As the world becomes increasingly tech-centric and companies adapt to meet rising customer expectations, the spotlight is on Process Mining technology. This is according to senior figures at Celonis, a global leader in Process Mining technology, who have shared their predictions for the technology's potential impact on businesses for the year ahead.

Chief Executive Officer Alex Rinke argues that process intelligence and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will play a crucial role in enabling businesses to cut waste and enhance efficiency. He explained: "We're all continuously looking to improve efficiency and experience while cutting waste - reducing costs, reducing cycle times, reducing carbon emissions. The good news is that these big strategic moves can be made - if you do it process-first."

Rinke further underlined the significance of understanding business processes, which he describes as “the greatest lever for value and the fastest lever for change”. He suggested: “Process intelligence, which helps you understand how your business flows, is one of the critical foundational layers in the new tech stack that will make AI and automation successful. What's particularly exciting is the ability for process intelligence and AI to work together to solve some of the world's most pressing challenges and ultimately make things better for people and the planet."

In a similar vein, Chris Monkman, Vice President of Product Intelligence at Celonis, predicts that companies will see significant progress in deploying LLM-based agents for custom tasks. This could enable possibilities like having a bot that almost entirely automates frequent or difficult tasks like creating sales pitches, responding to customer service inquiries, and replanning production based on material shortages.

"Companies will thus be able to redirect the resources, both human and capital, they’re currently applying to these tedious and difficult tasks to other parts of the organisation, creating opportunity for optimization across the business,” Monkman explained.

Meanwhile, Kerry Brown, Lead Transformation Evangelist at Celonis, believes 2024 will be a year of "renewal and reckoning" for businesses.

"This renewal could be facilitated by new productivity tools, changes in the workforce, and increased urgency around system migrations," Brown says.

With these changes, Brown foresees a significant potential for enterprises to gain end-to-end visibility into their processes, particularly through advances like object-centric process mining.

Greater insight into processes, according to Brown, will empower decision-makers and reduce the influence of emotion and subjectivity in decision making. "Emotion and subjectivity in decision making will be minimized, as visibility gives rise to greater insight, prioritization, and ultimately trust," Brown predicted. She concluded by emphasizing that this increase in objective data will provide an opportunity for enterprise changemakers to discern which systems and processes are worth carrying forward, and which should be abandoned, a process she dubbed "a reckoning".