AI Isn't a Shortcut. It's an Outcome.
Innovaic's Daryl Davis and Andrew Oswood joined Richard Askam on Print Island to talk about why AI keeps failing print businesses and what actually needs to change.
Most print businesses know they need to do something with AI. Far fewer know what that something actually is.
That gap is the problem.
When Daryl Davis (CTO & VP of Operations at Innovaic) and Andrew Oswood joined Print Island's Richard Askam for a live webinar, the conversation got straight to the point: AI isn't a product you buy, a tool you install, or a magic wand you wave at your estimating bottleneck. It's an outcome. And for most print businesses right now, the conditions for that outcome don't exist yet.
Here's what they broke down.
Watch the full Webinar now
The shiny object trap
Vendors are moving fast. That creates pressure for print businesses to move fast too. And that's exactly where things go wrong.
When a new AI estimating tool lands in your inbox looking impressive, the questions you don't ask are the ones that cost you. How do you know those numbers are right? What else in the business can it connect to? What happens when reality doesn't match the demo?
The black box demo shows you features. It doesn't show you whether any of it will work inside your actual business ecosystem. And without that bigger picture, you're not buying a solution. You're buying a very expensive experiment.
Context is everything
AI needs to know your business the same way a new hire needs to know your business. What machines you run. What your real throughput looks like (not the spec sheet version). What your margins actually are. How press A runs differently to press B.
The more of that context lives in people's heads, personal spreadsheets, or disconnected systems, the less useful AI is going to be. Full stop.
As Andrew put it: the better your data, the better your decisions. Generic data gets you generic answers. Live, accurate, business-specific data gets you something you can actually act on.
Split brain syndrome (and the confidence death spiral)
Here's what typically happens. A business buys an AI tool for estimating. The sales team starts using a different one for CRM. Meanwhile, Bob in the back still has his spreadsheet because "that's where the real numbers are."
Now you have three versions of reality. None of them are talking to each other. And the AI, which is inherently optimistic and has no visibility into the gaps, keeps producing outputs that quietly drift from what's actually happening on the floor.
People notice. Trust erodes. The tools get abandoned. Everyone goes back to what they know. And six months later someone suggests a different AI product.
That's the confidence death spiral. And it starts the moment AI is treated as a department-level tool rather than a business-wide ecosystem.
What AI actually needs to work
Daryl laid out a simple three-step readiness framework:
1. System baseline. How much of the knowledge AI needs is centralised and accessible, versus living in people's heads or scattered across disconnected tools?
2. Real-time visibility. If your employees can see it, AI can probably use it. If they can't, neither can AI.
3. Gap detection. AI won't find your leaks for you. You need processes in place to catch variances and validate outputs. Otherwise the confidence death spiral starts quietly, and nobody notices until it's too late.
Get those three things in order and you have a genuine foundation to build on.
The right question to ask
Most businesses ask: can AI estimate this job for me?
The right question is: can AI help me identify where I have an opportunity to make more margin, based on what my operations are actually doing right now?
That shift, from feature to outcome, is where the value lives.
Key takeaways
- AI is an ecosystem, not a feature. Treating it as a point solution is how you end up with wheel-spin and wasted budget.
- Your data quality determines your AI quality. Garbage in, garbage out. No matter how impressive the tool looks in a demo.
- The boring stuff comes first. Eliminating the mundane is what frees your team to focus on the things that actually move the business forward.
- No shortcuts. The businesses that will get the most out of AI are the ones building the right foundations now, not the ones chasing the shiniest tool.
- Find the right partner. Not someone selling you a product. Someone who starts by understanding where you are and where you want to be.
Watch the full conversation
Daryl and Andrew covered a lot of ground in this session, including live Q&A from print business owners asking exactly the right questions. Worth watching in full.
Daryl Davis is CTO & VP of Operations at Innovaic. Andrew Oswood is a workflow automation specialist with deep roots in print production. Both are founding members of the Digital Automation Club.
Watch on Print Island
