In this week’s video, Andrew Smith, Founder of ZenSmart, explains why the urgency to adopt workflow automation goes far beyond cost savings. By capturing granular data at every production step, automation lays the foundation for deep AI insights—into margin, productivity, fails, and flow. The earlier you start, the faster you gain a strategic edge. Watch now to learn more.
Transcript
I wrote last week about the intention of print manufacturers to invest in automation. A stunning 77% of firms are taking steps to automate their workflow this year alone. But why should I start investing now? What’s the urgency? Well, really, there are two reasons. The first is simple profit and the competitive advantage that workflow automation provides. The second reason is that when you automate, you start collecting massive amounts of data just by operating your business. You’re collecting data on people and productivity, machine and performance, workflow efficiency and dwell time at your process stages, item failure and materials usage. And in the past, you would build reports and dashboards and run queries to look into what is going on in the business and to make really important decisions about what you need to do. But things have just become a whole lot easier and it’s changed. We announced just a few weeks ago, generation one of our AI assistant called ZenSmart AI Insight. It lets you ask any question at all about production and manufacturing status, people and performance, just by having a plain English or Spanish or Dutch conversation. Importantly though, AI Insight is just the start. What we see is that all of that incredible data that’s stored inside of your automation solution, that all of that is training data, training data that enables incredible insight in order to illuminate really what’s going on in your business. And with that, that training data can be used in the future to coach, to warn, to provide predictive insight. And so instead of reacting to what has already happened, the next generation is going to be about predicting what will be. If you’d like to know more about how AI is going to impact the future of your business, reach out, we’d like to talk with you about it.
