Transforming the Print Experience

Patrick Moorhead: The Six Five is On the Road here in the HP Garage, here in Palo Alto, where Silicon Valley basically started. We’re also here at HP Imagine 2024, where a ton of solutions and technologies from consumer, commercial, print, PC, conference room technologies are all coming together, being wrapped up here, and AI. Dan, is this exciting or what?

Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s an event to imagine, and HP Imagine is going to bring, I hope, some… Well, it has, and that’s the thing, we’re here and it’s ongoing, but a vision of where does all this technology go? We’ve got the AI PC, which you know is kind of the epicenter of it all, but you got these PCs, you got connectivity, you got print, they got a very complete portfolio, Pat. I think being here at the beginning of Silicon Valley, it makes you think, are we at the next big inflection?

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah, I hope so. I think we are. I hope so. I think we are at the next inflection.

Daniel Newman: We are, yeah.

Patrick Moorhead: Let’s talk print here, and I mean, there’s only one person that would be the best here and that’s Tuan, who runs the printer group. Tuan it’s great to see you. We saw you at APC, had a lot of great chats about what’s going on in the business. Consumer, commercial, big, big commercial, and everything in between. Thanks for coming on the show.

Tuan Tran: All right, thanks. Thanks, guys. Great to be here. Great to be in the garage again.

Patrick Moorhead: I know. Look at this.

Tuan Tran: It’s been a couple of years-

Daniel Newman: Vacuum tubes and oscillators.

Tuan Tran: … they’ve got the original equipment here. It kind of brings you back to our roots, so it’s very cool.

Daniel Newman: Totally. The Logo hasn’t changed that much. We got a chance to speak at APC and you shared a little bit about your vision, but this is such a fast-moving trend, Tuan. I mean, look, in a matter of weeks, months, you went from everyone buying their own GPUs and building, to moving them into the cloud, to now everything’s consumed as a service. I know you’ve been thinking a lot about that and how you do your business. Talk a little bit about how AI is transforming the print journey.

Tuan Tran: Yeah, I mean, like I shared with you, I think at APC last year, we were just getting our framing around AI and what we think it could do. I think over the last, let’s say six months, since we’ve talked, I think we’re even more bullish on the ability of AI to really transform the print experience. And I really mean transform, because I think if you look at the print experience, and I’ll share some thoughts tomorrow, it’s painful, it’s a painful experience. The end result’s good, but the experience, a little bit painful. So we think there are so many, my teams at work over the last few months, there’s so many opportunities where we can actually take the intelligence that AI has and actually incorporate that into every facet of what we’re doing, to make that experience a much more pleasant experience, a much more collaborative experience, a much more creative experience. And we’ll share some of that tomorrow.

Patrick Moorhead: Why don’t we dive into some of the pain points? They vary, and there’s more than, “Oh, this is hard to set up.” There’s a lot more pain points than that. Maybe you can talk about your roadmap for solutions and integrating AI as well.

Tuan Tran: Yeah. Probably the biggest thing we’re going to be talking about tomorrow is really what we shared a little bit early on at APC, it was around the perfect print. Whenever I talk about this with customers, I mean, they resonate with it. It’s like when you print an Excel spreadsheet and you forget to say set print area, that spreadsheet goes over 15 pages. For us, we’re like, “Hey, that’s what you told us to do. That’s what Excel and Microsoft Windows told us to do. Print it over 15 pages.” But the problem is we know what good looks like, and we should be able to help the user to say, “That’s not good. That’s not good.”

Patrick Moorhead: “Sure you want to do that?”

Tuan Tran: Yeah, exactly. “You sure you want to do that?” So Excel’s a great example. HTML is another great example, with the page breaks on HTML. Many times what you see on screen does not translate very well to what’s on paper. I think, for us, we want to take accountability for that. We want to make sure we take care. Exactly, that’s what AI is, it allows the machine to be smarter. So our machines can smarter with AI, and when we see a print job, we’d say, “Hey, you’re going to put this thing over 14 pages. Sure that’s what you want to do?” “You’re going to put all these trailing headers, and scattered. Is that what you want to do? 14 pages for your recipes. That makes sense to you?” I think that’s the first thing, and I think that’s a very small but very, I think, easy to understand use case.

Then I think you get into all the other areas around setup, around use, we’ll talk a little bit about support tomorrow, and how we support printers and how we triage printers. Because there are many things that can go wrong, you have a paper jam, you’ve got an error code. All those things, they’re painful today, so we want to take all that pain out. But in addition to pain, I think what we also want to do is enable a level of creativity that hasn’t been there before. One of the things that we want do is enable that immediate creation. So put generative AI into our smart app and enable people to create custom reading cards, with the perfect saying, tuned to whatever the event they have. That’s another use case we’ll be demonstrating tomorrow. So I’m excited. I’m excited about everything that we’ve got to share tomorrow.

Daniel Newman: Can you indulge a little bit here, knowing that nothing’s going to beat your embargo outbound, to talk a little bit beyond that, because I think, to Pat’s point, to yours, is I think we’re getting it with the setup, with the basics. And by the way, basics are worth a lot here. I’ve wasted thousands of sheets of paper having that one column, it didn’t make it.

Tuan Tran: It didn’t make it.

Daniel Newman: And it’s like, well, thank gosh I needed some scratch paper. But that’s so logical, it’s so simple. But I think this is a category where you, as the leader of the business, probably wants to remind people there’s innovation happening.

Tuan Tran: Yeah, there is, definitely, yeah.

Daniel Newman: So what are some of the bigger, beyond the obvious? Anything you can tease?

Tuan Tran: For example, one of the things we’re looking at in a big area is around workflow. And workflow, and our devices, I think, within workflow, there’s many, many, many, many workflow packages out there, but they all exist on that edge between analog, which is where all the paper exists, and digital. And that divide is a big divide. So our devices, more and more, are scanning devices, their digitization devices. How do you digitize and make sure that you extract the right data? It’s about a legal office extracting personal information, it’s about shipping, and matching shipping with what you ordered, patient records. In terms of all of those things, getting the information you need extracted from paper into a digital format in a smart, intelligent way, that’s a huge area where we’re using AI.

We’ll be launching a product here with scan AI that helps our customers do that, not only directly with HP, but also help our channels help our customers do that. The channels are a big part because they’re the touch with the customer and they need to be educated in how to use those solutions. So that’s a big part of what we’re driving. Then even in graphics, our large format business in the construction industry, we’ve got a big, big presence in construction, with all of our plotters and our large format printers. But we’re launching here a construction portal, that allows construction architects, builders to actually collaborate, and we’re using AI to actually power that collaboration. So you’ll see things like vectorization of analog floor plans directly to digital. And you’re like, “Whoa, that’s kind of cool.” You scan in a floor plan that’s analog, and then use the AI to actually convert it to a CAD file that you can easily manipulate. So it saves a tremendous amount of time and energy.

Industrial graphics, we shared some of this at Druva. You can run a factory, because our large printers are all about production environments, running and batching the right jobs at the right time, so that you optimize the use of the equipment that you’re investing millions of dollars in. That’s another AI application, getting the right media. We even have the AI on robots that deliver media to these printers. It’s kind of cool, because you could see the factory floor, we set up a factory floor, and you could see AI directing the robot to say, “I need new paper”, or, “a different type of paper for this print job, and that has to come next.” After this printer gets done, the AI robot comes out, loads in new paper, and actually runs a different job. So you could just see the automation and the intelligent factory running in real time, and all that’s powered by AI.
So when you step back, you’re like, oh man, almost every part of the printing process, whether you’re at home, whether you’re at the office, whether you’re in an industrial setting, can be powered and reinvented by AI.

Patrick Moorhead: I really appreciate you going beyond the printing Excel spreadsheet. By the way, printing them right is difficult. We talked a little bit about creativity as well, but a ton on future of work here. Let’s talk about, what are some of the customer stories, or customer benefits, from, it can either be specific customers, you don’t have to use their name if you don’t want to, but what are some of the benefits that real life customers who are using your products and services today are experiencing?

Tuan Tran: One of the products we have out today is our scan AI. This has been something we’ve sold within our managed print service. I’ll give you an example, I’ll share this on stage tomorrow. One of the customers who use that, they have 300 warehouses across Italy. Very simple example. They basically scan in all the receipts that they get from packaging receipts, they scan all that in it across their 300 warehouses, that basically gets sent to a central server, it’s got AI to match the receipts with the receivables. We’ve actually seen a 60%, 70%, 80% savings in labor after you put that in, versus matching the eye. So, real productivity gains.

Patrick Moorhead: That’s big, big productivity.

Tuan Tran: The optimization that I shared with you on the industrial printing, that’s something that we’ve seen. We’ve seen 30%, 40% optimization, in terms of… The metric for industrial printing is the uptime and the production of those printers, and so the job changeovers are a big deal. If you have a job that’s got two-sided media, you want to run all those jobs at the same time. You don’t want to run two-sided media, reload the media, shut the printer down, change media, run something different. So when you optimize the job with the media and the print quality settings, you can actually increase run time, and you get 30% more productivity on your equipment. That 30% productivity just goes straight to the bottom line, because you’re like, “Hey, I don’t have to buy new equipment. I get 30% more productivity with my current equipment.” That’s the type of things we’re seeing and that’s the kind of results we’re seeing. 30%, 40%, 50% productivity.

Patrick Moorhead: Interesting. Sounds a lot like a lot of the AI productivity increases we’ve been hearing about. That’s impressive.

Daniel Newman: Yeah, it’s good. Always good to be able to visualize it. I think sometimes people try to oversimplify the business. They look at print and they’re like, “Oh, it’s print.” But when you start to break down the ability to take physical objects, bring them back into the digital world, and how that can drive engineering, architecture, manufacturing, it starts to become a really important trend.

Tuan Tran: I mean, we’re piloting some of the architectural, this workplace hub that we have, this construction hub. And we’re seeing, for instance, if you’re an architect, and you’re having to go out and basically just a simple thing of creating a job report, an inspection report, it’s like, okay, today, you go out, you take some pictures, you get some notes, you got your notebook, you do all that stuff, and it’s like you come back, you put it on your floor plan, you create a document. That’s a lot of time. That takes you a day, two days to do. What we’ve built is something with AI that can actually pull all that content together in a multimedia kind of way and multimodal kind of way, text, graphics, audio and video, and you put all that together in one package and that saves them days. So they’re like, “Well, okay, that’s a totally different way of working for me.”

Daniel Newman: Let’s wrap this conversation, Tuan, with a hot take. We’ve talked about what’s coming, we’ve talked about what’s happening here at Imagine. Give us the quick future forward. What are you really excited about? What do you think is going to happen in print as we go forward beyond this event?

Tuan Tran: Yeah, I mean, I think what we expect to happen, especially when we roll out these solutions, is that printing should get a lot easier. That’s the number one thing I think we’ve got to focus on. It’s too hard. It’s too hard today to do the basics, so we got to solve the basics and AI can help us do that. Then I think in the home you unleash creativity, because AI, and generative AI in particular allows you to create content, whether it’s photos, whether it’s greeting cards, all that. At home, it unlocks creativity. In the office, it unlocks productivity. And in construction and industrial, it optimizes that workflow, again, more towards productivity. That’s how I think about the world and I think we’re excited. We’re just at the start of that future, but we’re more convinced now than ever that it’s going to be big. So we’re excited about that.

Daniel Newman: Tuan, thanks so much for joining us here during HP Imagine. We appreciate you making some time and congratulations on all the progress.

Tuan Tran: All right, thanks guys.

Daniel Newman: All right, and thanks everybody so much for joining us here on The Six Five. We are at HP Imagine, we’re sitting here in the HP Garage in beautiful, sunny Palo Alto, California. This is where it began for HP, and this is where it began for the Silicon Valley. Hit that subscribe button, tune into all of our coverage here at the event, and of course all of the content on The Six Five. But for now, we got to go. See you all later.