Celonis Celosphere 2025 | Peter Budweiser, Celonis

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Peter Budweiser

General Manager Supply Chain

Celonis

play_circle_outline Peter's insights on geopolitics and tariff implications for companies.

play_circle_outline Navigating Geopolitical Factors: Assessing Tariff Impacts and Short-term Business Strategies with Celonis Insights

play_circle_outline Supply chain disruptions compared to other events like chip shortages and COVID.

play_circle_outline Supply chain transformation driven by resilience and agility in volatile environments.

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Peter Budweiser, Celonis

Peter Budweiser

General Manager Supply Chain Celonis

In this Celosphere 2025 interview, Peter Budweiser, general manager of supply chain at Celonis, joins theCUBE’s Rob Strechay and Savannah Peterson in Munich to unpack how Process Intelligence sits at the center of AI outcomes (“no AI without PI”). Budweiser explains how the Celonis Process Intelligence Graph and a digital twin of the enterprise let teams rapidly assess exposure to shifting tariff announcements, trace sourcing all the way to finished goods and open customer orders, and simulate disruption scenarios before they hit. He outlines practical short-... Read more

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What were the key events and changes that impacted business strategy in February? add

What are the immediate questions customers have regarding the impact of changes on their business, and how can they respond effectively? add

What are the fundamental questions that arise when responding to disruptive changes in the supply chain, and how does Celonis address these issues? add

What are the key drivers behind supply chain transformation in today's business environment? add

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Peter Budweiser, Celonis

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon, Celonaughts, and welcome back to Munich, Germany. We're here coming towards the end of day, one of our two days of coverage of Celosphere. My name's Savannah Peterson, joined with Rob Strechay for all the fun this week, all the great case studies and all the exciting, actionable tips from the Celonis team.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I love being in beautiful Bavaria and enjoying ourselves here. I think the energy that we've gotten and information, because this wave of AI, we've been seeing it come in and I think Celonis was there with the process intelligence. And now, it's really becoming critical as agents need to become real.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, absolutely. We're starting to realize that value. Really excited to have a repeat guest back with us. Peter, thank you so much for coming to hang out today.

Peter Budweiser

>> Thanks a lot for having me.

Savannah Peterson

>> We had a blast talking last time. I was reviewing the footage, Rob and I, both to see how things were going to hold up in terms of what you predicted last year. We'll get there, but I'm very excited because we're going to talk about something that I think most companies are a little uncomfortable talking about, which is geopolitics and tariffs. Celonis has a really interesting approach and a full-on process mechanism. Can you tell us a little bit about that, Peter?

Peter Budweiser

>> Very happy to do so. Let me take you a little bit back to when it all started, which was, I think, February this year, right? So, February this year we had a lot of announcements regarding tariffs. Many, I don't even recall how many and what the exact numbers were, but there was a lot of uncertainty. There was, obviously, also definitely the notion that this . At the time I had the feeling that this is not just a change where you change how much tariffs you're paying, but I think it really felt as like, "Hey, this could really impact my business strategy," in a sense of does it make sense to be still active in certain market? Am I even competitive depending on what your supply chain looks like, how your company's set up and so on forth? So, what we wanted to do is we obviously wanted to help our customers, to help them react. And I always like to think about it in two ways. The first immediate questions that they had were, "Okay, when all of this is happening, how is it affecting me?" So, here we're able to formulate a response very, very fast because the beautiful thing about Celonis and the process intelligence graph is that we have all the data that you need to make exactly the judgment. To say, "I understand where I'm sourcing things from. I understand the global footprint of my supply chain." So, with the additional information of what were the latest announcements, which we can scrape from the web, for example, we can then give you say early assessment to say, "This is how much you're affected," and then obviously to give you the foundation to say, okay, what's the right thing to do. Here, what's interesting is there are a couple of things that you can do in the short-term really, right? So, short-term responses, as in maybe I can buy more before the tariffs actually become effective, so I'm stocking up. Maybe I can change my suppliers. Maybe I can slightly change how at which stage in my supply chain I move products from A to B because that determines the tariffs that are paid. And a couple of more also tactical things. I think the only thing that we couldn't really help with in that is, I think, still a tricky situation is how do I embed this in my business strategy to that point of, "Hey, do I even want to still be active in the American market with certain of my products or am I not able to compete?"

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I think to me, and it was highlighted similarly, but different issue with Mercedes this morning, talking about their supply chain and the chip shortage that was going on and how they engaged back in, I think it was '23. And when you start to look at things like this, how is what you're doing really helping from a supply chain perspective? Because, to your point, it's the same if you're in the US and you're importing stuff, the tariffs were changing things, and to your point, it was hundreds and hundreds of tariffs and they were not only put in place, but they were changing week to week and things of that. So, trying to model that with a spreadsheet is impossible. So, how did you look at that and how is Celonis really looking at that and helping with that?

Peter Budweiser

>> Yeah. To your point, the analogy makes a lot of sense because in the end, I have a potentially disruptive change in my supply chain that I need to respond to, whether that's chip shortages or whether that's a ship stuck in the Suez Canal or whether that's tariffs or whether that's COVID. In the end, the fundamental questions are always the same, like, "Am I affected? How am I affected and what do I do in order to respond to that?" And there's a lot of nuances in all of these aspects, but really, the fundamental thing is very similar. And to make it a little bit more specific and to be very specific, so you do understand what you're procuring, you do understand what the things that you're procuring, where they end up with in terms of the finished goods that you're producing, semi-finished goods, finished goods. And then, obviously also who are the customers that are buying? Who are the customers that actually do have open sales orders with us? And the first level really is to build this process intelligence graph to understand how things are related and connected. And then, the second step, obviously, is then also to simulate these changes. And here really on a technical level, there's a couple of nuances also that you obviously need to account for, but conceptually speaking, you're trying to simulate the effects of these disruptions as soon as you know about them, to then formulate the best answer. And in the best case, even simulate the effect of those responses as well.

Savannah Peterson

>> That has to be a really complex challenge right now, especially because... I mean so many moving pieces. And then many of them are complete and total literal wild cards. Talk about humans in the loop having a big impact on what's going on here. How was the reception within your community when you rolled this out? I can imagine people were relieved.

Peter Budweiser

>> Yes. Generally speaking, yes. What was very interesting to see is in the case of these disruptions, you need to be prepared for it in order to be able to respond. If you're not prepared, then it will be very hard to respond, especially in a short amount of time. So, what we really saw is, obviously, a lot of our customers, companies that already work with us, they're very interested, but the ones that really were able to take the advantage of already having this digital twin, this process intelligence graph implemented, those were the ones that were actually then also able to form these fast responses. For the others, I think it was more like another example of, "Hey, if I had invested in this earlier, then I would be in a better situation right now."

Rob Strechay

>> I was going to say, is there a real-world example you could share? Because I think that resilience and efficiency is one of those things that people are trying to learn about.

Peter Budweiser

>> Best example is the example, right? So, in 2023 when the first semiconductor crisis happened, they were not prepared. So, I was partly part of the initial conversations. And we first discussed, "Okay, how can we help them to respond and to optimize the response also to these disruptions?" Now, obviously that took some time to run a proof, that took some time to do an initial implementation. Now, with the semiconductor shortage coming back, now they're in a situation where they have everything set up and they're a lot faster to respond. Great example from my perspective. There's also a couple of other examples. Involio is one of them, I had a discussion with them earlier today, very similar situation. They had everything prepared already. So, for them, it really was just a matter of, I think even days to set up the response for that particular situation.

Savannah Peterson

>> So, given the moving target, the radical complexity we're living in right now and a few other things, and this is kind an interesting question, what do you think is the greatest challenge to global supply chains right now? Is it the risk here? Is it materials? Is it... Yeah?

Peter Budweiser

>> Yep. I've seen a very interesting study, like surveys essentially around what keeps supply chain leaders busy. And I think there's two things I would like to highlight here. The first one is that the strategic driver behind supply chain transformation is no longer the usual cost of optimization, operational excellence, but it's business strategy. So, it's a CEO-level topic. And the reason for why that is exactly because of some of the topics we discussed because of resiliency and agility. So, can I still perform in this new very volatile environment? The other aspect is still cost, so that still plays a role.

Savannah Peterson

>> Shocking.

Peter Budweiser

>> But the last one is also very interesting, which is supporting new business and service models. So, with consumer demands changing, also requirements from customers are changing, and that is also something that you need to adapt to. So, to a certain degree, it's really like how do I reimagine running my supply chains to support these business objectives? And related to resiliency, related to agility, related to also grasping new opportunities. And I think these are some of the key topics. So, there's a lot of, I think very interesting discussions and also a lot of thinking around how we can reimagine this future.

Rob Strechay

>> Yeah, I was going to say, looking towards the future. And we have all these emerging technologies. And like we were talking about before we went live here, agentic AI is definitely one of the major things, the automation between traditional AI and generative AI and process intelligence. You have it coming together and everybody's looking at their digital twins of their businesses and their processes. How do you see these technologies helping organizations over the next year?

Peter Budweiser

>> Specifically, over the next year?

Rob Strechay

>> Well, next year to five years. I mean, I agree with you. I think agentic stuff is going to take a lot longer than everybody... because I don't think people know their processes, and I think there's a lot of bad agents being built out there now, and that's why I'm high on Celonis about the process mapping and intelligence.

Peter Budweiser

>> Yep. So, how is it going to help over the next couple of years? I think there is a lot... So, let me start differently. I think there's a very good understanding that with agentic AI agents and so on so forth, you have a much higher flexibility, doing things the way you think are right for your business. With Celosphere, obviously, there's all the topics around composability, freedom process and so on and so forth. And I do believe agentic AI really can play a very important role here. So, what I already see happening is that some customers, not everybody, but customers I think that are in the right place in terms of their maturity and how they think about things are already in a situation where they have certain aspects of their organization where they're just thinking about what is the right process? How should it look like? And then, agentic AI orchestration and so on forth are rather tools and solutions to put it in place. So, we have a lot of very specific examples also within Celonis where there's a very specific focus on, say for example, I want to improve how I onboard suppliers from the initial request from my organization to actually have the supplier onboarded and starting procuring from them, spanning several different systems, incorporating collaboration, getting information from those suppliers to set it up. And I do especially see a lot of, potentially in these cases, where there's no real system in place. In the end, it's relatively straightforward. The big opportunity is the white space. And the white space is typically at the intersection of systems where the handover maybe is not perfect. Also, from an organizational perspective, if you have two organizational teams, procurement and supply chain. For example, if you can deploy solutions very flexibly that meet the needs of the business to break down that silos and then help you get additional value from it, I think those are the sweet spots actually to get started with. And that's also why I think we'll see more coming from that perspective versus automating simple tasks within a specific domain.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think you're bringing up a really good point, and that takes us actually to a place that I wanted to drive this conversation. If you'll recall, last year I asked you what you were hoping to be able to say this time this year. And I loved it because you were talking about using Celonis to drive decisions and trade-offs around sustainability, as well as leveraging AI to make decisions. Do you feel like both of those things have happened?

Peter Budweiser

>> Not entirely, to be honest. I recall that. So, I think on the AI side, we've seen very good progress. I think there's also a lot of evolution in terms of how people think about it, but generally speaking, I think there's a very consistent drive. You mentioned there's uncertainty to a certain degree and people need to catch up, but in the end, I think we'll get there, right? It's very straightforward. There's also a clear, big vision, which is one of the autonomous enterprise. On the sustainability side, unfortunately in the industry, it has eased a little bit, to be honest. So, the regulatory pressure, I think, decreased. Also, with the new administration in the US, I think also the pressure has decreased. So, the pressure from a more regulatory point of view I think is not as high anymore, which obviously then also influences the, say, motivation of different organizations to actively incorporate sustainability into the decisions. Nonetheless, I think there have been some very good examples and cool examples of how that can go. And it's also still a focus of ours to integrate sustainability into the biograph, which is then eventually also the foundation to incorporate it in the decisions that are taken. But unfortunately, not as strong as I would hope for.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, first of all, thank you for being honest, and second of all, I think it's okay to still have that ambition, right? We're still figuring out what a lot of this means. So, that brings me to my closing question, which is going to be the exact same thing, but looking at 2026, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't say now?

Peter Budweiser

>> I think one big question that I have, but I think that also others have is how exactly is the agentic AI topic going to play out? It will for sure come, but how exactly, in supply chain, how are the different systems vendors and so on forth going to work together to really make that come to life? I think that's one very interesting topic. And then, for supply chain, this eventually goes into more cross-functional collaboration, collaboration across different organizations. Also, collaboration across different layers. From my strategy to planning to execution, I think there's a lot of potential there. So, if we are talking again in one year, I would like to talk about the advancements that we made in those areas.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love that. Well, I look forward to it, Peter, and you know we're going to hold you accountable to it next year. Thank you so much for making the time to hang out with us again.

Peter Budweiser

>> Thanks a lot. It was a pleasure.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes, and thank you, Rob. Always fun.

Rob Strechay

>> Always fun.

Savannah Peterson

>> Bringing the insights to our fantastic audience.

Rob Strechay

>> Always great.

Savannah Peterson

>> It is always great. And we hope that you are doing great 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.