The packaging industry is standing in its own riptide moment.
Demand is shifting. Supply chains are unstable. Customer expectations keep moving. Demographics are changing. And AI is advancing faster than most of us have seen in our careers.
Any one of these, on its own, is manageable. All of them hitting at once is a different problem entirely.
I borrowed that framing from Jonathan Brill, futurist and author of AI and the Octopus Organization. He spoke at the Flexible Packaging Association recently and called these “colliding currents.” For converters, they land harder than almost any other industry right now.
And AI has arrived right in the middle of all of it.