Management consulting firm Bain & Co has released its 2026 Paper & Packaging Report, which states that paper and packaging companies have been aiming to improve industrial performance through focusing on capacity decisions, protecting commercial margins and accelerating adoption of AI-enabled efficiency and effectiveness improvements.
The company’s report notes that overcapacity issues are structural and that companies must understand ‘true relative cash cost per tonne vs. competition – grade-by-grade and mill-by-mill’ – to make effective decisions. To overcome these issues, Bain & Co say companies allocate more volume to the most profitable customers, products and geographies. They also employ a ‘laser-focused’ approach when mapping out production site options, considering the system-wide implications of potential closures and conversions.
When it comes to improving efficiency, AI is said to make maintenance ‘predictive and prescriptive’ for companies, reducing failures, downtime and labour costs. In addition, it apparently increases tool-in-hand time by 15 percentage points and reduces maintenance cost per tonne by 17–23%.
The report outlines three pillars of smart maintenance: asset strategy, work productivity and spare parts optimization, as well as diagnostic, development, ramp-up and scaling transformation. Bain & Co claims that spare-parts optimization alone can reduce inventory requirements by 20–40%, freeing up working capital.
The research also shows that AI-powered tools such as web scraping and geospatial analytics are increasingly being used to identify new demand clusters and growth pockets. The 2026 Paper & Packaging Report also explores substrate shifts, sustainability expectations, consolidation trends and supply chain redesigns.
In the packaging design space, Colgate-Palmolive announced it will be using Erthos’ AI-powered materials discovery platform to inform its sustainability-minded packaging developments. The platform will present ‘hundreds’ of industry biopolymers, additives, and naturally occurring polymers by their performance, cost, and compliance.
PepsiCo recently revealed a multi-year collaboration with Siemens and NVIDIA, aiming to transform its plant and supply chain operations through advanced digital twin technology and AI. PepsiCo says it is shifting to a digital-first planning strategy, leveraging physics-based digital twins and AI agents as co-designers to simulate, validate, and optimize facility layouts before any physical build.
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