Our taxi driver was a little perplexed en route to Celosphere 2023, Celonis’s annual user conference. A regular trip for him, from Munich city center to the city’s international airport, it took a lot of work to explain that we’d be heading to a new terminal. That’s because, in true Celonis style, an innovative company with a spirit for adventure, Celosphere 2023 is being hosted in an airport hangar with floor-to-ceiling views of the adjacent runway.
It’s not a publicity stunt. It’s a metaphor for the company’s determination to enable businesses to break boundaries with process mining and realize value, often equating to tens of millions of dollars.
Innovation in the Air
Unexpected experiences breed excitement. And, this year’s conference attendees are enthusiastic, streaming out of knowledge sessions, many brandishing bottles of German beer, sampling an eclectic maze of lunch options. The crowd is diverse and driven, embracing the spirit of innovation, excited by the numerous announcements that promise to unify data and processes and supercharge integrations and efficiency.
Of course, it would be impossible for a technology company driving innovation at pace to fail to touch upon the generative AI boom of the past year. However, instead of pivoting to artificial intelligence (AI) and developing a product suite with standalone generative AI capabilities, the messaging has been far more subtle. Celonis already has AI capabilities in place, particularly in its suite of pre-built applications.
Introducing Process Copilot
Perhaps the biggest announcement of the day, regarding the use of generative AI in Celonis’s process mining functions was the Process Copilot. Currently in Beta, the copilot is recognizable in its design and functionality, enabling an informed co-worker experience operating with natural language search and leveraging GPT-4.
The Process Copilot aims to make it easier and faster to identify and act on value opportunities. Underneath it all is the Process Intelligence Graph, another important feature announced at this year’s Celosphere conference. In many ways, Process Copilot is a natural language interface that supports the contextual, unified process intelligence provided by the Process Intelligence Graph.
Another important generative AI development being demoed at Celosphere was IBM’s Process Mining GenAI Connector for unstructured data. IBM is a titanium partner for Celonis and has worked closely to integrate the strengths of both organizations to develop a way to discover untapped opportunities to drive greater efficiency and performance in process mining campaigns by enriching structured data, from common source systems such as Oracle and SAP with unstructured data.
Configured to support customer service use cases, the connector leverages watsonx GenAI to pre-process, summarize, and categorize unstructured data before it is channeled into the Celonis EMS. This data helps to enhance customer experiences and performance as well as aid decision-making.
Leveraging AI with Celonis
While generative AI innovations are certainly part of the Celonis roadmap, the company doesn’t have tunnel vision. Instead, Celosphere was a great demonstration of a company that understood the importance of AI, was working towards further embedding it, and, importantly already has a history of incorporating AI into their products.
In one session led by Kevin Yong, principal product manager at Celonis, and Eileen Li, a product manager at the company, we learned how to leverage AI on the Celonis platform. What was striking about this session, was the multiple ways that customers can take advantage of AI using existing Celonis features, as well as the significant advances in AI technologies the company is bringing in.
Of course, generative AI process improvement is being championed by the Process Copilot. However, beyond this, customers can leverage AI annotations in Views, through alerts and automations, and most accessibly, via existing pre-built applications.
It’s important to remember that at Celonis, process mining is a technological function infused with machine learning (ML), so by default, AI is used to continually improve results. What we’ve learned at Celosphere 2023 is that Celonis has a solid foundation and a drive to become an AI-enabler in line with current generative AI developments without diverting from its mission to deliver the best process mining tools and experiences available.
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