Editor’s Note
This article explores the complex challenges of autonomy as AI agents become more integrated into data-driven decision-making. It highlights how platforms like Celonis are central to parsing vast, heterogeneous datasets, underscoring the growing importance of sophisticated data management in both routine and critical operations.
Celonis, the German company organizing this conference, is a global leader in this field, with a platform that allows companies to sift through all the data they collect or generate (thousands, millions in some cases) to extract useful information that helps solve problems or make decisions, whether routine or critical.
Evidently, there is more and more data and it is increasingly heterogeneous; therefore, its storage is just as important as having the capacity to interpret it for a specific purpose. And for this, as is normal, AI and, especially those new ‘mining agents’ have emerged strongly to carry out the prospecting.
The resulting interpretations are genuine raw diamonds for any business because they make it more efficient, as it knows where, when, and why it has a problem in any of its routines. And, most importantly, these autonomous agents solve it. And, even more decisively, they generate economic value: the cumulative value generated by all companies that have trusted Celonis amounts to nearly $9 billion.
The AI agents are, in reality, the tip of the iceberg. Everything underneath is what Celonis calls process intelligence. This is, its executives explain, the true enterprise AI. The company has become in a few years a true game changer, as acknowledged by some of its clients – some of them of the caliber of Mercedes.
Carsten Thoma (President of Celonis) adds a dose of reality: “We need to recognize that AI still needs to fulfill the true potential it has.”
In this context, Celonis proposes boosting its process intelligence platform, something fundamental for enterprise AI to work. And the core is clear:
That’s where the company’s three magic words for this week appear: analyze, design, and operate.
The foundation of everything is the Process Intelligence Graph, the multimodal digital twin that Celonis makes available to its clients, “agnostic to the system, without any bias; a complete visual representation and an essential layer for everything else that comes after.”
There are as many possibilities as there are companies in the world. Because each company needs different control, has different challenges, and different procedural objectives. Celonis puffs out its chest and states without embarrassment that it is the only company that offers that possibility to its clients in a personalized way.
It boasts of having an open platform, with more than 300 service partners, more than 700 academic partners and a collaborative alliance with more than a hundred technology companies, among which are IBM, Microsoft, Snowflake… And all to “give our customers the building blocks to allow them to compose the future,” adds Rinke.
Why not take a look at the use cases? Better if they are Spanish. At the Munich event, the Basque company CIE Automotive – a global supplier of components, assemblies, and subassemblies for the automotive market – and the Almeria-based business group dedicated to the manufacture and distribution of surfaces Cosentino – which was already a protagonist last year – appear.
Companies like Cosentino explain how thanks to Celonis they have been able to reduce the implementation of a process from 15 months to three.