressing legacy print infrastructure is one of the fastest ways to break through it. Most organizations haven't felt that pressure yet, but the ones with serious AI ambitions will feel it first. Most organizations have a modernization roadmap and very few have a print chapter in it. The companies that get ahead of this won't be the ones with the biggest AI budget, they'll be the ones who modernized the infrastructure feeding it. That's the chapter worth writing next. Start with the Strategic Guide to Intelligent Print Automation.
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