Democratizing Process Intelligence: Insights from Celosphere 2024

"There is no AI without PI (Process Intelligence)"

This concise sentence from this year's Celosphere in Munich summarizes what is currently moving the process management community: The connection between artificial intelligence and well-founded process knowledge will become the key to sustainable process improvements.

The speed of this development is remarkable: When we started with aiio in 2021 as the first AI-first process management platform, the connection between AI and process management was still viewed with skepticism. Today, almost two years later, it is consensus - and poses new challenges for the industry.

However, this new reality also brings new challenges, as Alex Rinke, Co-CEO of Celonis, aptly describes in his keynote: "What we are missing is a common understanding of how the company actually works and how we can improve it." An observation that matches our experience from numerous customer projects - and underlines the need for a low-threshold democratization of the process platform for everyone (e.g. with aiio).

Shaping the process routine together

While Celosphere demonstrated the impressive possibilities of modern enterprise solutions, it also became clear that the true value of process intelligence only arises when it arrives in everyday business. At aiio, this is exactly where we start - with a platform that makes process knowledge available where employees work every day. The fact that we have been focusing on the integration of modern technologies such as AI since our launch in 2021 is a matter of course for us - but the focus is always on the practical benefits for our users.

The Evolution of the Process Intelligence Market

From our point of view, the integration of Symbio into the Celonis platform marks a significant trend: Enterprise solutions are becoming more comprehensive, but also more complex. While this is interesting for large corporations, the question for many companies is: How can we democratize process intelligence while staying within the tighter budget constraints?

Expert knowledge vs. company-wide use

An interesting detail emerged from the Process Navigator presentation at Celosphere: In a medium-sized company presented as a lighthouse project, Celonis, with its newly integrated modeling and management tools, was able to reach approximately one in eight employees.

While this is an impressive number for a budget-intensive expert tool like Celonis, it also shows that 87.5% of employees are still excluded. This raises the question: What level of acceptance can process management achieve in a company where 7 out of 8 employees have no active role in shaping processes? This is a challenge that we at aiio have specifically addressed from the outset.

Microsoft M365: The Integration Platform of the Future

Celosphere 2024 highlighted another important trend: Microsoft M365 is evolving into the central platform for Process Intelligence. With the presentation of the Campari case and the integration into Microsoft Copilot Studio, Celonis underscored the growing importance of the Microsoft ecosystem – an approach we at aiio have been pursuing since our founding.

The numbers speak for themselves: With over 280 million active Microsoft Teams users and an average of 57% of work time spent in M365 applications, the platform is the ideal place for democratized process management. While Celonis primarily showcases MS Teams as a collaboration channel for Process Mining experts and as a text-based ChatBot for the workforce, aiio, as a native M365 solution, goes a step further:

• The complete integration into the M365 environment enables a seamless connection to Celonis insights.
• The Microsoft Graph serves as a central interface for context-related process information.
• Microsoft Teams is the hub for company-wide democratized process management.
• aiio enables the shared use of Copilot functionalities for AI-supported optimization.

This synergy creates a continuous workflow: What Celonis identifies in process analysis can be directly processed, questioned, and optimized by all employees in their familiar working environment within aiio – and all this in an optimized ratio of budget-intensive expert access and budget-friendly access for everyone in a system like aiio.

The Power of Combination

Instead of viewing enterprise solutions and democratized process management as opposites, as in the past, the key lies in intelligent combination:

1. Process Mining as a Data Foundation

• Precise process analyses, e.g., through Celonis
• Create data-driven decision-making bases
• Identification of optimization potentials (IT-centered)
  

2. Democratization of process management with aiio to turn those affected into participants

• Integration into Microsoft M365
• Find optimization potentials beyond the IT systems through the participation of everyone
• Intuitive use easily possible without expert knowledge
• Company-wide licensing affordable
  

3. More than the Sum of Its Parts

• Import of mining results into aiio
• Enrichment with employee know-how
• Combine the knowledge from people's minds with the knowledge from the IT systems
• continuous improvement through all participants

Best Practice: ABB & Busch-Jaeger use Celonis and aiio together

Our pilot project with ABB & Busch-Jaeger demonstrates how this combination works in practice. Here, we are following the exact path described in the Celosphere presentations: extracting data from IT systems and making it easily accessible to the entire workforce. This is achieved through an optimal combination of the strengths of Celonis on the one hand and aiio on the other.

We will present the complete Case Study at the PzM Summit in November 2024 - here are the key learnings in advance:

• Process Mining delivers the "What" and "How" of the processes in the IT systems (which accounts for less than 50% of the actual process flows).

• aiio uses AI agents that additionally read in target process information, e.g. from drawings and conventional process documentation, and combine it with the process mining import.

• aiio makes these combined insights usable for everyone involved, thereby enabling participation up to the collaborative further development of the processes.

• The combination is what truly creates sustainable process management.

Hyperautomation meets Democratization

While Celonis, with the integration of Symbio, is also driving hyperautomation for suitable, IT-centric processes, we at aiio are focusing on unlocking process knowledge for everyone in the company. And since a large part of the processes will continue to be carried out by people in the future, the key to success is finding the right balance:

1. Expert systems for in-depth data-driven analyses
2. Democratized process management platforms for human-driven analyses as well as company-wide use and further development of the organization
3. Intelligent integration of both worlds

Conclusion: Process Intelligence for everyone

Celosphere 2024 has shown that Process Mining and AI are becoming increasingly powerful. At the same time, it is becoming clear that the real added value only arises when these technologies are made accessible to all employees.

With the combination of Process Mining and aiio, companies create exactly that - a data-driven, yet agile and democratized process landscape that optimally supports both experts and employees.

Learn more now!

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^Disclaimer:

^{Celonis®, Symbio® and all other mentioned brands are registered trademarks of their respective owners. The naming of brand names and protected trademarks is for descriptive purposes only.}

^{aiio has no business relationship with Celonis SE or its affiliated companies. The compatibility between aiio and Celonis products described in this article is based on publicly available interfaces and was developed independently.}

^{The reporting on Celosphere 2024 is based on publicly available information and represents our interpretation of the event. All statements on products and services of other companies reflect only our assessment.}

^{All examples and references mentioned, especially the ABB & Busch-Jaeger Case, refer to our own project experience and have been published with the consent of the companies mentioned.}

^{© 2024 aiio GmbH. All rights reserved.}

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