Bayer’s Timo Peters and Celonis’ Chris Monkman connected with Acceleration Economy’s Tom Smith for a discussion in context of the AI Ecosystem Course. Highlights of their discussion follow.
Highlights
01:19 — Bayer first began working with Celonis process mining in 2012, in a very distributed setup. In 2022, the company shifted to a central setup; as that happened, it has gone from about 300 users to more than 2,700 today, Peters explains.
01:50 —The company is looking to expand beyond use cases such as source to pay. Bayer sees great potential in driving more insights and understanding by making process mining. Generative AI could have a major impact because people can begin to develop easier ways to use it.
05:55 — Celonis’ Monkman says the company has approached GenAI as an opportunity to change the way users interact with process mining, specifically using natural language. Its new Process Copilot is “an instantiation of that idea.” This will help not only business users who don’t know how to structure queries but also expert analysts by making their jobs easier.
13:11 — Bayer is looking to work with the Celonis product team to establish its first generative AI installation, with a focus on the source-to-pay area. They’ll start there and look to expand. Goals include streamlining internal processes and discovering ways to improve engagement with, and service to, customers while receiving insights more quickly. “It always needs to be customer-centric,” Peters says, adding “You can’t be too early from my point of view” when it comes to generative AI.
16:37 — Peters emphasizes the importance of tapping internal team knowledge in collaboration with Celonis in its process mining deployment “to insert all this company knowledge into the product…otherwise it’s not driving the value.”
20:31 — Monkman discusses the new Process Intelligence Graph combining the company’s Object Centric Data Model, processes and data extracted from source systems. This ensures the implementation is tailored to the business and its semantics. “Fundamentally it’s an ecosystem strategy…it’s really like an enablement layer for AI that’s core.”
