Celonis Celosphere 2025 | Carsten Thoma, Celonis

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Carsten Thoma

President

Celonis

play_circle_outline Emotional recap of day one at Celosphere in Munich with Savannah and Rob.

play_circle_outline Growth: quadrupled customer base and increasing use cases in six months.

play_circle_outline Importance of clear understanding of AI's capabilities driving customer adoption.

play_circle_outline Highlights of partnerships with Microsoft, Databricks, and others.

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Carsten Thoma, Celonis

Carsten Thoma

President Celonis

In this Celosphere 2025 interview, Celonis Co-Founder and President Carsten Thoma joins theCUBE’s Rob Strechay and Savannah Peterson in Munich to unpack how putting Process Intelligence at the center of AI outcomes is moving from vision to proof. Thoma reflects on a two-year platform journey – from debuting OCPM for a system-agnostic, wall-to-wall view to operationalizing it at scale – and why 2025 is about productivity, not “leapfrog” tech. He shares that Celonis has quadrupled the number of customers using the platform in the last six months, now powering 1... Read more

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What were the achievements and developments related to the technology implementation and customer growth over the past year? add

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good evening Celonaughts, and welcome back to beautiful Bavaria. We're here in Munich, Germany, coming to the close of day, one of our two days of live coverage of Celosphere. My name is Savannah Peterson, delighted to be bringing you all the coolest stories with Rob Strechay. Rob, it has been, we've had tears on the show today, we've had joy on the show today. How are you feeling right now emotionally?

Rob Strechay

>> I'm good. I think the joy that the customers and the Celonaughts have brought here has been fantastic, and I felt... And now we're in a dance club and we're pumping it up.

Carsten Thoma

>> It's grooving.

Savannah Peterson

>> Speaking of grooving, who better to have the final dance on day one with us than Carsten? Carsten, my god, Rob and I were saying best keynote ever this morning. Everyone's dancing, it's pumping in here. Your customers are fighting for stage time on your keynote stage. How does it feel for you to be here today?

Carsten Thoma

>> Oh my God, I cannot deny that we are a little bit proud.

Savannah Peterson

>> You should be.

Carsten Thoma

>> We are proud. Proud of the team, proud of the value we could deliver, and the result is that people wanted to be here, talk about what they did with Celonis, engage with the team, and really showed up with a lot of force today. And it's always super tense, the days that are leading up to an event like this. In particular, what we delivered this morning was not one by the books, right? So there was a lot of question mark, a lot of uncertainty, but we pulled it off, the team pulled it off, and right now I'm just happy.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I mean-

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, go for it, Rob.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I mean I think again, being able to, and we got to see you yesterday as part of the press conference and get a little preview of everything, but then seeing it in action today on the main stage, freeing the process being one of the key themes along with the ROAI, or the ROI of AI. I think those two pillars for this week, along with process intelligence has been key. What are some examples that you're excited about? I mean, you had Mercedes, Vinmar-

Savannah Peterson

>> You're asking him to pick a favorite kid, Rob. What are you doing?

Carsten Thoma

>> I mean, honestly, that's a fair question. Two years ago, we embarked on this platform journey, right? Two years ago we launched a concept of OCPM, this system agnostic, wall to wall, unbiased few. It was a technology, it was hard to operationalize, and it did cost us some nerves and a lot of investment, but we successfully did so. Last year, we embedded this concept into a platform that is open for business that can serve our partners, customers, and the whole ecosystem and community. This year was not the year for leap frog announcement on the technology side, it was about proof points that everything that we went through over the past two years actually comes to productivity. We have quadrupled the number of customers only in the last six months-

Rob Strechay

>> Wow....

Carsten Thoma

>> that are using Celonis as a platform, north of 15 use cases across all domains and processes. That is the most rewarding thing you can have.

Savannah Peterson

>> Quadrupled in six months?

Carsten Thoma

>> Yes.

Savannah Peterson

>> Wow. Now I'm just curious, what do you think has been the greatest catalyst of that growth?

Carsten Thoma

>> I think a clearer understanding of customers, what actually enable enables AI. Like last year we launched this platform into quite a general AI hype with hardly any distinction, and generative AI and enterprise AI is something very different. Right?

Rob Strechay

>> Yes.

Carsten Thoma

>> You could also say if you look at how Celonis can deal with process intelligence that we, what English or German serves as an input for the large language models, you could argue Celonis developed a process language that is a common business language and creates a shared understanding. And I think that the clarity for customers and also our partners that this layer is essential is much better this year than in all this AI noise that we had in the industry last year.

Savannah Peterson

>> I really appreciate what you're saying there, and I like that rather than focusing on the technology though, you did have some great announcements this week as well. You're focusing on showing and not telling, and it's so refreshing. Rob and I have been fans of y'all for a while now, we mean that very genuinely, but I loved when you were talking to us about the 11 champions who have achieved eight billion in value realized, it's incredibly impressive. So, what would you say is the next step in quadrupling in the next six months? How do you get the next layer?

Carsten Thoma

>> The platform will grow, it will grow. You create those custom examples and the hardest piece is to use this lens, this practice, this strategic practice and get over a certain threshold. Every customer that have crossed this threshold grows the adoption of Celonis exponentially. So I think if you look at the 120 value champions, not only the 11, we already have the base for the next cohort, and we're seeding and seeding. So I think it's a question of maturity. It's a question of keeping it elastic, keep the velocity high and stable from an infrastructure perspective, and then customers will adopt. And every use case, every app, every partner app that will be launched over the next months will drive this adoption. In the first year after we launched the platform, we had about 23 partner apps, right? From today until end of fiscal year, which is end of January for us, we will launched another 30.

Savannah Peterson

>> Wow.

Rob Strechay

>> Wow.

Carsten Thoma

>> That's another acceleration of , yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> Doubling, essentially. Yeah, even more so, actually.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I mean, I think again, some of the announcements that you made with Microsoft, Databricks, Bloom Filter, and some of the other partners on the technology side, we had Dan on earlier and we talked a little bit about it. Do you look at that as also being one of these enablers where it's these larger AI ecosystems where people are building? And I looked at AI and agentic AI in particular as being a wave-carrying Celonis forward because we've seen it, we go to a lot of these shows and people are failing at agents because of the fact that they don't have the process right. They just try to shove a bad process into an agent and wonder why it doesn't work.

Carsten Thoma

>> Correct.

Rob Strechay

>> What are you seeing?

Carsten Thoma

>> It's not only that, it's also sometimes what doesn't support the adoption of true AI is also you cannot put an automation on everything. Right? Some of the things that people try to automate don't make sense to start with.

Savannah Peterson

>> Preach, Carson. Seriously, I wish more people realized that.

Carsten Thoma

>> You need to... What we are trying to do, we're trying to create a differentiated data asset that is enabling enterprise AI and then you can go two ways from there, right? In this case, do we have enough insight that we know how to rationalize a workload that gets triggered by that differentiated data asset or the process underneath, or does it actually make more sense to recompose it? And not things are the same in this context. And I do believe that people start to understand that distinction and that the next wave, and it's always been like this with every type of new technology and huge disruption, customers have never been super successful in the first wave. But you know when something is truly meaningful, the second wave is coming, and I think we are a part of that.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think you absolutely are part of that. So I know you've got a little installation over here, a little activation. Just as a sidebar, your brand team does such an amazing job. From your bomber jackets, it's so sleek in here. I love it. I mean, I matched your brand colors because you do such a good job you almost have-

Carsten Thoma

>> I couldn't, I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more.

Savannah Peterson

>> You guys absolutely nail it. But I saw one of the fun things you have going on over there, it is, is enterprise AI here or not? And so, is it? You're the man to ask.

Carsten Thoma

>> Come on. We've heard it from customers today, not from us. I truly believe it is. I think everyone finally realize it doesn't make sense to keep data and to keep intelligence capsuled and captivated in one domain. Where does this lead to?

Savannah Peterson

>> Right.

Carsten Thoma

>> Where does it lead to? You put customers back in the Stone Age. If everyone starts to restrict access or charge for the data, and by the way, it's data that the business of the customer generates. Who owns that data? The customer pays subscription fees to a vendor and then the business of the customer generates event data and dynamic data. It's very simple. No, it has to be a high degree of interoperability. It has to be system agnostic. It has to be across domains. And then customers have enough context to actually truly reinvent and optimize the operations. And that's what we're trying to achieve and I think the digital twin of your operations has arrived at latest today.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I-

Savannah Peterson

>> I would agree. We've seen it.

Rob Strechay

>> We see it in spades. And it's like when start-

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely....

Rob Strechay

>> to look at what you guys are doing, I think one of the things that was also a fantastic moment that you guys had this morning was when you were talking about the ecosystem and talking about how, again, it's the stack isn't going to be one company and the data silos and how you're breaking down data silos. Talk-

Savannah Peterson

>> Data jail.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, the data jail we talk about.

Savannah Peterson

>> Dan's phrase for it, it was great. I love that.

Rob Strechay

>> That was with Dan, we were talking about being in data jail.

Savannah Peterson

>> out of jail.

Rob Strechay

>> Or data hell or a data swamp or what have you. When you start to look at this, are you seeing organizations are really embracing that compose-able nature of what you're bringing to the table?

Carsten Thoma

>> Mature organizations are starting to, but you can also see it's a trend that is not going to be reversible. It goes back to, what can you rationalize by automating and what can you prevent to start with? Right? We are sometimes, if you combine enterprise application management with process intelligence, which we do a lot with our partner, Ardoq also, you see very clearly how much in percentage of incumbent systems is idle, not being used. Like 98% of process activity, active processes sometimes resides in less of 10% of the system footprint.

Savannah Peterson

>> Whoa.

Carsten Thoma

>> It's absolutely mind-blowing.

Savannah Peterson

>> That is mind-blowing.

Carsten Thoma

>> So, what is the right thing to do there?

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, yeah.

Carsten Thoma

>> Reinvent your operation, take what you need, and then you read is safe on compute, storage, and it's just more productive.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, really trimming the fat in an instance like that. One thing that I love, well, I love many things about coming to the show and thank you all for hosting us, your customers are so passionate about you. I mean, they love you. They literally use the term love. When you think of business intelligence, the first thing that comes to mind is not always warm fuzzies. I mean, we haven't had too many of these conversations outside of working with you. And I also noticed that same fervor from your team, your team is obsessed with the team. How do you as a leader preserve that culture both internally but as well within your community? I mean, I can just feel it in the room right now.

Carsten Thoma

>> What we are doing is obviously like, it's not commodity, right? It's on the edge.

Savannah Peterson

>> Right.

Carsten Thoma

>> And it's on the edge for us, it's also on the edge for our customers. You need to have that empathy towards our customer, our partner, but also towards the teams. Right? And while you need a lot of discipline because you're working on critical processes for our customers, it's mission-critical, you also have to push the envelope a lot. And you need to explain to people over and over again that what they're doing is brand new and it's really hard to do. And they need to understand that and it's hard to do, it's new, and this is why you have to allow failures. You make mistakes, you learn from those mistakes, we get up and improve it. Right?But I think it's impossible to create this passion if you don't put the team and also your ecosystem on a mission, and make it very transparent that what we're trying to achieve is not easy to do, but it's worth it.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, and it's okay if it gets a little messy.

Carsten Thoma

>> It's a little messy in between, and it's less messy than it was a year ago and it's much less messy than it was two years ago, this is why we see that type of adoption. And ultimately, we want to achieve one thing together with our ecosystem, which is make processes work for people, companies, and the planet, because if we achieve that, it's definitely a good thing for everyone.

Rob Strechay

>> When you look at it, I think one of the things that's been a common theme that we've been talking to a lot of your customers about today has been that ROI or the ROAI. When you're talking to other executives at your customers and prospects, how do you help them grasp that better?

Carsten Thoma

>> Sure, perfect question. Honestly, that's one area where I think we can improve a lot. It's a perfect question.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well done, Rob.

Carsten Thoma

>> You know what we are so excited, what we sometimes do with the customers? Look what we found, tough. It's accountability, it's a system gap, someone's responsible. You really have to take every conversation, it's like you could achieve this goal as a company and break it down from there. It's very tempting, you see something, there's such an enormous impact. And you go to the customer and he says, "Look what we found."

Savannah Peterson

>> Look at the thing. Look at the thing. Look at the thing. Yeah.

Carsten Thoma

>> And they're like, oh my god, hopefully they don't tell that anyone else, right?

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, because I don't want to get fired.

Carsten Thoma

>> Yeah, so that empathy question is a big one and it's like-

Savannah Peterson

>> Or shareholders ....

Carsten Thoma

>> But this happens. This happens in transformations, right?

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely.

Carsten Thoma

>> And this happens when you do something that's truly disruptive. So we have to learn the tone, we have to learn how to align our interest with the goals and interest of our customers. And we manage better and better, this is why they're so excited, but we did not always manage and we still have a few where we didn't.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think that's a really interesting point you're making, Carsten, it's about the psychology, essentially. There's a lot of, I mean, as we navigate the uncertainty that's abound right now-

Carsten Thoma

>> 100%....

Savannah Peterson

>> it is that gentle touch to a degree that's-

Carsten Thoma

>> 100%....

Savannah Peterson

>> it's potential, not mistake

Carsten Thoma

>> 30 years of enterprise technology, I did nothing else my whole life. Nothing was ever that obvious from a value perspective than Celonis. But it's exactly like you said, you have to really keep in mind that you need to show empathy to your customers and your partners because it's really something it's sometimes hard to accept.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, no, it is. Empathy definitely at the core of everything you've done from the keynote to just the whole, it's all just good. I don't know, it's refreshing to see humans still in the loop and being optimized. So, great job. All right, I'm going to ask you what I always ask, which is when we are at Celosphere 2026, because you've had a big year, there's been a lot that's happened. Obviously we've recapped some of the numbers, the data, it's all there, but, and people can read all about it in our coverage. What do you hope to be able to say then that you can't yet say today? And I'm not just going to let you say you have more customers, because we know that's going to happen.

Rob Strechay

>> Or all the process .

Savannah Peterson

>> I'm not letting you off the hook with that one. That one's too easy. It's got to be something else.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah.

Carsten Thoma

>> I would love to say that the whole enterprise ecosystem understands that we all left to act in the interest of the customer, and that interoperability and value-add through shared understanding in particular, breaking down data silos, has become common sense for every customer to benefit from. That's what I would love to say.

Savannah Peterson

>> All right, so better common sense. I think we could apply that to a few aspects of life. I love it. Carsten, I know that we're standing between you and a beer and the party with all of your people, so we're going to let you go back to celebrity life.

Carsten Thoma

>> Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Thank you.

Savannah Peterson

>> Thank you for having us. We genuinely cherish it, and Rob and I look forward to the show every year.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> And thank all of you for tuning in wherever you might be on this beautiful rock. We're here in Munich, Germany at Celosphere. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.