AI & The Rise of Intelligent Operations with Noelle Russell

The $12.9 trillion problem you can't see – and how AI can fix it

Watch Noelle Russell's full Face Value session on-demand

Noelle Russell – CEO of the AI Leadership Institute – says there's a number that should keep every business leader up at night: $12.9 trillion.

That's how much the global economy loses every single year to operational inefficiency. Not to cyberattacks, not to fraud, not even to bad strategy. Noelle’s talking about broken handoffs, redundant steps, and slow decision-making.

Noelle says that for most organizations, this waste is completely invisible. But all is not lost! She has solutions.

In our latest Face Value session, AI strategist and five-time Microsoft MVP Noelle Russell joined us live from Celonis HQ in New York to tackle this $12.9 trillion challenge — and to share a roadmap for how leaders can finally start fixing what often can’t be seen.

Think about processes before AI

Noelle opened with a framework to help organizations think about their workflows in three distinct ways. Most companies today are stuck in what she calls the perform stage. They’re executing processes on autopilot and discovering problems only after they've become emergencies.

The next level is prevention: building dashboards, alert systems, and guardrails that surface problems as they're happening. It’s an improvement, but one that still leaves the business reactive.

The real opportunity, according to Noelle, is in prediction: using historical data and machine learning to identify failures before they occur. She calls this "intelligent failure discovery," and compares it to the difference between a paper map and a GPS that reroutes you around traffic before you hit it.

Noelle says, “We get to pull future challenges forward. Rather than waiting for a problem to happen and then answering it reactively — we can actually prevent it."

Building trust is the key to AI success

Noelle shared a common stat that most have seen at this point: 95% of AI projects fail to deliver any meaningful value. She says the high failure of AI most are seeing today boils down to three often overlooked factors: security, accuracy, and trust.

Trust, she argues, is the most common culprit. Organizations build sophisticated AI capabilities, then watch them go unused because employees were never brought along on the journey. You can't automate your way around change management.

“The number one thing you can do is create awareness that this is something you're doing as an organization,” Noelle says. “Build readiness by training your teams to actually know how to use the tools that you're building. And most importantly, realize it's the ultimate competitive advantage to take what we used to predict and turn it into something we can prevent.”

Noelle recommends a practical solution for getting started: look at a single process you haven't examined in two years. Not a flagship system, but something in the background that’s low-stakes enough to experiment with. Document it, and ask: What would have to be true for this process to fail in 90 days?

From there, build a targeted AI capability around that specific failure mode with the goal of proving value and building trust.

The future belongs to the most connected AI, not the most powerful

Noelle challenges a prevailing assumption: that winning the AI race means deploying the biggest, most capable models.

"The future of AI is not about the most powerful model," she says. "It's about the most connected one."

What enterprises actually need is AI that's wired into their business processes – connected to their data, their workflows, and the humans doing the work — rather than standalone tools solving isolated problems, she outlines

“I use the term bring back the backlog,” Noelle says. “What are things we originally wanted to do in our business, but because of technology, data, personnel, skillset we haven't been able to do. That is what this level of process intelligence offers us.”

Watch the full session

Noelle covered a lot more in her live session of Face Value, including how to handle C-suite skepticism, build communities of AI practice inside large organizations, and design responsible AI guardrails from day one.

Watch the full recording at celonis.com/facevalue, where you can also explore previous sessions and register for upcoming events.

To learn about digital twins and Process Intelligence, download Meet Process Intelligence: the connective tissue for business

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