Why Print Must Be Factored Into Your AI Strategy

David Jensen

June 15, 2026

4 mins

Throughout 2025, employees 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.

Recently, Scott Lee, chief product officer (CPO) at Vasion, joined Channon Voyce, social marketing manager at Vasion in a podcast where they discussed the organizational printing infrastructure and its influence on a company's artificial intelligence (AI) strategy. During their conversation, they addressed important concepts regarding printing, the print infrastructure, document cycles, and how they fit in the AI picture.

Printing Will Always Be Necessary

In their discussion, Channon and Scott addressed how 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. Scott asserted that there will always be a need for printing. He cited how manufacturers need labels, forms, and shipping documents. Many healthcare facilities have digitized their operations, including forms and admission processes. However, there are still prescription labels, instruction documents that accompany prescriptions, and printed hospital discharge documents, to name a few.

Scott summarized the various components of a legacy print infrastructure, complete with multiple print servers, siloed printing devices, group policy objects (GPOs), and a mountain of IT helpdesk tickets exclusively for printing-related issues. Add hardware, licensing, supplies, and maintenance, and the costs of the print infrastructure continue to escalate.

Aside from the general costs of printing, Scott addressed other issues such as security. “Recently, I saw a stat that about 67% of organizations have experienced a printer-related data breach in 2025, which was up from 61% in 2023. The average cost of a breach is around $1.25 million dollars,” Scott said. “There is 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 stuff on the tray.” Modernizing the print infrastructure significantly reduces the risks and costs associated with printing.

The Print/AI Connection

Industries worldwide are getting on the artificial intelligence (AI) bandwagon. There are a variety of opinions about AI as far as how and when to implement it. Some are proactively embedding the technology into their operations, while others are delaying making their AI decisions and investments.

One concern is that companies across the globe are rushing headlong into an AI transformation without examining all the necessary factors. One significant aspect is that for the technology to live up to its expectations and be valuable, it needs structured data. Speaking on the mechanics of printing, Scott commented on how a company’s print infrastructure can actually bottleneck its AI endeavors. “When documents are in the printing process their data goes from structured to unstructured,” he said. “I spoke with our CIO, who is an AI expert, and he told me that of the 16 billion pages printed last year, roughly 10% to 20% of them have data that is structured enough for AI to read them. When you’re trying to train AI models on your business with a sparse amount of data, there is a limit to what you can do.”

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?” he asked. “It's ironic that the organizations are investing heavily in AI transformation right now and simultaneously maintaining legacy print infrastructures that silos the very data they need for the AI to transform the organization.”

Unlocking the Full Potential of AI

“At Vasion, we’ve had a major role in getting documents to printers reliably without downtime and lost productivity,” Scott said. “We’ve modernized the 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, Scott talked about the importance of making documents 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’s Intelligent Print Automation (IPA) is an important part of the print infrastructure. In terms of the uses of printed documents, many solutions address getting documents to the printer, storing documents, or getting signatures on the documents. Each solves one problem in one silo, but none of them connects to the others.

“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,” Scott said. “Documents become structured data. You can start turning multifunction devices into intelligent workflow triggers. The data existing as flat files and invisible to every downstream system, starts feeding the organization’s AI instead.” Scott cited an example of how you could scan an invoice, auto route it for approval, and then extract the data from that approved invoice. Then you can archive it with an audit trail, acting on the document only once.

At that point, you can start to consolidate and unify end-user printing and critical system printing or output via SAP, Epic, ERPs, etc. But you can do it on a single control panel, which is powerful because it gives you full visibility into everything happening in print across the organization.

“Thinking about that whole structured versus unstructured data concept, we may not all feel the heat on that right now, but I believe that is where we'll start to feel a lot of pressure to unlock the possibilities of AI within our organizations sooner rather than later,” Scott said.

Don’t let your legacy print infrastructure inhibit your technology modernization strategy. Find out how to unlock the full potential of AI and accelerate innovation in your organization using Vasion Intelligent Print Automation (IPA).