Celonis makes compelling case for 'freeing the process' to operationalize AI returns

While most enterprise software vendors are still promoting AI as a silver bullet, Celonis arrived at its annual Celosphere conference this week with a more grounded message: enterprise AI is failing to deliver, and the reason has nothing to do with model capabilities.

Speaking to a packed audience in Munich, Celonis Co-CEO Alex Rinke cited a statistic from IDC that is an increasing reality for CIOs making decisions: only 11% of companies are getting any measurable benefit from AI projects today. Rather than gloss over this inconvenient truth, Rinke used it as the basis for Celonis' pitch - that process intelligence provides the missing operational context that AI needs to actually work in the enterprise. Rinke told the audience:

I remember being on a Christmas vacation in 2022, and ChatGPT had just come out. I was on it 24/7. I wasn't just terrorizing my family - I was also terrorizing ...