Inside Celosphere 2025: Why there’s no ‘enterprise AI’ without process intelligence
Presented by Celonis
AI adoption is accelerating, but results often lag behind expectations. And business leaders are under pressure to prove measurable ROI from AI solutions – especially as the use of autonomous agents increases and global tariffs disrupt supply chains.
The problem isn’t the AI itself, says Alex Rinke, co-founder and co-CEO of Celonis, a global leader in process intelligence. “To succeed, enterprise AI must understand the context of business processes – and know how to improve them,” he explains. Without this business context, AI risks becoming, as Rinke puts it, “just an internal social experiment.”
Next week Celosphere 2025 will tackle the AI ROI challenge head-on. The three-day event brings together customer strategies, hands-on workshops and live demonstrations, highlighting enhancements to the Celonis Process Intelligence (PI) Platform that help companies leverage “enterprise AI,” powered by PI, to continuously improve operations and create measurable business value at scale.
Focus on measurable ROI
The event’s focus on achieving AI ROI reflects three challenges technology and business leaders face as they transition from pilot to production: legacy systems, breakneck industry change, and agentic AI. According to Gartner64% of board members now view AI as a top three priority – yet only 10% of organizations report meaningful financial returns.
Celonis customers are bucking this trend. A Forrester Total Economic Impact Study found organizations using the platform achieved an ROI of 383% in three years, with a payback period in just six months. One company improved sales order automation from 33% to 86%, saving $24.5 million. The study estimated a total of $44.1 million in benefits over three years, thanks to faster automation, reduced inefficiencies and greater process visibility. These numbers underscore a broader pattern: companies that modernize legacy systems and align AI with process optimization see faster payback and sustainable profits.
Real companies, real results
Celosphere will spotlight how global companies are building ‘future-proof’ operations. Mercedes-Benz Group AG and Vinmar Group will demonstrate AI-driven, composable solutions powered by PI, and participants will see demonstrations of PI-enabled agents in live production environments.
Among the notable success stories:
AstraZenecathe pharmaceutical company, has reduced excess inventory while maintaining the flow of critical medicines by using Celonis as the foundation for its OpenAI partnership.
The state of Oklahoma can answer purchasing status questions at scale, unlocking more than $10 million in value.
Cosentino clears blocked sales orders up to 5x faster using an AI-powered credit management assistant.
Raising the stakes for agentic AI
Numerous sessions will focus on orchestrating AI agents. The shift from AI-as-advisor to AI-as-actor changes everything, says Rinke.
“The agent needs to understand not only what to do, but how your specific business actually works,” he explains. “Process intelligence takes care of those rails.”
This leap from recommendation to autonomous action raises the stakes exponentially. When agents can independently trigger purchase orders, reroute shipments, or approve exceptions, bad context can mean catastrophically bad results at scale.
Celosphere participants will see firsthand how companies use the Celonis Orchestration Engine to coordinate AI agents alongside people and systems. Effective orchestration is a crucial defense against the chaos of agents working past each other, duplicating actions or missing crucial steps.
Navigating tariffs and supply chain shocks
The volatility of global trade isn’t just headline news, it’s an operational nightmare that is reshaping how companies deploy AI, says Rinke.
New tariffs cause cascading effects in purchasing, logistics and compliance. Any policy change could spread across thousands of SKUs, forcing new supplier contracts, diverted shipments, and rebalancing inventories. For AI systems trained on static conditions, that volatility is virtually impossible to predict. Traditional AI systems struggle with such variability, but process intelligence gives organizations real-time insight into how changes flow through operations.
Celosphere case studies will show how companies turn disruption into advantage. Smurfit Westrock uses PI to optimize inventory and reduce costs amid tariff uncertainty, while ASOS uses PI to optimize its supply chain operations, improve efficiency, reduce costs and continue to deliver an excellent customer experience.
Platform-over-point solutions
Rinke argues that Celonis’ advantage lies in treating process intelligence not as an add-on, but as the foundation of the enterprise stack. Unlike additional optimization tools, the Celonis platform creates a living digital twin of business operations: a constantly updated model enriched with context that allows AI to work effectively from analysis to execution.
“What sets Celonis apart is visibility between systems and offline tasks, which is critical for true intelligent automation,” says Rinke. “The platform offers extensive capabilities, including process analysis, design and orchestration, rather than a point solution.”
“Free the Process” and the Future of AI
Celonis continues to champion openness through its “Free the Process” movement, promoting fair competition and freeing companies from traditional lock-in. By giving organizations full access to their own process data, open APIs and a growing partner network that includes The Hackett Group, ClearOps and Lobster, Celonis is building the connective tissue for a new era of interoperable automation.
For Rinke, it is this open foundation that turns AI from a series of experiments into a business engine. “Process intelligence creates a flywheel,” he says. “Better understanding leads to better optimization, which enables better AI – which in turn drives even greater understanding. There is no AI without PI.”
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