For decades, scale was a moat. The biggest producers had the most machines, the deepest benches, and the pricing knowledge locked inside a few senior estimators. FESPA Expo 2026 in Barcelona made it clear that the moat is draining. AI is leveling the playing field, and the smaller, faster producers know it.
Marcus Boijemyr, our Chief Product Officer, made that point on the FESPA AI panel, and it was the line that traveled furthest across the show. AI lets smaller companies compete with much larger ones. One panelist walked straight to our stand afterward to keep the conversation going.
But leveling is the headline, not the mechanism. The producers closing the gap are not the ones adding the most AI. They are the ones who stopped scattering it across a dozen tools and centralized on one platform.
FESPA published its 2026 Print Census the day the show opened, naming three problems holding the industry back: e-commerce and web-to-print integration, workforce and skills gaps, and pricing pressure on margins. Notice what is missing. Print speed. The bottleneck has moved off the machine and into the systems feeding it.
That leaves every producer with one choice. Accumulate, by buying a separate tool each time a new problem appears, smart on its own until the handoff between two of them breaks. Or integrate, by putting operations on one connected layer where estimating, production, procurement, logistics, and invoicing all run AI-enabled and flow into each other without anyone rekeying anything. Take onboarding, the pain owners kept describing, weeks lost wiring up storefronts: Store Link for web-to-print and e-commerce closes that gap at the front door, and it is one piece of a layer where every step works the same connected way. The leverage is in the connections, not the steps. It is the horizontal thinking Henrik Müller-Hansen, Gelato's CEO, has argued for all year, and FESPA was where the industry caught up to him.
The most useful conversations were not with vendors. They were with operators, and they brought numbers and conviction in equal measure.
Charlie Saunders, CEO of TidyMerch, joined the FESPA AI panel and was direct about why he consolidated. He chose GelatoConnect because he did not want to spread AI across ten separate tools. TidyMerch doubled output in 2024 without adding machines or staff.
Amit Kumar of We Must, the largest DTF producer in Canada, had a blunter message for the room. Get on the platform now, before it is too late. We Must fulfilled 20,000 orders in their first month live and bought a second production machine within two weeks.
Stephan Steiner has run GSB Digital in New York for 34 years, the last three rebuilding it around software. He processes thousands of orders a day now without his team touching pre-press, job ticketing, or estimating. "They're just flowing," he said. "That's quite powerful." Then the line that captures where this is all heading: "One of my colleagues said the other day that GSB is becoming so much more a tech company than a print company. I thought that was very telling."
Different sizes, geographies, and product mixes. The same pattern underneath. Centralize on one AI-native platform, then grow without adding cost. The numbers back it up: with GelatoConnect Estimator, ESP Colour runs 200+ estimates a day, each in 15 seconds, saving 108 hours of quoting effort weekly, and BSG used instant quoting to win a £750,000 tender.
It comes down to one decision. Am I integrating, or just accumulating? One feels like progress until the next handoff breaks. The other is what separates the shops winning these conversations from the ones losing jobs before the quote even goes out.
At FESPA we also gave attendees an early look at GelatoConnect One, the AI-native layer that brings the parts of an operation still running on quoting, the estimates, the job tickets, the manual handoffs, onto the same connected layer as everything else. It is in early access now, with more to come.
We pulled the full debrief into a 30-minute session: what we saw, what changed, and what to do in the next twelve months.
Watch the recording: After FESPA. How AI just leveled the playing field in print production.