Episode 25 of Above the Treeline features Andy Keller, a 42-year veteran of USAA Insurance who began his career in 1984 as part of a government-sponsored IT co-op program and retired as a Technical Architect Lead. Over four decades, Keller worked across core claims systems, document composition, image capture, e-delivery, cloud migration, and enterprise modernization initiatives.

With renewed conflict in the Middle East and American service members once again deployed into harm’s way, it feels appropriate to pause and acknowledge the families who carry that weight.

USAA was built to serve them.

As a non-veteran member of USAA, my connection is through family. My father served in the Marine Corps. My wife’s father served in the Army. Like many members, our relationship to USAA is generational. It is rooted not only in financial products, but in service.

Because long before “digital transformation” became an industry strategy deck, USAA was solving a practical problem: how do you serve members who may be anywhere in the world, often far from home, often in unstable environments, and still ensure continuity of their financial lives?

That question shaped architecture. It shaped communications. And, in this episode Andy Keller makes clear, it pushed USAA toward digital access decades before much of the broader customer communications industry began to move.

From COBOL to Cloud

Keller entered USAA at a time when customer communications were inseparable from mainframe logic. COBOL, PL/I, assembler, JCL. Xerox MetaCode driving print streams. AFP conversion. Automated document factories. Inserters. Postal optimization.

Paper was not a channel choice. It was infrastructure.

One of his early assignments involved what would later become a precursor to digital document rendering: capturing output, overlaying data, managing fonts via XY coordinates, and enabling internal service representatives to view member documents electronically. That work predated widespread internet adoption.

The architectural seeds of digital were present long before the market language caught up.

Digital as Operational Necessity

USAA’s founding constraint serving military families who could be deployed anywhere in the world shaped its communications strategy long before “digital transformation” became an industry phrase.

Keller was part of the team that helped implement USAA’s early electronic delivery capabilities. By the early 2000s, the organization was delivering policies and statements through web and mobile platforms. Adoption was slow and steady—approximately three percent per year over two decades, until digital became the behavioral norm.

Today, digital adoption exceeds 70 percent. More importantly, the cultural posture has shifted. Paper is no longer presumed. It is optional.

The Regulatory Gate

Keller describes the most significant early barrier not as technical, but legal. Compliance teams interpreted statutory language such as “written notice” as inherently requiring physical mail.

Only when regulatory clarity explicitly permitted electronic delivery did institutional momentum accelerate.

This is a recurring pattern across regulated industries. Technology capability precedes regulatory comfort. The constraint is interpretation, not innovation.

The Seven-Foot Stack

One memory Keller shared is instructive: a member once stacked every piece of USAA mail received over time. The pile stood roughly seven and a half feet tall.

That visual reframes the direct mail debate.

From the sender’s perspective, each piece fulfilled an obligation or represented opportunity. From the recipient’s perspective, it accumulated as volume. As waste.

As digital access matured, paper increasingly became triage sorted over a recycling bin, with only urgency determining survival.

The authority of the printed artifact erodes when redundancy became visible.

Charging for Paper

USAA experimented for years with incentives to encourage electronic adoption. The inflection point came when paper statements carried a modest monthly fee and digital adoption jumped materially from 3–4% to 7% or more.

The lesson is uncomfortable but clear: cost shifts behavior faster than encouragement.

As institutions approach 80 percent digital participation, similar economic signals will likely become even more common.

Obligation vs. Opportunity

Keller frames the internal divide as obligation versus opportunity.

Operational communications such policies, disclosures, statements are compliance bound. Marketing communications pursue growth and brand reinforcement.

Historically, these streams operated in parallel stacks. Different systems. Different governance. Different incentives.

The unresolved challenge is integration: how to fragment content dynamically for experience optimization while maintaining regulator-approved language structures that were designed for fixed layouts and immutable pagination.

This becomes not a print-versus-digital debate, but an orchestration problem.

The Postal Dimension

Keller also served for decades in local public office, including as mayor of a small Texas municipality. That dual exposure of enterprise architecture and public governance shaped his view of institutional inertia.

The Postal Service, constitutionally embedded, is not obsolete. But its operating assumptions were built for a correspondence era. Return mail volume such as checks mailed back to billers was the first major collapse. Electronic bill presentment and payment removed a foundational volume from the postal stream.

The next shift is subtler: as transactional communications become digitally default, physical mail concentrates into parcels, logistics, and selective high-value touchpoints.

AI: Accelerator, Not Apocalypse

From Keller’s technical perspective, AI is less existential than evolutionary.

Its most immediate value lies in interrogating legacy systems, extracting business rules embedded in decades-old code, and accelerating modernization cycles that historically stalled under technical debt.

Insurance products often contain state-specific logic encoded in languages whose original authors have long retired. AI’s opportunity is institutional memory recovery.

The risk is governance complacency. Garbage in, garbage out still applies. AI does not absolve accountability.

The Default Is Moving

Andy Keller’s career arc from mainframe-based document factories to cloud-based digital orchestration mirrors the broader shift underway across regulated industries.

Paper began as infrastructure.Digital began as an accommodation.Digital is now becoming the default.

The decisive transition is not channel substitution. It is authority migration. It is gravity pulling the center of customer communications to a new place.

When the mobile interface becomes the starting point of the customer relationship, gravity shifts upstream into data, orchestration logic, compliance architecture, and AI-assisted intelligence layers.

USAA was built to serve members at a distance.A century later, that distance remains, and connecting matters more than ever.

Notice

Special thanks to Andy for his time and insights. It should be stated that Andy’s opinion’s are his own and do not reflect the position or views of USAA Insurance.

When I sat down with Ernie Crawford, President and CEO of Crawford Technologies, I wasn’t expecting such a personal story to launch our discussion on digital accessibility. But it was his mother’s declining vision and a stack of unreadable investment statements that ultimately helped shape a technology platform now used by some of the world’s largest banks, healthcare companies, and service providers.

In this first in-person, audio podcast episode 22 of Above the Treeline, Ernie and I unpack what “Accessibility as a Service” really means today. It’s no longer just about meeting ADA or WCAG requirements. It’s about automation, real-time delivery, customer experience, and increasingly, machine readability in an AI-driven world.

Crawford Technologies deserves real credit for helping lead the accessibility conversation across the CCM industry. Long before it became a regulatory flashpoint or an RFP requirement, Ernie and his team were building the tools, platforms, and education that helped make digital accessibility a strategic priority. Now celebrating its 30th anniversary, CrawfordTech has established itself as a trusted partner to over 2,000 organizations on six continents, consistently earning top marks for innovation, service, and customer satisfaction

That longevity is paying off: the company reported record revenues in 2025, with a 41% year-over-year increase in accessibility services and 47% growth in European markets. A significant share of that momentum is being driven by expanding adoption of AccessibilityNow Translate and increased demand for scalable, cloud-based SaaS delivery models

More than a technology story, it’s also a story of sustained leadership. CrawfordTech marked its anniversary with a reaffirmed commitment to solving complex customer communication challenges delivering innovation with a human touch.

Key Takeaways

Accessibility goes beyond complianceAccessibility is no longer just a legal checkbox. It improves SEO, supports machine agents, and strengthens CX. As Ernie put it, “The approach we take is to make it both accessible and usable”

Large print is not just a font changeIt’s full recomposition. Following Clear Print standards, Crawford reduces the bloat while maintaining readability typically 2.5x expansion in the number of printed pages instead of 9x.

The next frontier: multilanguage PDFsOne PDF, multiple layers, multiple languages selectable by screen reader or viewer. Crawford is working with industry experts like Duff Johnson and PDF Association to make this both usable and testable across platforms.

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Accessibility isn’t just for the disabled, it’s for the agents, too.

In a future where machines read and act on our content, proper tagging and structure will define how organizations deliver value, stay compliant, and compete. If you’re a service provider and not already offering accessibility, it might be time to start.

This is just a slice of what Ernie and I covered—from the flaws in composition engines to the realities of batch versus real-time remediation. It’s a must-listen for anyone in the customer communications, print service, or compliance tech space.

Sneak Peak: Industry Summit, April 8–9 in Orlando

Crawford Technologies and Madison Advisors are teaming up for an expanded edition of last year’s successful industry roundtable. Expect deep dives on regulatory shifts, document tech strategy, and AI’s growing role in content accessibility. Hear why he believe it is this years must-attend CCM event.

Final Thoughts

The world of customer communications is evolving—and accessibility is no longer optional. As Ernie shared, whether it’s responding to regulatory pressure, delivering a better customer experience, or enabling AI-driven document intelligence, accessibility is now table stakes. Service providers and enterprise tech teams have a real opportunity here—not just to comply, but to compete.

Interested in having your company featured on Above the Treeline?

We’re always looking for sharp perspectives and innovative voices shaping the global future of customer experience, communications, compliance, and AI-related technology. If you’ve got a story worth telling, let’s talk.

Reach out to [email protected], connect with me directly on LinkedIn.

I recently had a great conversation with Duff Johnson from the PDF Association. Duff has spent his career advocating for PDF, and for good reason. PDF has been one of the most important and enduring standards in enterprise communications.

I’ve personally spent more than 30 years working with PDF and Adobe Acrobat, going back to the early days when simply being able to preserve layout digitally was transformational.

So this conversation with Alan Berger is not about whether PDF is good or bad. It’s about asking a different question.

Is the document of record inseparable from the page, or are there now compliant alternatives that better align with how customers and systems interact today?

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For decades, regulated customer communications have followed a familiar pattern.

A document is created, delivered and archived.A checkmark for compliance.

That model made sense in a paper-first world where proof of delivery was the primary objective. Proof that something was sent. Proof that it was printed. Proof that it could be retrieved years later if needed.

But the world around those communications is changing.

In my recent Above the Treeline podcast conversation with Alan Berger, CEO of InfoSlips North America, we kept returning to the same realization. The industry is not being held back by technology. It is being held back by a mindset that still treats communications as the end of the process rather than part of an ongoing relationship. A conversation.

This is not a debate about whether PDFs are good or bad. PDFs remain an important and reliable workhorse across regulated industries. The issue is more subtle and more consequential.

The problem emerges when page-based, document-centric thinking becomes the ceiling for digital progress.

When the page became the experience

Most regulated communications today are still shaped by their print origins.

The same file that once drove a printer is now delivered through a portal or an email notification. From an operational perspective, very little has changed. Only the transport mechanism is different.

From a compliance standpoint, the requirement may be satisfied, but from a customer standpoint, the experience often feels disconnected from everything else.

Customers engage with organizations through mobile apps, websites, alerts, and messaging channels that are responsive and contextual. When a statement, policy notice, or regulatory disclosure arrives as a static artifact, the contrast is immediate.

In my conversation with Alan, he described how regulated communications are often viewed as a sunk cost. Something the business has to do, not something it can learn from, improve, or design around customer understanding.

As a result, these communications frequently sit outside digital transformation programs, outside customer experience strategies, and outside AI roadmaps.

What regulation actually requires

One of the most persistent myths in this industry is that regulation mandates a specific format.

In reality, most regulations focus on outcomes, not file types. They emphasize immutability, audit readiness, authentication, retention, and accessibility. They do not require information to be delivered as a page-based document, just that they are “written communications” or “in writing.” This distinction matters.

From a UK perspective, the direction of travel is becoming clearer through the FCA’s Consumer Duty framework and the more recent PS25/13 policy statement. Together, they indicate a shift away from fire-and-forget communications toward proof and performance.

The regulator is no longer focused solely on whether information was sent. Increasingly, firms are expected to demonstrate that communications support customer understanding and appropriate outcomes.

Electronic delivery becomes the default not because digital is convenient, but because digital enables evidence. Evidence enables testing. Testing enables improvement.

Digital delivery is not digital experience

Many organizations believe they have modernized because they reduced print volumes or moved customers to online portals.

But placing a PDF behind a login screen does not create a digital experience. It simply relocates a legacy artifact.

For customers, especially on mobile devices, long documents can feel more like images than information. They are difficult to navigate, difficult to interpret, and disconnected from the moment the customer is trying to resolve.

Most communications were built to optimize production and distribution, not comprehension and interaction.

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Strategic distance and why leaders are pulling ahead

This issue becomes even clearer when viewed alongside broader global banking transformation.

In its research on how retail banks build strategic distance, McKinsey & Co describes how leading institutions are separating themselves from competitors through digital capabilities that reshape customer experience, not just operational efficiency.

The consistent message is that differentiation no longer comes from products alone. It comes from how effectively organizations design and connect customer journeys.

Digital leaders do not modernize one part of the experience while leaving others frozen in time.

Rethinking the document of record

The document of record still matters. Immutability still matters. Auditability still matters.

What changes is how the customer interacts with that information.

Instead of freezing experience at the moment of composition, communications can be structured in ways that allow them to adapt across devices, support accessibility by default, and present information in context.

The record remains intact, but the experience becomes dynamic.

This distinction becomes even more important as AI and agent-driven experiences begin to shape how people interact with information. Agents do not read pages. They work with structure, context, and meaning.

From documents to understanding

At its core, this is not a file format discussion. It is a purpose discussion.

Is the goal simply to deliver information, or is it to ensure understanding?

When communications are designed around understanding, they can reduce confusion, lower call center demand, improve satisfaction, and strengthen trust. When they are designed solely around output, they quietly introduce friction at exactly the wrong moment.

The traditional model of produce, send, archive is not wrong. It is just no longer enough.

Andy’s Thoughts

The future of regulated communications will not be defined by whether something is paper or digital, PDF or not PDF. It will be defined by whether the communication helps someone understand what matters to them at the moment they need it.

Compliance will always matter. Records will always matter.

But selecting a channel and checking a box is no longer the finish line.

The organizations that pull ahead will be the ones willing to look beyond the page.

That shift is already underway.

The TCM channel is currently featuring 9 to 5, and my wife told me I was nuts when I said I really wanted to watch the Xerox room scene, record and write about it.

She’s probably right.

For most people, 9 to 5 is remembered for its sharp commentary on workplace sexism, power dynamics, and the early push for women’s advancement in a male-dominated corporate world. Released in 1980, it arrived at a hinge moment. Carter giving way to Reagan. The Equal Rights Amendment still unresolved.

Important topics.

But for me, it was always the copier.

I was a “moron” running the Xerox machine.

That Xerox room scene captured something very real about the time. Before email. Before digital workflows. Before the internet was even a concept most people could articulate. Paper was the network. Copying was how information moved. We couldn’t imagine it any other way.

At the time, this was state-of-the-art high-speed document reproduction, what we simply called copying. Pure analog engineering, designed to move paper as fast as physics would allow.

And I can still hear it.120 clicks per minute.Two each second.Echoing in my head decades later.

I especially love the background details in the scene, like the reference to “Father Dominic” on the bulletin board. He was famous for Xerox ads in the early ’80s. “It’s a miracle!” It was a wink to an era when these machines felt almost magical. We almost had him come to our small print operation for the PR, but it never worked out.

This was all before personal computers were common. Mobile devices like the ones we carry today existed only as science fiction fantasies on Star Trek.

I wanted to work for Xerox. It was my professional goal. Our sales rep was the coolest guy I knew. Three-piece suit. Gold-rimmed glasses. Confident. Snappy. Working for one of the most innovation companies in existence

We also had our Xerox technicians, who were more like family. They kept everything running, no matter how hard we pushed the machines. There’s even a story about one of the characters in the movie marrying the Xerox repair guy. It didn’t happen on screen, but it says everything about how central these machines and the people who kept them running really were to offices and businesses around the world.

As a teenager, I fed a Model 9500, very similar to the modified Model 9400 shown in the movie scene. By “fed,” I mean constant monitoring. There were 50 collater bins, so 300 copies of a book or manual were required six runs. New “originals,” as we called them, were reloaded at regular intervals. Paper trays refilled. Interface reprogrammed.

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When needed, we ran 24/7, pushing close to a million copies per machine a week. These machines were beasts. If you knew how to polish or change a photoreceptor belt, string new corona wires, or replace developer and feeder belts, you were golden.

I learned all of that at Advanced Customer Training (ACT) at the Xerox campus in Leesburg, Virginia. I was eighteen years old. I was in heaven, surrounded by the most advanced analog copier technology in the world. I would later return to Leesburg for training on the Xerox 5080 engineering copier.

That same core imaging engine also powered the Xerox 9700 laser printer, a machine that quietly launched countless companies in the customer communications space. What began as the 9700 users group evolved into XPLOR, the “Xerox Printer Liaison Organization”, becoming independent from Xerox in 1983.

An entire ecosystem and a culture formed around moving information on paper at scale. But like the 9400 copier featured in the movie, that era faded with time and changes in technology. XPLOR ceased operations in 2025.

A lot has changed since 1980. Copying books and manuals now feels as strange as using a phone book. But the Xerox room scene fro 9 to 5 still sticks with me.

It reminds me how deeply technology and culture are intertwined and how profoundly both can change in nearly 50 years.

Any other Xerox room “morons” out there who can still hear those clicks? Love to hear your stories.

You can watch the full clip on YouTube here:

One of the more fascinating conversations I’ve had in a long time didn’t start with AI, agents, or customer experience buzzwords. It started with a LinkedIn post about preserving intellectual knowledge.

That article, “The Vanishing Wisdom: The Knowledge Tapped Between Two Ears,” was written by Annemarie Pucher, CEO of ISIS Papyrus Group, and it immediately got my attention. Not because it was provocative, but because it articulated something I’ve watched enterprises struggle with for years, and have experienced firsthand when experts with decades of knowledge and judgment retire or walk out the door.

What followed was a wide-ranging conversation that made one thing very clear. Papyrus Software hasn’t been chasing where the CCM market says it’s going. They’ve been quietly building for where enterprises eventually have to go.

Before “Agents” Had a Name

Papyrus came out of the same origins as many long-standing CCM vendors in the late 1980s: mainframes, printers, Xerox 9700s, and direct-to-output architectures. But instead of staying anchored to output, they moved early into something most of the market resisted at the time: process.

A document without a process, as Annemarie put it bluntly, is worth nothing.

By the early 2000s, Papyrus was already closing the loop between inbound and outbound communications, integrating data capture, classification, and automation while most organizations insisted those worlds should stay separate.

Then came a detail that feels almost surreal in hindsight. In 2008, Papyrus patented what they called a user-trained agent. At the time, nobody really knew what to do with agents. The industry didn’t have language for it. There was no category to put it in.

Today, everyone is talking about agents.

The Enterprise as a Living System

I really love the way Annemarie describes the enterprise. Not as a stack or a collection of tools, but as a living system. More like a doctor diagnosing a patient than an architect assembling components.

Documents, data, and processes aren’t separate domains in this view. They are indicators. Evidence of decisions. Traces of how work actually gets done, including all the exceptions, workarounds, and human judgment that never make it into formal documentation.

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This perspective matters because it reframes the problem enterprises are trying to solve today as they rush to feed LLMs and AI systems. The issue isn’t just automation. It’s visibility. It’s understanding why decisions are made, not just what happened.

That’s also where knowledge loss becomes painfully real. When experienced people leave, the rules don’t just disappear from systems. They disappear from context. From memory. From the space between two ears.

Why This Matters Right Now

It’s impossible to have this conversation in 2026 without talking about AI. But what made this discussion different with Annemarie was how grounded it was.

AI doesn’t fail because models aren’t powerful enough. It fails because enterprises lack context. Without shared language, visible rules, and clear process intent, intelligence becomes guesswork.

Papyrus’ focus on adaptive processes, business language, and ontology isn’t academic. It’s foundational. AI needs something to reason over. It needs enterprises that can describe themselves clearly and consistently.

In that sense, Papyrus wasn’t early to AI. They were early to what AI actually needs in order to work effectively.

Andy’s Take

You often hear about AI as if it is something you can bolt on at the end of an outdated process. A magic bullet that will make all things possible.

This conversation made the opposite case. Intelligence starts with understanding how work actually gets done. It starts with capturing judgment, exceptions, and intent while that knowledge still exists. AI doesn’t replace that work. It depends on it.

Too many transformation efforts fail because enterprises try to automate what they don’t truly understand. They digitize outputs without addressing the processes and decisions underneath. Then they wonder why AI projects struggle to deliver meaningful results.

Papyrus’ story is a reminder that real progress often looks boring before it looks brilliant. It doesn’t announce itself with buzzwords. It shows up quietly, years ahead of demand, waiting for the rest of the market to catch up.

There’s something appropriate about opening 2026 with a conversation recorded at the very end of 2025.

One year closing, another opening and where you stop debating tactics and start asking more fundamental questions. Not what should we improve, but what are we actually holding onto that no longer works.

That was very much the spirit of this conversation with Ray Stasieczko, host of End of the Day with Ray on YouTube.

I originally reached out to Ray with a fairly specific question: Why should print service providers be paying attention to what’s happening with the big OEMs?

That question lasted about five minutes.

From there, the discussion expanded quickly into end-user behavior, declining print volumes, AI hype versus data reality, parcels versus mailboxes, and why 2026 may be the year the industry finally runs out of room to postpone hard decisions.

What surprised me most wasn’t disagreement. It was how often Ray and I, despite coming from different vantage points, landed in the same place.

Different Lenses, the Same Conclusion

Ray and I don’t approach the industry the same way.

He tracks the business of print: OEM strategy, dealer economics, capital structures, and where hardware-centric models start to strain. I focus on print volumes and the broader migration of customer communications away from paper and into digital, interactive environments.

Yet despite those differences, we kept circling back to a shared realization:

The industry doesn’t have a value problem. It has a volume problem.

That distinction matters more than most people want to admit. Value arguments are emotional. Volume is structural.

Volume determines:

* Whether presses stay busy

* Whether service contracts make sense

* Whether consumables scale

* Whether labor models hold

* Whether capital investments can be justified

“The industry keeps talking about how valuable print is. The ecosystem doesn’t run on value, it runs on volume.”

As volume declines, even gradually, the entire economic model starts to destabilize. And no amount of optimism changes that math.

The End User Isn’t in the Mailbox Anymore

One of the most revealing moments in the conversation came when we stopped talking about equipment entirely and started talking about behavior.

Ray asked a question that felt almost too simple:

“Who the hell wants to go to their mailbox?”

That question cuts through a lot of industry noise.

People don’t avoid information.They avoid friction.

The modern end user expects communications to show up:

* Where they already are

* When it’s relevant

* In a format that’s easy to act on

That reality is why parcels and packages came up so quickly in the conversation, not as logistics, but as attention moments.

A package gets opened immediately. Mail gets sorted, stacked, ignored or thrown in the bin.

From there, the discussion moved naturally away from printed inserts and toward something much more telling:

“It’s not even going to be a printed material in the box. It’s going to be a QR code in the box.”

That single shift reframes how we should think about direct mail, advertising, and transactional communications. The opportunity isn’t about printing better. It’s about meeting the customer at the moment they’re already engaged.

Stop Dragging the Past Into the Future

A recurring frustration throughout the conversation was how much energy the industry spends trying to preserve familiar models instead of designing new ones.

Ray was direct about it:

“Everybody’s trying to drag outdated processes into the future instead of figuring out how to disrupt themselves.”

That mindset shows up everywhere:

* Digitizing legacy workflows instead of replacing them

* Using AI to automate bad processes

* Treating incremental change as transformation

The industry has become very good at selling reassurance to itself.

But reassurance doesn’t change customer behavior. And it doesn’t reverse declining volumes.

AI Isn’t the Strategy, Data Is

No year-end conversation would be complete without AI coming up, but this one avoided the usual hype entirely.

Ray’s position was clear: AI is not the problem, and it’s not the solution either.

“AI is just going to take your data and digest it. If your data’s screwed up, AI is irrelevant.”

The real issue isn’t intelligence, it’s discipline.

AI doesn’t fix broken data.It exposes it.It accelerates whatever foundation already exists.

For companies hoping AI will magically rescue outdated systems or unclear strategies, that’s a dangerous assumption.

Why 2026 Is Different

When I asked Ray what he sees coming next, his answer wasn’t about features or formats. It was about financial pressure.

“We’re going to see the money look at this industry in a whole different way.”

In Ray’s view, 2026 is when patience runs out.

That means:

* OEM shakeups become unavoidable

* Some industrial print players exit altogether

* Capital markets stop accepting “long-term transition” narratives

* Boards and private equity demand clarity, not comfort

Incrementalism won’t survive that scrutiny.

“You can’t be dragging the past into the future.”

A Personal Note

Before closing, I want to acknowledge that Ray is one of those who encouraged me to just do it, and start a podcast.

Not to wait until it was perfect. (Which is video is not!)Not to over-engineer it.Just to start having the conversations. (The best part!)

That advice stuck. These podcasts may not be polished or beautiful, but they contain something far more important: real experience, honest perspective, and conversations the industry often avoids.

For that encouragement, and for consistently saying the quiet part out loud, I’m grateful and look forward to many future conversations with Ray.

Final Thought

This conversation with Ray wasn’t about being negative on print.

It was about being honest about where communications are going and whether the industry is willing to follow them.

Communications are not disappearing. They’re relocating. Finding a new home in a digital eco-system.

2026 will reward the companies that understand that difference and challenge those that keep defending the output instead of the outcome.

Listen to the full podcast to hear where Ray and I align and what he believes is coming next for OEMs in 2026.

Because the start of ski season coincides with something we rarely talk about: a spike in struggle. As the days get darker and colder, and as life accelerates toward the holidays, many people quietly slip into depression, anxiety, isolation, or substance abuse. Some fight it in silence. Some mask it behind adventure. Some never say a word.

If you’re reading this, consider this your reminder: ask one person in your life how they’re really doing. And listen.

In this Episode #18 of Above the Treeline, I had a powerful conversation with professional skier and mental health advocate Drew Petersen, a personal hero, and someone who understands the stakes more than most.

A Conversation on Skiing, Survival, and Purpose

When Drew and I met for the first time, it didn’t take long to realize his story isn’t just about skiing. It’s about staying alive.

He told me he recently moved to Carbondale, Colorado new home, new trails, new community and that this season he’ll be skiing Aspen. We talked about the joy of the shoulder season: trail running, mountain biking, desert trips to Moab. But almost immediately, our conversation slid to something deeper: mental health, suicide, addiction, and why these topics belong everywhere, including in the mountains and in business.

When I mentioned seeing clips of his TED Talk circulating around Instagram and Facebook, he laughed at the irony:

“There’s an irony in the term ‘public speaking’ because public speaking mostly happens in private.”

His talk is reaching people. And it matters. Because as Drew put it, mental illness is everywhere. It sits in every industry. Every community. Every family.

And yes, every ski town.

Mountain Life Isn’t Just Powder Days

Living in places like Breckenridge, Park City, or Aspen looks idyllic. But as Drew explained, these communities carry some of the highest suicide rates in the country.

* Intense lifestyles with massive highs and crushing lows

* Pressure to perform or “keep up”

* Transient communities with weak support systems

* Substance abuse woven into social culture

* A stigma that tells people they should be “living the dream,” so why admit they’re struggling?

For me, Drew’s stories hit me personally. They reminded me of my son Alex, and of how many young people, especially those drawn to mountains, speed, and adventure battle something invisible beneath the surface.

Drew said something that stuck with me:

“When I started to realize what was going on around me… I felt less alone. And then I felt terrified.”

You can be surrounded by beauty and still be hurting. You can be at the peak of the mountain, or like my Alex, jumping out of an airplane, and still feel the edge.

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The Role of Community: Lift Lines, Narcan, and Real Conversations

At one point, Drew and I talked about substance abuse, alcohol, opioids, fentanyl and how deeply intertwined these problems are with suicide. I shared stories of talking with strangers on chairlifts who casually mentioned meth or pills the way you’d mention après beers.

His response was direct:

“We gotta make Narcan cool.”

This is what he means:We need conversations in lift lines.We need stickers. Posters. Training.We need to normalize awareness, not bury it.We need recovery to be as visible as the next powder day advertisement.

Drew is nearly six years sober. He talks about it openly because someone needs to.

Running for His Life: Leadville and the “Why”

Most people know Drew as a professional skier featured in movies, industry ads and magazine covers. But many also know him through his film “Feel It All,” which follows his attempt to run the Leadville 100 while threading his mental health story throughout.

This year he ran Leadville again his fourth time and described it as the most fun he’s ever had running 100 miles, at 10,000 feet above sea level. (Fun?)

He also described the evolution of his “why”:

* One race was an act of self-love.

* Another was about being a vessel of love.

* All of it was about learning to love himself after years of hating himself “to his absolute core.”

Near the end of our conversation, he said something I want to carve into the top of every trailhead sign in Colorado:

“Simply by being human beings on this planet… we are all deserving of and worthy of love.”

Schools, Youth, and the Moment That Defined His Purpose

Drew has been pouring an enormous amount of energy into speaking at schools. Middle schools. High schools. Universities. Meeting Hope Squads, students nominated by peers to lead suicide-prevention programs.

In one high school gym in Idaho, Drew stood in front of 1,300 students with his film playing on the scoreboard.

He told me that during a moment in the film where he talks openly about suicidal thoughts, he looked around at those kids and felt something snap into place:

“That is the exact moment. That is my purpose on earth. It’s why I didn’t kill myself.”

That’s what resonance looks like.That’s what impact looks like.That’s what purpose looks like.

Drew lives it everyday for everyone struggling with mental health issues.

Above the Treeline: The Metaphor We Share

Toward the end, we talked about the metaphor that’s shaped both of our work.

For me, Above the Treeline is about perspective getting out of the dense forest of life and seeing clearly again.

For Drew, it’s literal. When he moved to Carbondale, the first thing he knew he needed to do was climb Mount Sopris. Peaks are places of ceremony, clarity, and transition for him.

He told me:

“Being in the alpine is where life feels the most vibrant. Where perspective shifts.”

That’s why I’m using one of his photos in the opening my keynote, a shot of him climbing a snowy ridge above the green summer valley floor. It forces people to look differently at the story I’m telling. And that’s the point.

We have to get Above The Treeline to see where we are.And sometimes to see where we’re going.And sometimes just to see that we’re not alone.

Closing Thoughts: As the Snow Falls

The ski season is beginning. We’ll wax skis, check avalanche gear, line up first chair. We’ll chase the storms, the turns, the bluebird days.

But let’s also check in with each other.

Look for changes.Ask questions.Notice silence.Reach out.Share your own story when you can.Use Drew’s story when you can’t.

And remember Drew’s final reminder:

We are all deserving of love.We are all worthy of love.No qualifier required.

Thanks to Drew for the honesty, the humor, the humanity, and for the work he does on and off the mountain.

When the snow finally starts to fly here in Colorado, I’ll head to Aspen and take Drew up on his offer: a chairlift conversation, some turns, and a big wide groomer to “let ’er rip.”

Stay safe out there.Stay connected.

And most of all stay Above The Treeline.

When Nick Keegan launched his startup a decade ago, he was building a mobile app to organize household bills. It flopped. But the idea that failed turned into one of Europe’s most interesting customer-communications stories.

Today, Mail Metrics sits at the intersection of print and digital communication platforms a digital-first technology company that also happens to be Ireland’s largest transactional printer.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because Amit Sawhney, CEO of FCI in India, described almost the same journey in an earlier podcast. Both leaders telling a similar story: technology-led firms using print as an access point to win trust, control data, and modernize how regulated communications are created, tracked, and delivered.

The Turning Point

By 2020 Mail Metrics had no presses. Then came a string of acquisitions like Persona, Fourth Communications, Dafil, and then Adare SEC giving it full control from data to delivery. Keegan discovered that transforming communications requires owning the last mile, not abandoning it.

“We thought going digital meant less print,” he told me. “It turned out the more digital we offered, the more print clients trusted us with.”

The Mail Metrics Model

Keegan rejects the math that has trapped many PSPs. Selling digital messages for fractions of a cent while pricing print by the page is a race to the bottom. His answer: sell the platform: the secure, audited, multi-channel engine behind regulatory communications.

It’s a different conversation with a different buyer, one who values compliance and customer experience over simply cost-per-envelope.

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Europe Ahead, U.S. Behind

Keegan views digitization as uneven across markets. Denmark and parts of Europe are already paperless. The UK is mid-curve. The U.S.? Still mailing half of the world’s letters with only 4 % of its population. For him, that’s not decline, it’s opportunity, with a clear focus on targeting print-first PSPs in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Investment and AI

Private equity is fueling consolidation, but Keegan warns that capital alone won’t create platforms. Transformation requires technology DNA. And while AI is now the default buzzword, Mail Metrics treats it as a toolkit for incremental improvements optimizing journeys, processing inbound data, and speeding template creation rather than a headline.

Andy’s Take

Mail Metrics is the inverse of the typical U.S. print service provider. Where most PSPs were born from ink and paper and are now chasing digital relevance, Mail Metrics began as a digital company and deliberately acquired print capacity to accelerate that transition.

Its strategy isn’t about keeping presses busy it’s about using technology to make mail meaningful again, in all its forms, not just on paper. Backed by private equity, Mail Metrics is also part of a larger story playing out across the industry: investors are betting that the next wave of growth won’t come from more volume, but from smarter orchestration.

Closing Invite

If you’re in London on November 12, join us for Communicate ’25 at King’s Cross — where leaders from across Europe will discuss how digital-first thinking is reshaping customer communications and I will be giving the opening keynote.

Thirty two years ago, Adobe launched Acrobat and the Portable Document Format. Two years later, in 1995, I met Duff Johnson. He walked into my office, and I showed him what we were doing with PDF. The rest, as they say, is history.

That same year, my company Emerge was named Adobe’s Premium VAR (Value Added Reseller) of the Year, a recognition that reflected just how quickly PDF was starting to reshape the world of documents and digital workflows. We were all learning in real time what “digital paper” could become and nobody could have guessed how far it would go.

Since then, Duff has been one of the leading forces behind PDF’s evolution first as an evangelist, later as the architect of its standards, and now as CEO of the PDF Association, the global body that maintains the format’s technical and accessibility specifications.

When Adobe released the PDF specification to ISO in 2008, Duff and a small international team took on the responsibility of ensuring the format’s long-term health. Today, PDF is second only to HTML as the most common format on the web—used everywhere from contracts and invoices to shipping labels and government archives.

“PDF has become nearly invisible infrastructure,” Duff said. “Everybody assumes it’s there and that it just works. Try living without it.”

The Shape of Digital Paper

Most people think of PDF as “digital paper” or a way to fix the look of a page on screen. But Duff reminds us that under the hood, PDF is a page description language capable of carrying structured data, annotations, forms, and even 3-D models. One developer once described it as a “free-form database,” and Duff agrees.

That flexibility is what has kept PDF relevant while other formats have come and gone. It allows developers to render exact replicas of printed output—or to extract, tag, and reuse data for accessibility, AI ingestion, or interactive applications. Half of all new PDF files created today are “tagged,” meaning they include semantic information that makes them readable by both humans and machines.

The Accessibility Imperative

Duff’s team has spent decades advancing tagged PDF and the global PDF/UA (Universal Accessibility) standard. Europe now mandates accessible PDFs for public content, and the U.S. isn’t far behind.

“Accessible PDF is far more in reach today than it’s ever been,” Duff noted. “The limitation isn’t technology. It’s policy, process, and training.”

AI will soon help here, too. Machine learning can propose headings, detect structure, or auto-tag content before a human validates it. The goal: billions of legacy PDFs made fully accessible without manual remediation.

PDF vs. Toilet Paper

During our conversation, I mentioned that critics have called PDF “the single-ply toilet paper of business documents” which is technically functional, but clunky, static, and frustrating on mobile. Duff laughed and didn’t disagree entirely.

“It’s actually one of my favorite analogies,” he said. “PDF and toilet paper have a lot in common. For example, nobody likes to talk about them, everyone assumes they just work, and you only notice when they don’t. But most importantly, try living without either one.”

In other words: the world might complain about PDF, but it can’t function without it. Reliable, secure, and universally shareable digital documents are as fundamental to modern life as running water or, toilet paper.

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AI and the Future of PDF

If AI is the new frontier, PDF is one of its richest terrains. But, as Duff cautions, most AI systems treat PDFs like flat images by scraping text rather than reading the structured data they already contain. That wastes compute power and loses meaning.

He envisions a future where AI tools respect PDF’s internal semantics, reducing cost, improving accuracy, and allowing creators to embed “do not ingest” metadata for copyright control (the new TDMRep protocol).

“We’re waiting for the AI world to realize PDF isn’t just a picture. It’s data, structure, and meaning already packaged together,” said Duff.

What’s Next for the Standard

Current work at the PDF Association and ISO includes better compression, high-dynamic-range (HDR) imaging, and richer embedded content. These efforts ensure PDF remains future-proof for archiving, accessibility, and intelligent automation.

“PDF isn’t about nostalgia for print,” Duff explained. “It’s about reliability, authenticity, and the ability to share information offline and across systems. Try running a business or a civilization without that.”

Andy’s Take

For all the jokes about digital toilet paper, PDF’s real magic is in what it quietly enables: trust. It bridges decades of digital transformation without breaking a link.

It’s a file format that connects 1993 to 2025 an unglamorous but indispensable connective tissue spanning 32 years of our digital world.

PDF isn’t going anywhere. It’s just getting smarter.

In this 14th episode of Above the Treeline, I sit down with Kim Lykissas, co-founder of Cadence Communications, an independent advisory and managed services firm based in Sydney, Australia. Cadence helps banks, insurers, and pension funds optimize their “essential communications ecosystems” which is everything from compliance-driven customer communications to experience design, content governance, and brand alignment.

“We saw a need for a truly independent voice, one that wasn’t tied to a print bureau, a large corporate, or a software vendor,” Kim says.

Both Kim and his business partner, Dave Robinson, came out of Computershare, a global financial systems provider also based in Australia. Their vision for Cadence is to help organizations modernize their customer communication stacks with neutral, experience-first strategy, not vendor bias.

Digital Adoption, Regulatory Change, and the Decline of Print

Australia and New Zealand are experiencing a dramatic shift toward insourced, digital-first communication models. Much of it is being driven not just by consumer behavior but by regulatory modernization. Governments are updating rules that once required physical delivery, clearing the path for secure digital channels.

“Consumers are saying, I don’t want all this paper,” Kim notes. “And once governments free up the rules, everything changes.”

Add to that postage inflation, environmental pressure, and rising digital literacy even among older consumers and the result is an accelerated transition away from print.

Cadence’s clients such as banks, insurers, and superannuation (IRA) providers — are increasingly buying and operating their own CCM software platforms rather than outsourcing to print vendors. It’s a regional pattern that may soon define global best practice.

The Print Service Provider Crossroads

Kim and I dug into a topic that hits close to home for many of my readers: what happens to U.S. PSPs as transactional print volumes drop by another 50% or more?

“If your view of the world of CCM is composition, you’re legacy,” Kim says bluntly.

He sees a “last-man-standing” race among print providers and only those who become ultra-efficient in print and invest in advanced digital capability will remain relevant.

Trying to grow digital capabilities organically within a traditional print operation, he warns, is “hard work” and often too slow to compete with digital-native solutions.

Instead, he points to examples like Broadridge’s acquisition of Signal where investment in digital expertise fast-tracked transformation.

CX Has Left the Basement

Customer communications used to live deep in IT a function of operations and compliance. Not anymore. Today, ownership is shifting toward Chief Customer Officers, Growth Officers, and CX leaders, signaling the convergence of RegTech, MarTech, and Data.

Cadence research shows that 70–80% of customer touchpoints in financial institutions are transactional, not marketing. Those moments, Kim argues, define the customer relationship far more than a marketing campaign ever will.

“If you’re relying on two marketing messages to build the relationship, you’re missing the point,” he says.

AI and the Real-Time Future

The conversation naturally turned to AI not as hype, but as trajectory.

Kim foresees a world where every interaction is real-time, personalized, and orchestrated by automation far beyond today’s batch-based CCM.

Humans will stay “in the loop” for trust and compliance, but AI will handle orchestration and insight at scale.

The Most Valuable Data Point

Asked which matters most: postal address, email, or mobile number, Kim didn’t hesitate:

“Mobile. Email has a limited life. Everything’s moving to mobile.”

It’s not just a device shift, he suggests, but a cultural one: mobile is becoming the universal endpoint for both identity and interaction.

Andy’s Take

As digital continues to take hold, insourcing is a competitive threat that is not being viewed seriously enough in the U.S. and Europe.

While regions like Asia-Pacific/Oceania are advancing toward customer-owned orchestration, more advanced U.S. print service providers are expanding their platforms to retain customers by adding digital capabilities, but still ultimately they are tethered to print.

For now, the market in the U.S. remains “print + digital,” not digital-first. But as U.S. regulations, like the “Improving Disclosure for Investor Act" advance, and digital communications become the default across more industries, the evolution of insourcing in Asia Pacific/Oceania will be worth watching.

As enterprises bring orchestration, preference management, and content control back inside the firewall, those PSPs that continue to hold onto print as a part of their core value proposition will risk losing strategic visibility and with it, their influence over the customer communication value chain.

The next decade will determine whether North American PSPs can evolve from manufacturers to enablers or whether insourcing will quietly rewrite the rules of engagement as it has Down Under.