Celosphere 2024 | Analyst Conversation Day 2

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Rob Strechay

Dir./Principal Analyst & Host

theCUBE Research

Savannah Peterson

Principal Analyst & Host

SiliconANGLE Media, Inc.

Digital transformation unleashed: theCUBE explores AI-powered process intelligence innovations

As industries increasingly look toward digital transformation, the integration of artificial intelligence and process intelligence has become central to advancing efficiency and maximizing value.These technologies empower organizations to streamline complex processes, reduce inefficiencies and unify data across disparate systems

play_circle_outline Exploring the Impact of Process Mining Evolution and Community Recognition on Industry Success

play_circle_outline Importance of process intelligence in AI implementation

play_circle_outline Impact of technology on sustainability and real-world applications

play_circle_outline Business value focus and change agents at Celonis event

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Analyst Conversation Day 2

Rob Strechay

Dir./Principal Analyst & Host theCUBE Research

HOST

Savannah Peterson

Principal Analyst & Host SiliconANGLE Media, Inc.

HOST

Celonis Celosphere in Munich, Germany featured 25 segments with over 40 guests discussing process mining and AI. The importance of process intelligence in AI implementation was emphasized, showing that Celonis is industry-agnostic, enabling businesses to optimize their processes. Partners play a crucial role in leveraging Celonis' platform to drive value for enterprises. The event showcased real-world applications of AI and process intelligence, demonstrating how they can impact lives positively. The emphasis on sustainability in technology was refreshing, sh... Read more

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What were some highlights of the week related to process mining and Celonis? add

What is the typical implementation experience of using Celonis for process intelligence and AI? add

What are some ways in which technology can be used for good beyond charity efforts? add

What did exhibitors at the show find interesting about the attendees and the value they gained as exhibitors? add

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Analyst Conversation Day 2

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>> Good evening, Celonis fans, and welcome back to Munich, Germany, for the last time. We're here at the very end of day two of Celonis Celosphere. We have had 25 segments, over 40 guests, and absolutely a load of fun, a boatload of fun, a time load of fun. I'm not even sure what the analogy is. Particularly because of these two fine gentlemen, who have been here through the entire experience with me. Rob Strechay, George Gilbert, thank you both so much for such a power-packed week.

>> I actually had a different take on this, which was, when is any event not fun when you're here?

>> Aww, George, you're after my heart. You are a charmer. I love it. Well, you and I, in particular, have had a really good time talking about where Celonis is at. It feels like they're having an SAP-from-a-few-decades-ago moment. Process mining is, as I would say, at an evolutionary juncture, but you can really feel the trajectory. It feels like process mining is really having its moment. Companies and enterprises are aware of the value add there. That's what Celonis sells. Rob, give me one of your highlights from the week.

>> I think one of the highlights has really been the fact that their community has come together, and that they're recognizing the community with their Global Customer Awards. There was the Innovation Award that went to Conrad and Partners, which was TD SYNNEX and Schukat Electronic. You had the Value Excellence Award. I like this one in particular, where they talked about it on the main stage with Pfizer, with over 300 million in realized value. I think then the Community Inspiration Awards with Reckitt we had on as well and got to talk to-

>> They were super cool....

>> and understand their story. I think we've been able to see a lot of this community and helping... Because I think part of this getting to AI thing, I do agree with their little slogan that's around here. It's not little, it's actually really huge all over the place, but "You can't do AI without PI." And I think when you start to look at process intelligence, I think my highlight has been, getting to process intelligence doesn't have to be as hard. Especially where you start with certain use cases and the data that's existing already. So, that's been great.

>> Yeah. You just brought up a point I hadn't really thought about. In all the customer stories that we had, not a single person said that it was hard to implement Celonis. And most of them were achieving value, or realizing the opportunity, therefore, within six to 10 weeks, which is amazing. Who doesn't want to have impact on the top and bottom line within a quarter? George, I know you are chock-full of exciting ideas. You said you were like a stuffed python waiting to digest all the information that we've had this week.

>> And to add another metaphor. I'm like a Mexican jumping bean. I just got all these things I love, all this energy where I want to express all that I've learned.

>> Let's go.

>> Let me start with what seems like a digression. So, we know that everyone's talking about AI, and the hyperscalers and others have spent tens of billions building data centers. There's talk of building $100 billion data centers to train future generations of these models. I want to go out on a limb here and say, I think a lot of that is a big head fake. Because what's going on is, these things actually aren't all that intelligent. They are more like procedural memory. And so, what they can do is, these models can take the drudgery of writing some simple sequences of code. But for them to really work, they need a source of truth. Now, here's where I'm going to tie into what these guys have been saying, "No AI without PI, no AI without process intelligence." The problem is, we've spent 60 years building these stovepipes, ERP, CRM, HCM. We've talked about this. It's not one Tower of Babel, but many Tower of Babels. And to add yet another analogy, every time you want to get the data from one to the other, you basically have to... You're taking a tree, you're mulching it. You're sending it through a pipe, then reconstituting it as another tree in this other thing. And I don't know, this is a family-centric kind of program, so I don't want to bring up the visual from Fargo, where the bad guy puts-

>> The wood chipper....

>> Steve Buscemi in the wood chipper. Yeah.

>> By the way, it's at a rest area right outside Fargo. And I visited it.

>> Oh. Oh, wow. Okay.

>> It's a little cave, so anyway.

>> So, hopefully, they won't bleep that out since this is live TV.

>> Oh, it's okay.

>> Don't you know it's the last segment? It's okay.

>> But the point is, we, for 60 years, have been tracking things. We've been tracking things like plants or products or people. And we, for the first time in 50 or 60 years, we're going to leave that in place, but we're now going to start tracking processes. So, to your point that it's easier to implement, because before, we had the stovepipe, you had to force-fit your business to how it was designed in this stovepipe. Now, you pull the thing, the information about the things out of these old systems, and they mine them and then it flows into this process intelligence. And then, you can optimize these engine processes. So, for instance, now you can do things like optimizing how CPG retailers and their transportation providers work with retailers. And you get an entirely different view. Rather than optimizing how is this little thing doing, you're optimizing how a business runs.

>> So, to that point, I even had the folks on who won the award around network, that layer of integration. Because to me, having been back in doing... At the financial services company, we had to do a lot of EDI with our partners. And I started to look at this with network and I'm like, you know what? If you are doing EDI, but you're not doing the network at the process player, how do you know where it's breaking down on either side of the EDI? And you're exchanging-

>> Right, it's the wood chipper. That's the wood chipper.

>> Correct. The wood chipper is the EDI, and it failed all the time. You're having a hand come flying out or something like that. It wouldn't chip everything, but you'd sit there. And I think network, to me, is probably one of those critical things that you start to look at how, to your point of front to back with supply chains in multiple different supply chains, bringing them together. And I think they've already been strong in supply chain within companies. And I think bringing this together and connecting those dots really helps people understand where... There was the thing, or if you end-of-lifed a product, but it didn't get end-of-lifed all the way down, and you're doing EDI to EDI, to EDI, without connecting the process, it becomes broken. And I think, to me, that was key.

>> It's a game of telephone, like we were talking about, and people speaking different languages, not in harmony.

>> People need to understand how significant this is. It's not just that we've had SQL databases for 50 years. Even the NoSQL databases and every other variation of database, it's been about things. We haven't had databases. We haven't had a layer that managed processes. We have things, graph databases, but so far, the labeled property graphs, I won't name any names because they may be clients, but they're data structures. They don't capture the logic about how to run a process, and that's what we have here. There's another one, which I won't mention, that we're close to, but we're seeing the emergence of... Let me add another visual in here.

>> You know I love your visuals, George.

>> Okay.

>> Take us.

>> So, in the last James Bond film, when Léa Seydoux, she's a little girl and the bad guy comes, and she chases her out on the ice and she falls through the ice. Okay. So, the legacy systems that are focused on things, they are below the ice, and they cannot break through the surface because they model entities. And if you're above the ice, you're in the real world, and you're working with processes. And we're going to see a very, very fundamental divide between vendors who are below the ice and vendors who are above the ice and our process center. And that's a transition a magnitude of which we haven't seen in a long time. It's like we were in a technology-centric phase for the industry, and now we're going into an industry and business-centric phase.

>> I think that's great. With that analogy, you not only tied in Lars and the story behind his book that he wrote about process intelligence in Jamaica, right where Ian Fleming wrote 007. You didn't even know you just did that, so that really tied in-

>> Uh-huh, okay.

>> Good job....

>> one of the earlier segments. But I think ice analogies tie into Fargo as well. So, you're really killing it. One thing that really struck me this week, Rob and I, we were talking. We're very familiar in this space. I'm a supply chain manufacturing queen. It's the depth of my background. But something that I didn't realize until we got here was just how evenly they're distributed across verticals and sectors. My new friend, who I met at dinner on Tuesday night, was telling me no more than 10% of their business is in any one sector, which I thought was really fascinating. And then, as I really started to unpack that in my mind, I thought, "Wow, how do you do that?" Most solutions are very industry-specific. And that's not just from a technology perspective, it's from a compliance perspective. It's from an adoption perspective, or even the user experience, depending on who the end customer ends up being. Or it's just aimed at data scientists. And that's really not the case here. And as we continue to have our conversations, I was thinking, "How do they do this?" Of course, everyone wants to say they're a solution for everyone. Of course, everyone wants to say that they're a tool and industry-agnostic. But it's normally BS. It's normally not the case at all. And how they do it here, in addition to being incredibly programmatic about their thinking, and like in the conversation that we had with Carsten earlier today, they also do it by leveraging their partners. And I think the partners were a little bit, and certainly not the silent heroes, but I think the surfaced heroes at this event for me, over 400 different partners, all experts in their particular verticals and industries that are building apps on top of the Celonis platform. And that is what actually helps drive that value for all enterprise around the world. I thought that was great.

>> I think you're dead on with that. And I think, again-

>> Thanks, Rob.

>> Yeah. Yeah, no problem. I think again, when you look at it and look at the partners, and George and I actually talked about this last night, you look at the partners who are the major sponsors here, there are a lot of the GSIs that are out, the global system integrators.

>> Totally. It's a great point, Rob.

>> Because they have the experience in this process mapping, and managing without a tool that can help them go and do this and connect this up. So, to me, it is not a surprise that they would lean into this. Oh, by the way, they also have huge AI practices. So, when you start to look at this and you start to bring those two together at that, to George's point, I think what we've all been saying this week has been the fact that having that process intelligence and being able to understand this is how the agent needs to work is really a key. We heard that from BMW, when he talked about how they were building agents outside of it, outside of Celonis as well, but using the Celonis data and where the processes meet together with other data from other places. And I think that became very enlightening to me that this is not about, "Hey..." Yes, you have to get your processes down. And if you don't do this first and you don't understand that first, you are going to fail at AI. And that, to me, is a key.

>> There's one thing to build on what you're saying. These global SIs and all the implementation partners, they made so much money in decades ago with ERP and CRM because they had to re-engineer the business to fit the way the applications were designed. And what's different now is that they can liberate those legacy applications and re-engineer the business according to how they want to optimize their business for certain conditions, certain objectives. The re-engineering before was to straitjacket you into the application. Now, it's to liberate you from the old applications using this process-centered technology to meet whatever objectives you set.

>> You just hit the nail right on the head. We had a great conversation-

>> With Kerry....

>> with Kerry Brown earlier. Yep.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> Yeah.

>> Great minds, Rob. Big minds.

>> I was going to say, the house.

>> Yeah, the houses.

>> And you know what? It might take your legacy formation of process that you used shoehorned into SAP with you when you're getting to Ohana now and you have to move. "Hey, why would you shoehorn that in?" Take what you need to. Take the right processes with you. And oh, by the way, it optimizes your data patterns. And it will optimize and probably shrink your data footprint and make things easier, and help rightsize things. Because usually, when you're buying a new house, you probably don't want it to be identical to the house you just bought or left. There's got to be changes to it.

>> Yeah.

>> And it was exciting.

>> I'm taking the right pieces of that based on the ecosystem or the region. A lot of these enterprises are incredibly global, multilingual, different functions in different places around the world. It's all pretty fascinating. One last thing I really want to just point out, the Celonis team has done an absolutely outstanding job.

>> Yes.

>> From curating relevant customer stories that have measurable impact that they were able to share, both in all the keynotes and the sessions, as well as here on our desk, or Rob and Sav's Club, as we like to joke about it being. But it's so nice because there's so much hype in our industry right now, particularly around AI. But even in terms of platform solutions. It can mean a lot of different things. But we are seeing people saving lives. We're seeing people use research to learn how to impact the trajectory of young folks in the justice system and their mental health. We're seeing how hospitals are getting patients out faster and providing better care. These are things that matter. And in addition to each one of those real-world applications, the amazing food, the staff, and just the general loveliness of this entire team, there's also been an umbrella in all of the branding at this event around sustainability. And the Californian, the technologist in me, the compassionate Earth-loving being that I am, we are not trapped inside a convention center. And well, even when we are, I'm so refreshed to see that. Because the reality is, technology doesn't just have to be for charity to be for good. You can use business-value-adding solutions, like Celonis, to actually impact the world, to use less compute and AI. To make your processes more efficient, so there's less physical waste. And that will have a great impact. Our interview with Carsten touched on it. And the empathy within what is generally a very data-heavy, not necessarily the most emotional part of a business's task flow, honestly, it's inspiring.

>> And what's refreshing, and I think we've touched on this before, is all the shows we cover in the Bay Area are techies selling to techies.

>> Totally.

>> I don't want to cast aspersions on any certain areas of the country where cousins marry each other and that sort of stuff.

>> You're really going for it today, George.

>> Wow.

>> I'm glad I brought a beer on this segment. We are in Munich. We don't normally drink on the show, just FYI, but this is an exception.

>> But here, it's like they show up in business attire and they talk about business value. I'm like, "I can't remember the last time I went to a show where that happened."

>> So, I think what was interesting, and I talked to some of the other exhibitors here, and just to get a flavor for what they were seeing and understanding, and I think what was interesting is, they all found that coming to this show had a high return on value to them as being exhibitors here. And not just the Celonis people and the GSIs, but others in the ecosystem. And I think why it was, was exactly what you just hit on, is that they said the persona who comes here, a lot of it has to do with they are change agents in their organizations. Maybe they report into the CFO, maybe they do report into the CTO, maybe report directly into a COO or a CEO, but their goal is to go out there and help make these changes in their organizations and in their processes. That, to me, when you get people who are really about change and-

>> It's business-focused. It's not, "Hey, this technology is really cool." I get excited about that, but it's-

>> We're all nerds here. We all get a little excited about cool tech.

>> But ultimately, what's different about a process-focused technology is there's a business outcome that you're controlling for, that you're optimizing for. That's what's different.

>> Yeah.

>> It's-

>> I think that's a great point. And as we were talking with Carsten earlier, it's like, it's about change. They're all change-makers here. They call them Celonauts. They're change-makers. People are enacting change. And there's just, and you guys know my angle in all of this is always putting the human in tech, there's a real sense of compassion and caring. We got some great, funny stories from everyone on how they optimize their life outside of work, from being OCD about packing and socks to wedding planning. I really just think we've covered a breadth of things, and I couldn't have been more grateful to share this week with both of you. I really look forward to coming back to next Celosphere. I believe they just announced it, November 4th and 5th next year, right here in the same building here in Munich.

>> Nice.

>> It's going to be a fantastic time, and we're definitely going to have to do it together.

>> Can I add some of my branded catastrophism?

>> I would expect nothing less from you, George.

>> We're November 4th and 5th, unless Russia rolls through.

>> Oh, Jesus.

>> Oh, geez.

>> That is...

>> Wow, I didn't think we were going there. I don't even know what to say there, man. Anyway.

>> Don't you know it can go anywhere? We're here with George.

>> I think that's-

>> We'll leave it at that....

>> we'll leave it at that.

>> That? Okay.

>> Let's hope we're all still here, living happy and healthy lives.

>> Yes, I think we will.

>> Getting to tell the stories of change-makers, like these Celonauts, and getting to have a great time. Genuinely, gentlemen, thank you both. It is always a joy.

>> No, thank you.

>> Yeah. Hey, cheers, man. I say, cheers.

>> Cheers.

>> Cheers. Actually, let's get a little cheers up here.

>> Cheers. Cheers.

>> Both. And also, thank you to everyone you can't see behind these beautiful cameras and behind the production desk. We've got Frank, Alexa, Marcus, Fealy. We've also got-

>> Andreas....

>> Andreas. We've got Anderson, Tony, Ken, Frank Fay over there, Isabelle on the Celonis team. We've also got Marissa. Everyone else who was a part of the crew, who brought this all together, we see you. We're grateful for you. You listened to my voice all day long, and that in itself deserves a beer after this, and a trophy. And thank all of you for tuning in, wherever you might be around the world. We're here in Munich, Germany, wrapping up Celonis Celosphere. My name's Savannah Peterson. For the last time, you're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.