Leveraging the Physicality of Packaging in a Post-AI World

Published: June 30, 2026

By Ryan Chai, Category Lead, Labels and Packaging at Nobelus

You are going to fail.

That’s what they’ve been saying. The doomsayers and the doubters. The media and the tech gurus. AI will consume labor and collapse prices. The machine will do your job faster, cheaper, and without you. For a printer watching margins compress and decorated packages get commoditized both domestically and abroad, it is easy to believe them.

But I don't.

After more than 25 years in labels and packaging, I have learned that the only people certain to fail are those who hand their future over to forces they refuse to understand. The question is not whether the ground is shifting. 

It is. AI is creating a paradigm shift where printers who embrace the physical nature of packaging will come out on top. 

The true question is this: Will you fall victim to uncontrollable forces or rise to the challenge and thrive?

Design elements are levers and tools deployed deliberately to differentiate products on the shelf. Image courtesy of Nobelus

The Inflection Point is Real

The world has been turned upside down almost overnight with buzzwords like artificial intelligence, tokens, GPTs, inference, and automation. From the start of my journey in labels and packaging, I have longed to improve operational efficacy, speed to market, and brand capability. Coming from a digital-first production environment, I saw just-in-time automation and software from a fresh perspective compared to traditional flexographic workflows. With the advent of AI, I find myself once again wondering what unexpected possibilities the future may hold for our industry.

We are facing a significant inflection point. Between growing pricing pressure, increasing commoditization, and supply chain insecurity peppered by global upheaval, what is a printer to do?

I believe margin improvement and growth for our industry will naturally arise as we carefully fuse AI into systems that have historically been difficult to scale. I imagine a future where packaging engineering is just as accessible to a startup converter as it is to Nestlé. Where supply chain optimizations, intelligent packaging design, and digital printing ecosystems work together to produce packaging at the speed of creative thought. I see wasted time between multiple turns for proofing, sign-off, spec refinement and selection, and art creation collapse into a simple push of a button. This disruption will account for billions of dollars in value for our industry.

This is not wishful thinking. The productivity shift is already measurable. In controlled studies, professionals using AI completed a quarter more work in a quarter less time, and generative AI in packaging is forecasted to compound at better than 25% a year. The tools to collapse the proofing loop started shipping last year. The speed I am describing is not coming soon. It is already here.

Speed is Not the Prize

Here is the part the doomsayers miss.

When everyone can generate a beautiful design instantly for free with infinite variety, design stops being the thing that sets you apart. AI does not just make good work faster. It makes good work ordinary. The screen floods. Every brand will have Nestlé-grade engineering, and so Nestlé-grade engineering will no longer stand out.

When the digital layer becomes free and infinite, value does not disappear. It gets reallocated. It moves to the one place AI cannot follow: off the screen to the shelf. Value is infused into the object a human being picks up, turns over in their hand, and cannot scroll past.

Think about where buying decisions are still made. Most of them happen at the shelf, in the physical world, in the few seconds a person spends deciding which product to reach for. Packaging design influences most of those decisions, and no algorithm has ever generated the feel of a soft-touch laminate or a foil edge catching the light. You cannot prompt your way to texture. The tactile, the three-dimensional, the decorative — these elements are inherently analog. They are the only aspects of a package that AI cannot make for you.

The faster AI commoditizes design, the more valuable the finish becomes. AI is not the enemy of embellishment. It is the greatest tailwind embellishment has ever had.

AI is creating a paradigm shift where printers who embrace the physical nature of packaging will come out on top. Image courtesy of Nobelus

The Pendulum Always Swings

My experience in the industry has revealed a certain fact the doomsayers never account for: Consumer taste sits on a pendulum.

Societal curiosity and preference swing every decade. The rare becomes coveted; the ubiquitous becomes invisible. We have lived through loud years and quiet years, the maximal and the minimal. Through it all, the pendulum has never once stopped in the middle.

Picture where this is heading. As AI makes elaborate artwork cheap and universal, store shelves will become packed with noisy designs. Brands will need to balance this and employ other elements to be distinct. 

This is the mindset shift I am asking our industry to make. Embellishment is not about embellishment. A soft-touch matte, a high-build gloss, a cold-foil accent, a clean uncoated white — these are not decorations to pile on for their own sake. They are levers and tools deployed deliberately to differentiate on shelf. The converter who understands that is no longer guessing at trends. They are reading the pendulum and reaching for the right lever at the right moment. Sometimes that means more flash, and sometimes, powerfully, it means less.

What Kind of Printer Do You Want to Become?

We probably have only a few years to answer this question before market forces bear down on us, and at that point, it may be too late to capitalize on the shift that opened these market-share opportunities.

Those who resist the change will find themselves scraping for margin in an ever more competitive market. But for those who lean in, the path is clear, and it is not the path the doomsayers warned you about. The future is not man versus machine. The future is the printer who lets AI collapse everything on the screen — the proofing, the spec, the variants, the wasted time between every step — and turns that speed into something a person can hold.

Become the brand's physical layer. Be the partner who takes an idea moving at the speed of thought and makes it an object worth reaching for. Let the machine handle the screen. We will own the shelf with intention, with craft, and with the right lever pulled at the right time.

You are going to fail, they said.

I think this is the best moment to be a converter I’ve seen in my career. The doomsayers are describing a world where we did nothing. That is not the world we live in.

The levers are here. Will you pick them up?

About the Author

Ryan Chai is the Category Lead, Labels and Packaging at Nobelus. Nobelus supplies the finishing toolkit for converters who intend to win the shelf: specialty laminating films, soft-touch films, and high-build, foil-receptive, and embellishment-ready substrates along with PE thermal sealants, all at low minimums with hands-on solutions support built for the quick-turn market. Visit: https://nobelus.com/ 

Sources

• AI productivity (consulting RCT — ~12% more tasks, ~25% faster; engineering RCT n=4,867 — 26% more output; McKinsey on automatable work): McKinsey — Economic potential of generative AI
• Generative-AI-in-packaging market (~25–29% CAGR): Towards Packaging — Generative AI in Packaging Market
• Packaging design influences purchase (~72%): Ipsos — Packaging Design Influences Purchase Decisions
• Majority of buying decisions made in-store (~60–70%): JohnsByrne — How Packaging Influences Consumer Behavior