Ayelet Szabo-Melamed · Vice President Marketing · XMPie

At PRINTING United 2026 in Las Vegas, Wayne Beckett catches up with our good friends from XMPie to talk about personalization, automation — and why the two increasingly have to work together.

XMPie has long been known for variable data and personalized communication, but personalization today extends far beyond changing a name or an image on a printed piece.

If you already have customer data, XMPie can use it to create personalized direct mail, email and multi-channel campaigns where different touchpoints work together. But the journey can also start without knowing the recipient at all.

A QR code on packaging, a poster or another printed product can become the starting point for a digital interaction. The recipient identifies themselves, enters a journey and can subsequently receive personalized print, digital communication — or even AI-generated content and personalized video.

At PRINTING United, XMPie is demonstrating that philosophy across several partnerships on the show floor, working with companies including Xerox, Canon, Enfocus and Duplo.

One of the most interesting examples combines XMPie, Enfocus and Canon in a completely automated workflow where a user uploads information and an image, AI helps create personalized content, and the workflow ultimately produces customized printed products without manual production intervention.

And this is where automation becomes essential.

Personalization can create enormous value, but it also creates complexity. Producing hundreds or thousands of individually different jobs cannot depend on people manually moving files between systems. Web-to-print, personalization, prepress, production and finishing increasingly need to communicate automatically.

For XMPie, partnerships are therefore becoming just as important as the personalization technology itself. Connecting with workflow platforms such as Enfocus Switch allows printers to integrate XMPie into the production environments they already have rather than creating another isolated system.

Wayne also asks whether PSPs fully understand what is now possible.

Most understand that automation is essential for profitability and that personalization at scale requires it. But the opportunity becomes considerably bigger when print providers start combining physical and digital touchpoints rather than treating direct mail, email, web and video as separate channels.

And perhaps that is also one of the ways print can become more interesting to a new generation.

Data, AI, automation, creative applications — and print as part of a much broader communication experience.

Watch Wayne Beckett’s conversation with XMPie at PRINTING United 2026 in Las Vegas.