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Alex Rinke

CEO

Celonis

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play_circle_outline anticipation for future advancements and continued momentum in process intelligence.

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Alex Rinke, Celonis

Alex Rinke

CEO Celonis

In this Celosphere 2025 interview from Munich, theCUBE’s Rob Strechay and Savannah Peterson sit down with Celonis co-founder Alex Rinke to unpack why there’s “no AI without PI.” Rinke shares why only a small slice of enterprises are seeing measurable AI benefit today and explains how Process Intelligence provides the missing context to turn pilots into outcomes. He highlights record attendance (3,500+), the biggest Celosphere yet, and rapid momentum: customers adopting the Process Intelligence Graph are up roughly 3–4x. The discussion dives into Celonis’ thre... Read more

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What has been the growth in customer adoption over the past six months? add

What is the impact on success rates for companies after implementing your process intelligence solutions? add

What are the three layers of the process intelligence platform that enables enterprise AI? add

What are your expectations for the advancements and developments you hope to discuss at Celosphere 2026 compared to what can be discussed today? add

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Alex Rinke, Celonis

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good morning Celonauts and welcome back to beautiful Bavaria. We're here in Munich, Germany, day two of Celosphere. My name is Savannah Peterson, bringing you all the insights and inspo with Rob Strechay. Rob, our next guest is a total VIP and a Cube regular.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he was just on recently from the NYSE and it's great to have him back here again, so this is great.

Alex Rinke

>> Good to see you guys.

Savannah Peterson

>> Welcome back to the show, Alex.

Alex Rinke

>> Yeah, good to see you guys.

Savannah Peterson

>> We're so grateful to have you.

Alex Rinke

>> Back in Munich. Right?

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, this is fantastic. Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> Thanks for coming back.

Alex Rinke

>> If you love Oktoberfest, you're-

Rob Strechay

>> I was going to say, I've been here twice in the-

Savannah Peterson

>> You're like the Munich poster boy.

Alex Rinke

>> Thank you. Savannah, when are you coming to Oktoberfest?

Savannah Peterson

>> Hopefully next year.

Alex Rinke

>> Oh, fantastic.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. We got to make it up.

Rob Strechay

>> See, now that I have tables that I can renew now. It's like I have to renew.

Alex Rinke

>> You have to renew.

Savannah Peterson

>> Is that how it works?

Rob Strechay

>> Yes.

Alex Rinke

>> Yeah, that's how it works.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh wow. I didn't realize.

Rob Strechay

>> I am. I am.

Savannah Peterson

>> It was so VIP. Wow, amazing. You learn something new every day. Speaking of learning something new, y'all have grown a lot since the last time we saw you. If I heard Karsten right last night, you've grown 4x in six months in terms of your customer.

Alex Rinke

>> Yes. I mean, especially when you look at the customers that are adopting our process intelligence graph, that's been really a strong driver of growth for us. Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> That must feel amazing. What's it like for you to be in the room here?

Alex Rinke

>> I mean, Celosphere is like Disneyland for process intelligence enthusiasts, and you can definitely count me under this. No, it's really exciting. I'm seeing so many old friends, a lot of new friends, and it's the biggest Celosphere ever.

Savannah Peterson

>> Congratulations. How many of us are here then?

Alex Rinke

>> I think we have over 3,500. Yeah, it's been growing nicely. Yeah, yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's awesome.

Rob Strechay

>> I mean, I look at it and I think, again, you guys did a great job with the keynote yesterday. One of the best that we go to a lot of these, and I don't speak lightly.

Savannah Peterson

>> It's really saying something honestly.

Alex Rinke

>> Thank you. Nice hearing something coming from you.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, we were moved too.

Rob Strechay

>> It was moving. It was very on point and I really like you can't really do AI without PI. And I think when I take a step back beyond freeing the process and all of that, I start to look at the ROI of AI and the ... AI, and it's like a little tongue twister there.

Savannah Peterson

>> Good morning, tongue twister. There you go.

Rob Strechay

>> Yes, absolutely. When you start to see this AI wave really pushing, to me, if you're going to do agents right, you really have to understand the processes. Have you been seeing where you're being brought into these places where POCs have stalled or maybe they haven't gone as well as they thought and they're trying to rethink the process of AI and they're saying, "Hey, we need to know why it didn't work from that perspective and map out that process?"

Alex Rinke

>> Right, exactly. I think you're spot on. When we look at the data, IDC came out with a study that only 11% of companies are getting any type of measurable benefit from the AI investments. So on the one hand side, we all know AI is going to change the world and it's going to transform our companies. We believe that the future of the enterprise is AI driven and composable, so it's very, very exciting. You're thinking of operations that are much more automated, right? Where AI automates what we do, transform business processes, you look at much more adaptable companies that can change much more quickly, adapt, and then the reality is that the return isn't visible yet at anywhere the scale or magnitude that we expect. And it's really because you need to look under the covers and make sure that you understand your processes and you reimagine your processes. If you just use an AI agent here or there, it's not really going to move the needle in terms of business outcomes. And that's why we say there's no AI without PI. We really look at it. There's three things AI needs, right? It needs an understanding of the context of how your business runs, right? If it doesn't have that and it doesn't have that crucial information, it can't really automate for you. Secondly, it needs to be deployed in the right places strategically because you're looking at giant organizations. I mean, we have a lot of the biggest companies in the world here and they need to deploy in the right places. And three, it needs to work and integrate in your processes to work with everything else that you're already doing.

Savannah Peterson

>> So when we look at that 11%, when we look at that data, that's overall, those obviously aren't just Celonis companies. Would you say, and I realize this might be an estimate, would you say that there's a greater success rate once companies implement you that's dramatically different?

Alex Rinke

>> I would say absolutely. I mean, we see a huge amount of increased 3x to 4x in terms of customers adopting our process intelligence graph. We see tremendous momentum in our AI offerings on top of that, and we are doing it in a composable architecture with partnerships. We had Uniper and Microsoft on stage yesterday, a really, really exciting story of how they are gentrifying their cooperations across maintenance, finance, supply chain across all basically all the business using process intelligence and then Microsoft AI agents on top of that, and this is really what makes AI work, enterprise AI work. We are not talking about AI, we're talking about enterprise AI, which is not about LLMs or agents or just one technology. It's about a combination, operational intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, generative AI, agentic AI, and the discipline of infusing this into your operations. That's what we're talking about, and this is not possible without process intelligence.

Savannah Peterson

>> That ecosystem is so key, and especially for you as you're growing at this velocity, what's it like for you as co-founder to evaluate the right partners to pull into that ecosystem?

Alex Rinke

>> I mean, it's very simple. We do the right thing for the customer. Customers love to use it. We did a big announcement yesterday with Databricks. Customers love to use Databricks, so we have zero copy integrations. Customers love to use Microsoft. We have zero copy integrations. We integrate seamlessly with the agentic and Copilot frameworks. So we really partner. We will let our customers, take us. We believe that good things grow from open ecosystems.

Rob Strechay

>> And I think you also had Bloomfilter and you had a number of others.

Savannah Peterson

>> He makes it sound so easy.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love that, Alex.

Rob Strechay

>> I think one of the things that as we look at how you're bringing that composable together, and we agree, by the way, I think in the research that we've done, we look at it and we don't think there's any one company that's going to own AI. I think it's going to take a village and an ecosystem, as you talked about yesterday on the main stage. When you look at that ecosystem and like you said, Databricks, with using delta sharing and being able to get into that ecosystem that they have, do you look at that as a way to also it helps beyond your sharing that data into it so that agents that are built on top of their data lakes and things like that, but people are breaking down data silos? That seems to be a theme as well as what you're trying to lean into.

Alex Rinke

>> A hundred percent. I think data silos are not conducive to re-imagining your processes because we believe in freeing the process, free the process. Free the process from the restrictions of current legacy architectures and allow it to seamlessly integrate and operate in a different way. And this is where I think, to your point, it is about an ecosystem and you mentioned Bloomfilter, which is exciting. What we've said is, well, there's so many different use cases that are very domain and vertically specific that Celonis, we provide a horizontal platform. We give the building blocks. So we have more and more partners, ISVs, that their sole focus is to compose the solutions for different domains. And Bloomfilter is a great example. Aron is a great example. They are doing it for the HR space, the human capital space. Bloomfilter is doing it for the software development lifecycle space. Mercatus is doing it for asset reliability and maintenance. So there's so many of those apps popping up. You can see many of them here at Celosphere. We are very excited about that momentum because then the customer can just get started much, much faster. So the ecosystem is about those specialized ISVs as well.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's a nice layer on top, because it allows you to truly provide solutions across the board. I mean, it makes so much sense. They always say you market to everyone. You market no one. But with your partners, you're able to provide these really specific solutions. What would you say is the most exciting part about where you are this year versus where you were last year?

Alex Rinke

>> Yeah. So you can about our platform in three layers and the process intelligence platform that enables enterprise AI is three layers. The one is the data core, which is yesterday, and this is really the most scalable, low latency and open data infrastructure for process intelligence in the world by far. So it brings together data from systems, devices, task information, unstructured data, zero copy data integration with the major place. I mean, it really is a very, very exciting development and we've put a lot of investment in that. That's the foundation. Second step is the heart, the process intelligence graph and the process intelligence graph got a lot richer. So it doesn't just represent your process data across systems, the object-centric data model, but it also now incorporates business context, KPIs, benchmarks, but also process models, enterprise architecture diagrams. So it's evolving into this richer and richer digital twin to truly represent your business operations. There's also been a lot of maturity. As I said, there's been tremendous growth in terms of customer adoption. We have over 100 customer run sessions at Celosphere this year. In the last years, we put out a lot of groundbreaking new ideas. It's just show me.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. It's show versus tell.

Alex Rinke

>> Exactly. And over 100 customer run sessions tells you something.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's impressive. I just want to acknowledge that. That's so cool.

Alex Rinke

>> And by the way, we didn't have slots for more. They were really lining up to tell their story. So the process intelligence graph has matured a lot in terms of enterprise readiness capability, but also gotten a lot richer. And then you have our build experience, which is really built to support the full AI life cycle, analyze the process, design the future, and operate AI driven composable processes. So that's the platform, how it came together. Then you have all the innovation partnerships that complement our momentum and are very, very key as we talked about. I think those are probably the most exciting. Do you think?

Savannah Peterson

>> You can feel the evolution in the maturation within the team as well as your partner ecosystem. Us on the desk.

Alex Rinke

>> Thank you. Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, no, it is very palpable and the stories and the data back it up. One big conversation obviously that everyone's having right now is time to value. And I would imagine you've been able to shorten that time to value over the last year. How quickly are folks realizing value from the day they commit to implementing Celonis and increasing their process intelligence?

Alex Rinke

>> And this is something we are bringing down and we are continuing to bring down. It's a big part of our strategy that's about user experience, that's about maturity, but it's also about those ISVs and partnerships. If you think about zero copy, if you think about all the vertically specific or domain specific ISVs we talked about that provide pre-built process intelligence, that obviously excels time to value. So it's all those things together where customers can get ... I've seen customers now getting a positive return on their investment within month, within two or three months, and it's something we want to bring to every customer, that type of experience, and we see very good progress. I mean, by the way, changing and really reinventing processes in large companies is not easy.

Rob Strechay

>> No.

Savannah Peterson

>> And it used to take years.

Alex Rinke

>> It used to take years.

Savannah Peterson

>> So the fact that you're saying one month is remarkable.

Alex Rinke

>> Maybe it's a couple, maybe it's two to three, but we are making progress and we are really making it easier and more repeatable all the time.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I mean we even had Deutsche Telekom where they had started with you and then they came back to you when you changed from a use case to more object-driven process mapping.

Alex Rinke

>> Sorry. That's a good point. One of the things Vinmar with the CEO on stage, and they're really deploying Celonis very strategically across the business and have really, really leaned in to really enable autonomous and AI-driven operations. And one of the things he said on stage, which made all of us proud, was to say, it's a very different company today than the company we partnered with just a few years back.

Rob Strechay

>> I was going to actually ask you about him.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's got to feel good.

Rob Strechay

>> I mean, he was fantastic by the way, and I thought all three of your customers that you had on stage with Uniper and Mercedes-Benz also rounding that out. When you looked at it, they were all in different stages of their life cycle with you and using you in different use cases and for different parts of the product. Fantastic use of that. When you look at Vinmar in particular, they were the furthest along on their AI journey, and he talked about it and the change is hard, the processes were changing. How do you see that being kind of almost like that use case plays out? That would seem to be a use case that plays out in every industry, not just theirs.

Alex Rinke

>> Yeah, 100%. And I think for them, order to cash, very complex distribution, very large amount of transactions. And yes, it's about cost, but for them it's really about growth, because they're growing fast. And they're thinking, "Well, how can we get our people more productive and handle more transactions and deliver better service to our customers?" And they said, "Well, just putting improvements in the process is great, but we actually want to reinvent the process and using Celonis as a foundation." And he said, there are three strategic platforms, it's Microsoft, SAP, and Celonis. Those are the three strategic bets in the IT stack. And Celonis is really enabling them to reinvent the entire order to cash experience on a layer that's decoupled and abstracted from current architecture. And I think this was a great story, and they said that the supply chain team is already 40% more productive and they have ideas to take this 40. That's what he said yesterday. So it's exciting. It's working in conjunction with the other vendors and the other things they're doing. And yeah, it's a great story and we look hopefully to replicate this with many other customers.

Rob Strechay

>> But to your point, they didn't pick the easiest part. It was the $3 billion of their $4 billion business. I mean, it was the largest part of their business, so I thought that was fantastic.

Alex Rinke

>> And by the way, this is something we see more and more where people go more to the mission-critical areas of the business because that's what moves the needle the most. And that's where we talk about deploying it in the right places. That's what it's all about. Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> I bet you have a lot of those conversations with your customers. Everyone's trying to figure out what to do. I feel like nobody knows what to do half the time. So it's nice of you to guide them. What do you hope to be able to say when we have the pleasure of sitting down at Celosphere 2026 that you can't yet say today?

Alex Rinke

>> Well, I see you at 2026, but I think this idea of the AI-driven and composable enterprise, I think we'll have even more proof. It's kind like with the process intelligence graph today. We just see so much momentum. That's something we talked about a year ago. Now, everybody is showing how they're doing it, and I think you'll see a lot of momentum there. We have some things we're working on that I won't talk about because I want to make sure you come back next year.

Savannah Peterson

>> Such a tease, Alex.

Rob Strechay

>> That's great. That's great.

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh, that's awesome. Well, we can't wait to continue telling your stories. And seriously, congratulations to you and the team. You do such a brilliant job from the branding to the case studies.

Alex Rinke

>> Thank you. I can only give that back. I watch your show all the time.

Rob Strechay

>> Thank you.

Alex Rinke

>> Because you really go deep and we really appreciate you having you here.

Rob Strechay

>> Glad to be here with you, so thank you.

Savannah Peterson

>> It's a joy. Thank you.

Alex Rinke

>> Thank you, appreciate it.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes. And thank all of you for tuning in for our fantastic power-packed two days of live coverage here from Celosphere in Munich, Germany. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.