An interview with Toby Saalfeld, Senior Director, Portfolio Marketing Business Partner at Ricoh North America
Anyone old enough to have lived through the adoption of the Internet, digital photography, email, smartphones, and social media has witnessed the five phases of the “hype cycle.”
The cycle is triggered by an avalanche of publicity about the potential impact and benefits of an innovation. All that hype leads to a peak of inflated expectations. Eventually, the sky-high expectations plummet into a trough of disillusionment, followed by a more realistic slope of enlightenment. The final plateau of productivity leads to widespread adoption.
In 1995, technology analysts at the Gartner consulting firm observed a pattern in how new technologies are introduced, promoted, and adopted. They trademarked the pattern as the “Gartner Hype Cycle” and continue to use it to help clients assess AI and other new technologies.
So, which stage of the print-business AI hype cycle are you experiencing now? Are you discovering that some AI doesn’t quite live up to the lofty expectations? Or are you starting to realize that some of the hype may be a bit overblown?
Toby Saalfeld believes print business owners are tech-savvy enough to avoid the disillusionment stage and head straight for the slope of enlightenment.
He encourages print business owners to move beyond AI hype and hoopla and adopt a more rational approach to implementing both AI and automated workflows.
AI Is Like Electricity
Saalfeld points out that AI means different things to different people because it can be used for everything from creating infographics to predicting when the printheads on your equipment might fail. How a print business benefits from AI may be dramatically different than how a financial firm or creative agency can benefit.
“I regard AI technology like electricity. There is so much that you can do with it, but you aren’t sure where to start or focus your efforts,” said Saalfeld.
He points out that, “Unlike previous technology revolutions, AI is literally getting reinvented every 6 months.”
So, he advises print business leaders to take a deep breath and resist the urge to implement some AI tools (any tools!) simply to avoid falling behind what other print businesses may be doing with AI.
Fear of Missing Out
All of the hype about AI creates a fear of missing out. This causes anxiety and competitiveness that drives people to invest in things that have no outcome.
“Every company has employees in various departments who have already started using AI to help them accomplish their tasks,” said Saalfeld. “This is all well and good, but the biggest benefits can be realized when print businesses strategically implement AI to achieve the best possible outcomes for their specific business challenges.”
Saalfeld offers these suggestions for developing an AI action plan.
Set realistic goals aligned with your business operations. There are many great business applications for AI, but don’t start buying a lot of AI tools and racking up crazy expenses without knowing what you’re trying to accomplish.
This requires leadership and a team of AI enthusiasts within your company. The AI enthusiasts know how the technology works, and they’re excited about the opportunities and how it could be implemented within their companies. Leaders should be prepared to articulate the company’s vision and a larger framework for what they expect teams to accomplish with AI.
Build the people-and-process infrastructure that aligns with your company’s goals. Most people focus first on accomplishing the tasks they were hired for. Although using AI to solve problems in everyday work can help build more efficient and effective work teams, these types of experiments don’t necessarily turn into transformative business initiatives.
If the goal is to use AI to transform the company, the people-and-process infrastructure may be a lot more involved.
Once you have built a framework based on specific business goals and challenges, look for specific AI or automation technologies that can help meet those challenges. “AI is not necessarily the best tool for any given task,” said Saalfeld. “Sometimes old-fashioned logic programming does the job more efficiently, more reliably, and more cost effectively.”
He points out the RICOH Auto Color Adjuster (which enables non-experts to match the printed colors on materials output from different printing devices) uses an incredible amount of automation but doesn’t have a bit of AI under the hood: “It’s super effective, very reliable, and does exactly what it is meant to do.”
Encourage AI experimentation before adoption. It’s OK to conduct pilot AI programs. There’s real value in experimentation. And sometimes you can learn more from failures than wins.
But experimentation projects should be led by an executive with a clear vision of the over-arching view of company goals.
As you learn more about AI from experimentation, think about how the experiments could be scaled up and applied to bigger opportunities.
Break down workflow tasks in three areas: front-office, production, and back-office. The front office team handles sales, marketing, order entry, and customer service. The production team is responsible for prepress, printing, finishing, and quality control. The back-office handles shipping, invoicing, and accounting.
Set up separate data pools for the front office, production, and back office. This will enable you to create AI agents that can exchange only the data each work group needs to accomplish their jobs.
“When you look at how AI works and how data works in a business,” Saalfeld notes, “It is incredibly difficult to build one huge pool of data that is always accurate and up to date. AI agents working with smaller data pools are easier to maintain.”
Plus, employees in the shipping department don’t need to know how well the printer on the floor is performing or what type of information needs to go into a sales brochure.
Ideally, the AI agent in the shipping department should be able to reach out to the AI agent in the front office to get the specific data needed to complete the shipment, invoicing, and reporting. The AI agent in the production group can contact the front-office AI agent to get data such as job specs. changes, and due dates.
Evaluate the quality of the data being generated by steps in your workflows that have already been optimized and automated to meet your business goals. The accuracy of an AI project will only be as good as the data that feeds it.
Consider bringing in a consultant who can help you fine tune your AI adoption strategy to achieve results more quickly. If workflow gaps exist, an experienced workflow consultant can advise you whether it would be better to use AI to address the issue or use the programming logic involved in automation.
Software developers for digital printer manufacturers such as Ricoh work with AI all the time. So, they have a much broader vision of how AI can help print-business owners achieve specific objectives.
“At Ricoh, our service delivery people are well connected to our IT people.” said Saalfeld. “Typically, corporations run with a top-down approach. But AI is more like a mesh in which everything is connected. We make sure the right people get pulled in at the right time.”
“Sometimes you don’t need AI to automate. Many Ricoh customers use automation workflows that don’t have AI built in. Everything works exceptionally well.” said Saalfeld.
It’s like choosing the right vehicle, he adds, “A Ferrari is awesome, but if you only need the vehicle to haul wood, you would be better off using a truck.”
The programming logic used for automation consists of scenarios with predictable, repeatable instructions (e.g., “If this happens, then do that.”) It’s easy to follow the process and all possible outcomes that may happen along the way.
AI is sometimes more ambiguous than automation, Saalfeld points out, especially when AI uses a large language model. If there is a generative AI component, the AI may decide what the goal is and when that goal is achieved. The more loops it achieves, the more variations it may achieve at the output site.
For example, over time an AI chatbot in customer service may learn to express the same idea 50 different ways for different customers – just like a person would.
But automation may be a better approach for tasks that require consistent, predictable results.
“AI can be like a black box,” cautions Saalfeld. “You can see what goes in and what goes out, but you don’t really know what happens in the middle.”
Ultimately, when considering using AI and/or automation for specific tasks, it’s all about choosing the right tool for the right job.
What Does the Future Hold?
“When I think about the future of AI, I think of AI applications almost like people.” said Saalfeld When Ai agents in different departments analyze and exchange information from their data pools, they are essentially augmenting the work that people in front office, production, and the back office are doing.
Experts at Global Data predict that Agentic AI will eventually move big enterprises beyond rules-based automation to proprietary autonomous systems capable of planning, reasoning, and self-correction. They believe AI agents will be able to coordinate multi-step workflows with minimal human input. This won’t happen immediately because it requires advanced orchestration engines, long-context large-language models, and memory-driven architectures.
Smaller to mid-sized print businesses are unlikely to need (or want) autonomous AI systems. So, some of the hype surrounding AI may be irrelevant.
Ricoh consultants prefer to sit down with print-business leaders to identify the specific business challenges they face today, such as how to become more efficient, sell more output, and discover new revenue streams.
“Some technology we deploy with our customers may have AI built in,” said Saalfeld. “Or it may not. It all comes down to choosing the right tool or the right people to accomplish the right task.”
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay attention to what’s happening with AI.
“When the personal computer first came out in the 1980s, it was OK if you didn’t get one for the first 5 years or so. But after 5 years you probably needed one. The adoption rate for the Internet and email was probably about 3 years,” said Saalfeld. “But AI is moving so fast, I think anyone who is in business today is well advised to start their own experimentation, become familiar with the topic, and keep up with the advancements.”
About Toby Saalfeld
Toby Saalfeld is Senior Director, Portfolio Marketing Business Partner at Ricoh USA, aligning go‑to‑market strategy for Production Printing across hardware, software, and services. He brings an enterprise AI adoption mindset to the printing industry and translates emerging AI capabilities into practical, measurable outcomes across workflows, automation, and commercial execution. His approach blends deep print-industry expertise with a pragmatic, business-first view of AI, prioritizing real-world use cases, responsible adoption, and impact over hype.
About Ricoh USA
RICOH USA is an information management and digital services company. Over the past 80 years, they have helped customer-focused organizations use innovations to adapt to change and create more meaningful human experiences.
A key player in the digital transformation of printing, Ricoh’s Commercial Printing & Industrial Printing division provides production print equipment, systems, and support services that help businesses capitalize on the best innovations in print and marketing communications.
For example, RICOH’s top-of-the-line RICOH Pro VC80000 inkjet digital web press uses internal sensors, advanced machine learning, and a strategic combination of workflow automation and AI. These labor-saving innovations increase image quality, color consistency, and equipment uptime.
Ricoh’s Strategic Consulting
Ricoh’s consulting team can help enterprises and organizations of all sizes overcome challenges in innovation, strategy, expansion, process optimization, organizational transformation, and data-supported decision-making. For more information, visit: https://www.ricoh-usa.com/en/services-and-solutions/strategic-consulting-services.