Celonis Celosphere 2025 | Vanessa Candela, Celonis

Clips
More from Celonis Celosphere 2025

Vanessa Candela

Chief Legal & Trust Officer

Celonis

play_circle_outline Internal collaboration at Celonis to ensure compliance and trust.

play_circle_outline Enhancing AI Trustworthiness Through Process Intelligence: Contextual Insights for Smarter Implementations

play_circle_outline Balancing Innovation and Compliance: The Crucial Role of Governance in Building Trust in AI Development

Info
Transcript

Vanessa Candela, Celonis

Vanessa Candela

Chief Legal & Trust Officer Celonis

In this Celosphere 2025 interview, Vanessa Candela, chief legal and trust officer of Celonis, joins theCUBE’s Rob Strechay and Savannah Peterson to unpack why trust is becoming the “currency of the future” for enterprise-grade artificial intelligence. Candela explains how Celonis is building confidence into AI from design through build, combining process intelligence with AI to inject context, security and compliance directly into workflows. She details the meaning behind “free the process” – ensuring customers have access to their own data to power AI – and ... Read more

explore Keep Exploring

What importance does customer engagement and education play in relation to security and AI technology advancements? add

What role does process intelligence play in building trust within workflows and security in product development? add

What is the balance between speed and compliance in the context of AI governance? add

bolt Powered by CUBE AI

Vanessa Candela, Celonis

search

Savannah Peterson

>> Good morning, Celonauts, and welcome back to beautiful Bavaria. We're coming to you today from Munich, Germany. It's day two of Celosphere. My name's Savannah Peterson, bringing you all the fun, insight, and inspiration with the fabulous Rob Strechay all week. Rob, this is one of our favorite shows and I'm so delighted to share it with you.

Rob Strechay

>> Absolutely. I think this has been a great first day. We had a lot of energy, a lot of customers, a lot of Cellonauts and everybody from partners as well. So I'm very excited about today.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes, me too. And I'm super excited for our first guest of the morning, Vanessa. Welcome to the show.

Vanessa Candela

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

Savannah Peterson

>> This is going to be so fun because we're going to talk about two things that I don't think we talk about enough in technology, which is both trust and responsible AI. It's one thing to do things at velocity. It's another thing to do them with confidence. So talk to us a little bit about, set the stage about how you're approaching with the team applying process intelligence to AI to have these trusted outcomes that people and companies can be confident in.

Vanessa Candela

>> Yeah, absolutely. So it's so important for our customers, for our partners, for all of our stakeholders and for our employees. I mean, trust is at the center of everything for us and for everybody. And actually, I really believe that trust is going to be the currency of the future if it's not already for businesses.

Savannah Peterson

>> Ooh, I love that statement. What a soundbite. That's fantastic. I want to borrow it.

Vanessa Candela

>> No, I mean, I say it a lot because a lot of people think about what is the currency. And people talk about, "It's market share, it's cashflow, it's some financial metric." And I think that trust is the future of this, especially with AI, especially with people talking about responsible AI. I think it's critically important. And so we have these conversations with our customers all the time.

Rob Strechay

>> When you look at it, because I think again, as we were talking beforehand, when I was on the IT side of things, I really looked to my legal team as well as when I was out in startups, when I was running product, we always in the sales teams were actually partnered up very closely with legal and things of that nature. When you look at it, because there's so many complicated things that are regulations and governance that those teams are running into as they're interacting with the customers.

Vanessa Candela

>> Sure.

Rob Strechay

>> You must be having those same conversations internally. Help us understand how you're dealing with it internally at Celonis and how that helps them as they go out into the field and work with your customers.

Vanessa Candela

>> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's obviously so important to our customers. I have conversations with our customers about this. I also have responsibility for our security team, so that is a huge component of it. And so educating and enabling our team so they can talk about it in a way that resonates with customers, that builds trust with customers is critically important. And we talked a little bit about this, but there's a lot of... The way technology is moving right now with AI, it's so fast. I mean, it's always been fast, but we are on hyper speed right now. And when you do that, there's a lot of nervousness that happens. And so what we're doing with process intelligence and AI combined is really powerful and really powerful for us to have that conversation, right? So if process intelligence gives AI the context that it needs, it can get smarter, which means we can infuse trust in that process there. That makes sense? So we're having these conversations all the time, and I think it's important that everyone's educated around it so that they can talk to the customers in that way.

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely. And help translate that confidence. I've loved this slogan, y'all can see it on my laptop right here, the free the process. There's been flags running around. When we think about-

Vanessa Candela

>> I love it....

Savannah Peterson

>> technology, it's not always a synonym for freedom. Talk to me a little bit about how you see this process intelligence freeing up the accelerated pace of innovation so people can do things quicker.

Vanessa Candela

>> Yeah, sure. So free the process. I love that you said it. I love that you have a sticker on your laptop. That's amazing. It's really important to us and to the industry, frankly. And people ask me all the time, "What does that mean and what is that all about?" It's really about our customers having access to their own data. So if you think about that, data is going to power AI. It is what we need for process intelligence. It's at the foundation of everything that's happening right now. And if our customers don't have access to their own data, to do what they want to do with it, to choose the vendors of their choice, to help them grow and scale, then nobody's going to be able to take advantage of all of this amazing technology going forward. So that's what this is about, because our customers need the data so that they can leverage process intelligence to do that. If that makes sense.

Rob Strechay

>> As you look at, again, freeing the process and process intelligence, Celonis is working across many different industries. I mean, we had so many industries. I mean, I thought it was fantastic when up on stage you had three different industries really talking about it from manufacturing with the heavy manufacturing in plastics with Vinmar and you had Uniper with energy and obviously, Mercedes-Benz also manufacturing-

Savannah Peterson

>> So many fun stories on stage.

Vanessa Candela

>> I know.

Savannah Peterson

>> Isn't it amazing?

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> Such a great keynote. It really was.

Rob Strechay

>> And they're all different parts of their journey with Celonis. How do you see what you're doing and your team's doing to help? Because again, chief legal and trust officer, so that trust part is one of the big things. People want to know, and security is obviously part of that as well, that they can trust what's in there. It would seem like process intelligence really can help lead to that trust.

Vanessa Candela

>> Absolutely. Right? So that if you can inject intelligence into these workflows that you heard about in the auto manufacturing process, all these processes that we don't even know are happening behind the scenes. But if you can inject intelligence into those processes continuously, which is where we're headed, right? So when we get to that point, you'll be able to see constantly that there is trust built into that process. So what do I mean by that? We build confidence into our product from the start. So we inject security from the start. We inject trust from the start. We look at it from a compliance perspective. We start at the build. Actually, we start at the design, looking at how we're designing things, then how we're building things. And so when we can talk to customers about that, when my teams talk to the customers about how involved the trust teams are in that process, they get confidence in the product and know that we're thinking about it every step of the way. I expect that from our vendors. And so absolutely, I would expect our customers to expect that from us.

Savannah Peterson

>> How does all of this play a role in governance and process intelligence as a governance layer?

Vanessa Candela

>> So it's interesting. I think the future of this, and I think Alex mentioned this in his keynote yesterday, is we want to get to a place where we're not finding gaps, we're preventing the gaps from happening, right? So process intelligence combined with AI is going to allow us to do that. Think about a world in which today where you could find a gap in your compliance process before you go into an audit. Great. You find it right before, you fix it and then you go into your audit. You certainly don't want to find it when you're in an audit, right? In the middle of that.

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely not. Yeah.

Vanessa Candela

>> Like, "Ooh, wow, we didn't even see that because we didn't have process intelligence to know that there was that gap." In the future, when it happens and it's going to happen very quickly, you're going to be in this continuous control monitoring world, right? Where you're going to see it as it's happening and fix it long before you're in the audit world. So I think process intelligence is key to that. And it's, I gave you the compliance use case, but you can imagine the use cases across all of technology where we could leverage that.

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely.

Rob Strechay

>> I was going to say, yeah, and also, I think you hit on this a little bit, but really a lot of what was talked about even in the keynote yesterday, just the expansion of the number of partnerships that Celonis... You must have to get involved with a lot of that and making sure. And I think as Carsten was talking about, there's not going to be one company that does AI. It's going to be a collection of an ecosystem that come.

Vanessa Candela

>> That's right.

Rob Strechay

>> How have you been helping Celonis go faster with that, having some freedom and some control with that?

Vanessa Candela

>> Yeah, that's the big question, right? That tension between velocity-

Savannah Peterson

>> That tension, baby. Yeah....

Vanessa Candela

>> and compliance. I have this conversation all the time. So look, I mean, we have an AI governance council, we look at everything, we scrub our partners really tightly. I'm sure they will tell you. Just like our customers are coming to us wanting to understand what is your AI, what's behind it, what are you doing? How are you ensuring that it's ethical? How are you ensuring that there's no bias? All those things. We're doing the same things because especially for our tech partners, then we're putting those tech partners in front of our customers, right? So we need to make sure that we have 100% confidence in those partners. So you got to move fast, but we built a team, we have a very streamlined process around how this happens, as you might imagine, so that it goes as quickly as possible. But there is a natural tension there and I think it's a healthy tension.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> What would your advice be? As we know, there's kind of this perception of where people are on their AI journey or even their transformation journey right now, whether that involves AI or not, and where they actually are. In the same way you talked about the tension, we're kind of in this unique growing pains phase where people are starting to... It's like hitting puberty as a kid, right? You got to grow up and develop into an individual. It's the same thing that companies are going through in their maturation cycle. What would your advice be as someone who helps instill confidence into companies about these processes? What's your advice for those feeling just still a little uncertain about this next layer of tech?

Vanessa Candela

>> Yeah. There's always a new layer of tech, right? When this first started coming out and everybody was very concerned in AI and, "Oh my goodness, and how are we going to deal with this?" It reminded me of cloud. When the tech industry went to the cloud, it was that open source. Everybody was afraid of that, right? And compliance regimes build up around that and ensure that it's going to happen. AI is just so incredibly exciting and so powerful, but we've already seen it even in the last six months to a year. You've already seen how quickly this is moving and how people are becoming more and more confident and people are learning how to implement it. So I think Alex mentioned in his keynote yesterday, 85% or something of AI implementations fail. That is crazy, right? Given the value and the incredible power that AI has, some of that I think is because of change management, because people are nervous about it. They don't understand it. They're afraid it's going to take over jobs or whatever the concern is. So making sure that people understand what's behind it, the power of it, and how to do it in the right way, I think is critically important. So all organizations should be doing that. I know we're doing that ourselves internally for our use of AI and ensuring that confidence so people can use it in a way that is powerful because it's here. It's not going anywhere and it's too incredibly powerful not to take advantage of.

Rob Strechay

>> One of the things that, and I was just sitting there thinking about it because having been and done keynotes before in the past, I sat there. And when they flashed up 120 plus customer or 120-

Savannah Peterson

>> The champions....

Rob Strechay

>> customers, the champions were over $8 billion worth-

Savannah Peterson

>> Value....

Rob Strechay

>> of value. So that came through you, was vetted by you guys. Because I know how that all goes because you want it to be verifiable. So that must be like when you're going through and you're seeing these numbers and just knowing that they're real because you're... That must really be exciting that you can actually back that you can actually up because you know from the legal side, you guys need to be verifiable and all of that. So how has that been with just, we've seen it where the customers just seem so willing to come up and have conversations and talk about that?

Savannah Peterson

>> As Carson was telling us, fighting to get on the stage essentially. Yeah, which is amazing.

Vanessa Candela

>> Well, imagine you're responsible for bringing in a technology vendor that shows 10, 15X ROI. I mean, everybody wants to talk about that. We want everybody talking about that because it's real. So yes, obviously we have to verify it. I would argue that the number's probably even bigger than that, right?

Rob Strechay

>> Probably. Yeah.

Vanessa Candela

>> And so when we see that-

Savannah Peterson

>> Oh, I suspect it is. Yeah.

Vanessa Candela

>> It is so incredibly exciting and people want to talk about it because I don't think they believe it when they first start their implementations. They think, "Oh, we'll save a little bit of money here and there." And then we see the power of it in one use case and then they expand it to another and then their colleagues see what's happening and they want to get in on it. And that's when you see the exponential growth. So it is so fun to watch. It's so fun to be here talking to customers about it. Rarely do I get out in front of customers like this where I'm hearing about all the cool stories that are happening. So it's been a lot of fun.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> I bet that's a really good feeling. I'm going to ask you a personal question.

Vanessa Candela

>> Sure.

Savannah Peterson

>> Taking off your Celonis hat, what excites you the most about our AI future?

Vanessa Candela

>> Oh gosh. I mean, I use AI every day. I'm amazed when I talk to people that don't use it. It gives all of us an ability to just enhance what we're doing, right? So a lot of people say to me, "Are you worried it's going to take jobs? What are lawyers going to do when AI takes over the world?" There's always going to be a need for human, right? No matter what, but the power that it has to enhance what we're doing is so incredible. Whether it's organizing your personal life or doing what we're doing here or accelerating or increasing efficiencies. So it brings costs down for businesses, which ultimately hopefully brings costs down for people, right? There's so much opportunity there that I don't even know which to choose because I think there's a lot there. It's really fun.

Rob Strechay

>> I mean, I look at it and I'm very bullish on it obviously, but I think it's also one of these things that I think a lot of people have failed. And the whole MIT thing I think is overblown because I think there's-

Vanessa Candela

>> You hate that data.

Savannah Peterson

>> I just flat out hate it. Yeah.

Rob Strechay

>> I don't hate it, but I mean, I'm also a stats guy, so I understand that you can make stats look the way you want to.

Vanessa Candela

>> Who do you know at MIT who you're trying to kiss up to?

Rob Strechay

>> No, I don't. I went to BU.

Savannah Peterson

>> He's a Massachusetts guy.

Rob Strechay

>> I went to BU, not MIT, so it's like I was across the river but-

Savannah Peterson

>> I went to BCM.

Rob Strechay

>> Oh, right. Anyway, we won't go there. But I think when you look at it and you can stand behind it, I think one of the things that has really inhibited people from getting to production has been compliance and governance and real trust in there. And I think some things, it's also been the ROAI, as we talked about yesterday, and we'll probably be talking about a lot today. When you look out into 2026, where do you see the landscape and what do you expect in the next year between now and next Celonis Sphere about how that trust, governance and compliance is going to really become, I think, critically important that it's working hand in hand with the technology folks on that again?

Vanessa Candela

>> Absolutely. I think people will get more comfortable the more they use it, right? It's a little bit of a fear of the unknown. And as you have people like people on my team that are working to instill that confidence, security is using AI to secure against AI, right? That's where we're going. A lot of security professionals that are forward-thinking are thinking in that way. Inserting secure prompts into AI technology. There's so much that can be done there. So I think as the confidence builds, it will become more and more prolific and then it'll become like everything else. It'll be like, "Of course we're using AI. Of course everyone's using AI every day." And I think it's no different. And that's why process intelligence, frankly, is so important because AI in and of itself is not good enough. Not for B2B, not for enterprise. So for enterprise AI to work, you really need the process intelligence behind it. So I do think that there's a revolution here around this. And once people start to use it, they're going to realize that. I also think we talked about a little bit before is where we're going. We're going to get there and get there very quickly, probably faster than I even realize is being predictive around this. Where again, we touched on it a little bit before, but when you're in a world where AI combined with process intelligence is inserted right into the workflows as they're happening, it's going to become second nature. It's just a matter of time. And I think it's going to be faster than we all realize. I really do.

Savannah Peterson

>> And I think it won't be as distinguished. I think it'll just be a part of your experience.

Vanessa Candela

>> Exactly.

Savannah Peterson

>> You won't even necessarily know which aspect of this was powered-

Vanessa Candela

>> You won't be opening up the AI

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, it'll be beyond the browser.

Vanessa Candela

>> Yeah, exactly. It'll be embedded in all that we do.

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely. Vanessa, this has been an absolute perfect way to start the day. Thank you so much for making the time.

Vanessa Candela

>> Thank you so much. It was so great to meet you both.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes, likewise.

Rob Strechay

>> Same here.

Vanessa Candela

>> Great.

Savannah Peterson

>> And thank you, Rob, and thank all of you for tuning in to our two days of live coverage here in Munich, Germany at Celosphere. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching The Cube, the leading source for enterprise tech news.