HP tries resuscitating plummeting printer sales with AI-enhanced printing features — Perfect Output helps trim web pages and combines data

On September 24, during HP Imagine 2024, HP revealed in a blog post that it would be introducing HP Print AI and AI-enhanced features like Perfect Output that will enhance the printing features of its machines. The cloud-based HP Scan AI Enhanced feature intended for commercial users also has “expanded availability,” a new Build Workspace feature is aimed at design and construction professionals to make tasks like field reports and other collaborative work easier, if not automated.

The highlight of the announcement is definitely “Perfect Output.” As HP says, more than half of print jobs come from web browsers, but these prints are often undesirable due to the inclusion of advertisements, oddly scaled images, or excessive white space. Perfect Output “bridges the gaps between what people see on the screen and what they intend to print,” reformatting pages in real-time for each print job to focus on just the needed information.

The kinds of improvements one can expect from Perfect Output aren’t just limited to trimming content from pages. You can also combine spreadsheets spread across multiple pages into a single, clean page and graphic.

When you can expect to start using these features, HP Print AI is already available as an exclusive beta of Perfect Output to “select print customers,” the launch will continue throughout 2025. HP Build Workspace and HP Scan AI Enhanced are also available. Build Workspace has additional AI capabilities in beta in the US and Europe and is expected to roll out worldwide in Spring 2025. Meanwhile, HP Scan AI is only available in North America, “most of Europe and Latin America, and parts of Asia.”

Overall, this does seem like a helpful way to leverage AI technology for printers. However, many features seem more about utilizing AI power in the cloud than AI power on-device. This makes sense, though, especially since we’re talking about printers that don’t have much processing power— unless we’re headed to a future where even standard printers have CPUs and NPUs, which seems quite expensive and unlikely.