Old Jim will predict that within five years, AI, or Artificial Intelligence, will start to make gigantic inroads into the medical and legal professions.  

When AI hits these professions, it will affect the last two large consumers of Uncoated Free Sheet and other office grades.

Background:  Artificial Intelligence has been a dream for a long time, going back to "2001: A Space Odyssey" and earlier.  It is becoming real and making inroads into simple tasks.

Soon, AI capabilities will begin first to assist and then eclipse the human capabilities of doctors and lawyers, the two "on-your-feet," brainiest professions in the world.  The human mind simply will not be able to keep up with the memory, reasoning and logic capabilities of computers.  

This will be good for consumers.  We will receive better service at much lower cost than in depending on select and specially trained humans, subject to all the frailties of humans.

For investors in the pulp and paper industry, the news will not be so good.  In fact, it will be more of the same we have been hearing about the printing and writing grades for years--more consumption shrinkage.

The thinking goes like this.  Doctors and lawyers are some of the last holdouts from moving to fully electronic offices.  This is especially true of older doctors and lawyers who were brought up on paper forms and legal pads.  We are already starting to see some generational decline as the older retire and the iPad generation enters these professions.

However, when AI takes over, and again, this is just around the corner, the printed word will slip into being a thing of the past.

Already I see it in my own care.  Last year my care giver, the Emory Clinic and Hospital System here in Atlanta, provided me with my own portal.  I can ask my doctor to refill prescriptions, which he does and sends electronically to my pharmacy, so the paper is already out of this activity.  AI is going to take the doctor out of this loop soon.  But this is just a start--AI diagnostics are just around the corner.

In the legal profession, the rows and rows of bound legal reference books are already gone.  AI's first contribution will be to produce research without the aid of a paralegal and the ubiquitous note pad.

More will follow in both professions.

If you are following companies producing printing and writing grades, at their next investor presentation, you just may want to ask where their investment in servicing the legal and medical professions stands and how they see it unfolding in the future.