Process intelligence is the foundation of agentic AI success: Celonis’ Kaushik Mitra

Celonis, a German data processing company that offers software as a service (SaaS) to improve business processes, is heavily investing in expanding its market in India. The company has a significant presence in India, particularly in Bengaluru, where it has recently established a global innovation hub. In an interview with TechCircle, Kaushik Mitra, Vice President and Head of India GTM at Celonis, explains how the company is focused on developing AI-powered solutions in India, fuelled by Process Intelligence, to help businesses optimise their operations.

Process intelligence is a technology that automatically captures and analyses how work flows through an organisation's different systems. “India is a critical hub for Celonis; our Bengaluru office, which opened in 2021, hosts close to 200 employees, and we plan to double our headcount within the next year,” said Mitra.

In April this year, Celonis launched its first innovation hub, named Celonis Garage, in its Bengaluru office to facilitate co-innovation with customers and partners while collaborating with startups on advanced solutions such as artificial intelligence.

Having established a mature centre of excellence (CoE), Celonis, which initiated its go-to-market strategy in India in early 2024, is set to scale in the domestic market, especially in the area of process intelligence alongside AI. The company already serves over 150 GCC customers in India and is now targeting the domestic market, supported by its expanded COE team.

While Celonis caters to various verticals, it focuses on large enterprises with a whitespace in process intelligence, and views partners as an extension of its customer base, said Mitra. To effectively penetrate this market, Celonis collaborates with partners, including the Big Four (PwC, Accenture, Capgemini, KPMG) and system integrators, because these partners act as trusted advisors.

Some of its leading customers, including Wells Fargo, Siemens, and ABB, span manufacturing, automotive, consumer products, retail, and BFSI. Mitra noted that large enterprises across these industries are typically Celonis’ customers, particularly GCCs in India. He informed that the company is focused on expanding domestic market penetration, a relatively new area for both Celonis and process intelligence as a segment.

Mitra further informed that a significant portion of revenue stems from work in India due to the presence of GCCs supporting global headquarters, despite many clients being globally headquartered. “The company’s domestic market go-to-market strategy in India began five months prior,” he said.

Speaking about the innovative work done in India, Mitra highlighted duplicate invoice payments as an AI-driven process intelligence use case, explaining how the Celonis platform helps customers identify and rectify these and other issues related to accounts payable and receivable, procurement, inventory, and order-to-cash. Other areas include supply chain optimisation, warranty and service management in BFSI, and KYC and other regulatory compliance.

While facing competition from companies such as IBM and UiPath, Mitra said, Celonis has evolved into a process intelligence platform with a horizontal, cross-functional approach, moving from case-centric to object-centric process mining. "We differentiate ourselves by offering a process intelligence platform encompassing process analysis, modelling, and actionable insights," said Mitra.

“The platform's strength lies in providing insights across industries due to accumulated knowledge and built-in logic. Unlike static data warehouses, the platform analyses real-time data from existing systems,” he said, adding that Celonis’ ability to integrate data from sources like SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, and custom applications is a key strength.

The company is also rigorously working to address India's data and AI skills gap through academic alliances, collaborating with engineering and management institutes to build a strong workforce pipeline for its entity, partners and its customers.

According to Mitra, process intelligence is the foundation for AI and essential for the success of both generative and agentic AI. “Agentic AI relies on understanding and analysing complex business processes to operate effectively and autonomously. That's because process intelligence provides the necessary data and insights for agentic AI to make informed decisions, optimise workflows, and achieve desired outcomes.

In other words, without process intelligence, agentic AI systems may struggle with context, bottlenecks, and adaptation, leading to inefficiencies or errors, he said.