Celonis Celosphere 2025 | Eugenio Cassiano, Celonis

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Eugenio Cassiano

SVP Strategy & Innovation

Celonis

play_circle_outline Exploring Munich: Beer Culture, Process Intelligence, and Key Insights from Eugenio on Composability and Ecosystem Innovations

play_circle_outline Importance of enterprise AI and composability for maximizing AI value in organizations.

play_circle_outline Shift in CIO conversations from trial to establishing clear methodologies for productivity.

play_circle_outline Future aspirations for the Celonis ecosystem and partner innovations at Celosphere 2026.

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Eugenio Cassiano, Celonis

Eugenio Cassiano

SVP Strategy & Innovation Celonis

In this Celosphere 2025 interview, Eugenio Cassiano, senior vide president of strategy and innovation at Celonis SE, joins theCUBE’s Rob Strechay and Savannah Peterson to unpack keynote takeaways and get to the core of why, exactly, artificial intelligence depends on process intelligence. Cassiano explains how Celonis’ enterprise AI strategy is built on composability and ecosystem value, spotlighting the new Model Command Protocol, or MCP, for process intelligence and a clear analogy: agents as trains running on a common station and infrastructure. The discus... Read more

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What did Eugenio share as highlights from his keynote address? add

What is the perspective on the ownership of "agentic AI" and its implications for enterprise strategies, particularly in relation to ecosystem composability? add

What are the differences in the conversations surrounding corporate strategy and process intelligence between last year and this year? add

What are the plans for future partnerships and innovations related to the product ecosystem mentioned in the conversation? add

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Eugenio Cassiano, Celonis

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon, Celonauts, and welcome back to stunningly beautiful Munich, Germany. We're here coming towards the end of day two of our two days of live coverage here on theCUBE of Celosphere. My name is Savannah Peterson, bringing you all the best and brightest, especially this next guest with Rob Strechay. Rob, what's your favorite part about Munich?

Rob Strechay

>> Beer.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes.

Rob Strechay

>> And the culture. I think there's a lot of culture and beer. Yeah, that's what I love.

Savannah Peterson

>> It's great.

Rob Strechay

>> That and learning about process and getting into process intelligence.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes. My favorite thing about being here is learning from our fabulous guests like Eugenio. Return visitor. Thank you for coming back. Happy to have you as a CUBE alumni. Welcome.

Eugenio Cassiano

>> Thank you for having me back again this year. I always love to be here.

Savannah Peterson

>> It is a joy. Love your energy. Yesterday, you helped deliver the keynote address. Can you give us some of the highlights from what you shared there?

Eugenio Cassiano

>> Well, yesterday it was a fabulous keynote because we had Dan Brown before me and he spoke about all the innovations coming from our platform. Then my focus was really on composability, so actually meaning what is the value our ecosystem can generate on top of those innovations? It was very exciting and that went with a long list of partners that are contributing to it.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I mean I think that when we look at where process intelligence is going and the value created, Alex was on stage talking about the ecosystem, Karsten was on yesterday talking about it. There's a really good viewpoint of not one company is going to own quote, unquote, "agentic AI." How do you see that with the strategies that you're helping put together for where Celonis is today and where it's going?

Eugenio Cassiano

>> Yeah. I think when you think about the notion we launched yesterday about enterprise AI and composable, I think somehow there is an answer in it. I believe that this AI, to really get the value and the maximum out of it, is really to go and work in an ecosystem that is composable. You can wire in things, you can offer things and that's why you have resources and you have tools and then you have a ecosystem. So where they bring a beautiful deep domain expertise to build new models. I think yesterday, actually last year we anticipated a trend, which was the launch of AgentC, but we didn't know. It was really earlier. Yesterday we materialized by launching our first MCP protocol for process intelligence. Right?

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> Which is very exciting. Congratulations on the announcement. Very quick innovation and iteration there. You were sharing with us before we went live, a really great analogy for MCP. Would you mind sharing that with the audience?

Eugenio Cassiano

>> Yeah. I think MCP was launched this year by Anthropic, and I know everybody use certain analogy that are more tech. I like another analogy, which is more on the European. I live in Switzerland and train work very, very well.

Rob Strechay

>> They run on time.

Eugenio Cassiano

>> They are on time and really they apologize if it's one minute late or 10 seconds late. Think about without MCP, every agent will look like a train with his own infrastructure. With MCP, you need to imagine MCP as the common ground, the infrastructure and the train station. Now every train as an agent knows what to do, which tool to use, when to take the people and what are the time to respect. So it's a very common analogy I usually use to explain my non-tech friends out there.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I mean I look at MCP I think done for a reason. I think a lot of it is how do you bring process intelligence and be able to then bring other things back into Celonis. Have you seen how organizations... Again, it was just launched yesterday. We had some customers on who are using MCP, they're using A to A for agent to agent stuff. Have you seen them embracing and pushing into this technology as they build out agents that, they want to include the process intelligence that makes the agents smart about what they're supposed to do?

Eugenio Cassiano

>> Correct. So MCP, so process intelligence is going to play a big role in enterprise AI because we have the semantics, we have the process context, we know the why, we eventually know how it should look like, we eventually know the deviation towards , and maybe we also know the recommendation around it. However, what's happening, and that was very interesting yesterday, we had our CIO track within the executive forum. I asked a question to the CIO and I say, "What's going on there?" You can see that if we go back 10 years ago, there was this trend of shadow IT and now there is a new trend of shadow AI. So everybody wants to build their own agent isolated. That's where MCP plays well because you can help CIO to be in control, to govern, and to have a way to basically orchestrate things together and they confirm the strength. So ultimately there will be two, three, four vendors and who is going to win is the power of ecosystem. So providing the right context, the right tools and resources.

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely. So you have an interesting role of managing, when we're thinking about corporate strategy, it changes a bit. Especially right now with the velocity that we're all moving at, how have the conversations that you're having... Well actually let me phrase this a different way. Have the conversations you're having both internally and externally evolved a lot since the last time we spoke with you? Or are they similar and you're really just getting the wheels on the car, so to speak, to get the corporate strategy to embrace process intelligence?

Eugenio Cassiano

>> Last year, the conversation was more about, I want to try. Then we hear yesterday in Alex's keynote that most of the initiatives are struggling to get a clear RoAI, the RoAI they call it. This year is more a different kind of conversation, which is more like what is the right methodology to use to get something really productive? Once you establish a clear methodology and you identify where you want to focus, we start to see some interesting outcome out of there. Prediction wise, I think next year is going to be the year of the true and what I was talking yesterday also with our partner. Now the beauty is when you start composing and you start enabling this kind of interoperable AI ecosystem, you can start to attribute the value they generate. That's what we have been doing at Celonis for the last years. Now we are opening up also to AI initiatives and composable solutions.

Rob Strechay

>> Have you seen that as you look out, again, you're looking into the future as well with the strategy, that you're seeing that organizations, there's patterns starting to emerge? I looked at yesterday, like you said at the keynote, and I thought it was a fantastic group of customers that were up there. You had Mercedes-Benz who was really pretty early on in their movement to using process intelligence towards AI. You had Uniper who was using it in a different way. Then you had, was it, I'm blanking on the last one, I just said their name. The family-owned company. Vinmar.

Savannah Peterson

>> Vinmar.

Rob Strechay

>> Vinmar. Yeah, thank you.

Savannah Peterson

>> We're here for you, Rob.

Rob Strechay

>> Yes. They really seem to be very much pushing in and very aggressive. Is that when you look at the, as you see, there's the early movers, the Vinmars who can really do stuff with their company very quickly and very agilely. They're really at the pointy end of the AI spectrum. Then you've got your others who are maybe a little, nobody's late to the game, the game is just starting, but are trying to still figure out, to your point, the RO of AI, how to get that and what use cases to start with. Process intelligence to me seems like it helps you point in that right direction. Are you seeing that there's a classification of customers?

Eugenio Cassiano

>> I think this is a industry things that we keep repeating. It keeps repeating, right? So you remember 20 years ago SOA was launched. I think it will never change the fact that you might have different clusters or so you might have a flavor in EMEA or Europe. You might have a flavor in North America, which is more like fail fast, run fast, learn. You might have a flavor also Japan. That's why what we see a lot is this intersection that you will see more and more building those digital twin of organization and they are going to be supported with what Alex, and then talk yesterday about this notion of analyze, design, operate. That is not linear, but you can start how you want. You can start operate, you can design or engineer or you can orchestrate by designing and operate and you can analyze. This pattern applies on a different kind of approach. So Europe, maybe you want to have more references before. I see this pattern now providing the right methodology, the right platform to do it. Also with the help of our partners with their specific vertical solutions, it becomes very fast and repeatable.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well we see that. We hear that from your customers. We talk about fast and repeatable. You've grown 4X in the last six months in terms of your customer base. That is certainly very quickly, which is super impressive every time I say it. So let's talk a little bit about, actually, I got a fun challenge for you. I know you're in the process of educating people a lot and about what's possible. So if you could wave your magic Celonaut wand and have every CIO in the world know something about Celonis or what's possible, what would you want them to know?

Eugenio Cassiano

>> The future CIO is the business. I think Celonis will become their source of truth to basically improve the business on different angle, top line, bottom line productivity gains. Really to basically cut the silos and create bridges. That's what they want. So really evolving them from being more like thinking ideas as a cost center and evolving that into a transformation and a top line enabler. I think that's what they like. Yesterday we see the modern CIO, you see today there was a panel with Cosentino. Rafael is the CIO, very modern. He comes from the US, Spanish and he thinks about this. He thinks about Celonis as the brain that can do this for him and making the business.

Savannah Peterson

>> We had the pleasure of talking with him earlier today. Last year as well.

Rob Strechay

>> I think that's exactly it is when you start to look at how different organizations are moving, he's moving very quickly. I mean, they were at one use case last year, now they have 20, or they had 12 agents deployed, 120 use cases being covered. As you look at people once they get... When we were talking with Rafael, it was really about the crawl, walk, run and how do you get involved. Do you see that as a good strategy for these organizations? I think I like the composable nature because they already have stuff. They may have Databricks, they may have Microsoft Fabric as part of their data. They may have both. They probably do. They probably have multiple different data silos. So from a technology perspective, yes. Dan, we talked about CORE and how that's bringing things together, but when you look at it from a strategy perspective for these customers and what's next for Celonis and the platform, do you say, "Hey, we need to help accelerate this part of their journey"?

Eugenio Cassiano

>> So the first thing you need to differentiate with other vendors is, I'm Swiss and I always say we are the Swiss of the software vendor because our option is really to say, whatever investment you have made, we will embrace it. Whatever, it's on the data ingestion or in the execution side of the house. So yesterday we talked about our partners with Microsoft, we also have AWS. That's what is really important for a CIO, to give them feeling that what they already invested is not wasted. You can bring value to them. You can actually augment what they do. Many vendors do this and we try to be humble and do this. Number one. Number two, there is this notion of if you want to scale, you need to democratize the power of process intelligence. So meaning it has to be consumable by everyone in your organization. That's what we do with Rollio. Rollio is actually managing complex process exception, maybe non-deterministic, where you require multiple people to work together. We don't do this in the Celonis system. We run this into what they already use, collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams. Put the people together, we provide the process context, Celonis orchestrate the people, they make a decision, sorry, Rollio orchestrate. They make a decision. Done. What we saw with the early customer like Campari or Manroland that we saw yesterday, they're scaling this way bigger to people that even don't know what process intelligence is, but they focus on their day-to-day problem. That's the beauty, headless democratization, composability.

Savannah Peterson

>> They don't even necessarily have to know what process intelligence is. No. They can just know that they're able to have the visibility they didn't have before on what to do next and what to do best.

Eugenio Cassiano

>> Free them up from things that are repeating for them and they can do the things that are most important for them.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, yeah. All right. Last question for you. Since we've now made this a regular thing two years in a row. When we are here for Celosphere 2026 for the year, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't say now?

Eugenio Cassiano

>> So last year I promised you I want to see many partners and I had a keynote. Next year I would like to probably launch something already with an ecosystem of partner, that it's not just our product, it's something that is already launched as an ecosystem.

Savannah Peterson

>> Nice.

Eugenio Cassiano

>> So we're cooking something. So maybe you want to have a look on our labs innovation booth.

Rob Strechay

>> Oh, yeah. Excellent.

Savannah Peterson

>> Interesting, interesting. Well, we certainly look forward to continuing this conversation. You clearly and continue to deliver with the team on everything that you've been promising, which is very exciting. Eugenio, thank you so much taking the time.

Eugenio Cassiano

>> Thank you.

Rob Strechay

>> Yes.

Savannah Peterson

>> Appreciate you and thank you, Rob.

Rob Strechay

>> Yep.

Savannah Peterson

>> Thank all of you for tuning into our fantastic two days of inspiring coverage here in Munich, Germany at Celosphere. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.