What is AI-enhanced process mining?

You wouldn't still carry data around on a floppy disk, or use a fax machine to send your boss a P&L update. Yet you might still find some companies today trying to understand and improve business processes by mapping out stakeholders’ impressions with a pen and some sticky notes.

While this process mapping method isn’t totally extinct, most businesses have realized it can’t capture the complexity of their operational landscapes. As companies have grown their global footprints and their operations have entered the digital transformation era, data has been migrated to the cloud, tech stacks have ballooned, and information has been scattered across disconnected systems and teams in every time zone.

Then along came process mining – and with it an alternative to static, imprecise, single-point-in-time snapshots of how business processes run. By extracting timestamped data from event logs in your source systems (sending an invoice or shipping an order, for example), then constructing it into a process model featuring tasks, steps, and interactions, process mining technology provides an objective, accurate view of business operations.

Pretty powerful stuff. But even a process improvement technique as advanced as process mining isn’t immune to the march of progress.

The rise of AI has upgraded process mining into technology that can enrich the data it models and consolidates with predictive analytics, insights, and recommendations. Let’s unpack what AI brings to the process mining party.

What’s the difference between process mining and AI-enhanced process mining?

Traditional process mining techniques remain a great way of kickstarting businesses’ process improvement journey with valuable insights into where inefficiencies lie. The technology primarily focuses on process discovery and modeling, giving organizations crucial, real-time visibility into their actual process effectiveness.

But process mining isn’t about re-orientation or redesign for kicks – it helps clarify and smooth out pinchpoints and bottlenecks right at the root cause. That’s everything from optimizing on-time delivery rates and improving customer satisfaction, to mitigating supply chain risks, boosting working capital, minimizing operational costs, increasing automation, and reducing customer churn.

When you use a process mining platform that’s system-agnostic, you don’t have to worry about whether the technology will be able to extract all your business process data. APIs and pre-built connectors take care of that, so process mining is free to get to work digging through your company’s tech stack.

But enough about standard process mining. AI-enhanced process mining is a significant step up from merely understanding and visualizing your process data. This technology lowers the burden on business teams by making real-time, data-driven assessments that uncover how to enhance process efficiency and how to make better decisions with existing processes.

In other words, AI-enhanced process mining doesn’t just give you a high-powered magnifying glass to inspect the state of your existing processes. It also gives you your very own Sherlock Holmes by helping you make sense of the data in front of you, find clues about what’s stopping processes from working, and string those contextual clues together to form recommended solutions.

What are the benefits of AI-enhanced process mining with Celonis?

AI-enhanced process mining is great news for any business looking to enable superior process insights. But AI capabilities also add value by streamlining and simplifying businesses’ use of process mining technology.

Here are three key ways the Celonis Platform makes it easier to get set up with, enrich, and use your process-mined business data with AI’s help.

1- Get started with process mining more quickly and easily

Before you can start process mining, you first need to extract, transform, load, and model data into the platform – otherwise known as the ETL process. You’ll feel the benefit of AI-enhanced process mining right from this early part of the journey.

AI assistants can guide the ETL process to make it much easier to get your raw data into Celonis so you can mine it. (Look out for Celosphere 2025 announcements about new ETL assistants and updates coming to the Platform.)

With AI enhancement, you can accelerate the time-consuming human evaluation and assessment involved in getting your data to a point where you can execute improvement opportunities that generate value. It’s a huge weight off teams’ shoulders, particularly when they’re working with vast enterprise datasets. Instead, your teams can enter the process mining express lane with AI empowering them to get to data-readiness faster.

2- Enrich your process-mined data

A process mining solution, when part of a broader platform like Celonis, applies AI on top of your core process-mined data, analyzing and enriching it with algorithms that provide additional contextual information and data points.

This makes your process mining data more comprehensive and powerful for further action, with probabilities, predictive analytics, and recommendations already baked in – before you get deeper into your Process Intelligence journey.

To take an example from Accounts Payable, AI-enhanced process mining can tell you much more than how many invoices your business sent to customers in a quarter, and how long it took to send them. The technology can also start calculating how likely those invoices are to get paid, and at what point you should reach out to customers to follow up on unpaid invoices. This kind of assessment is simply infeasible for humans to make, for every given invoice, at scale.

Without this business context, the digital twin created by process mining will be incomplete. That leaves you unable to identify targeted optimization recommendations and implement automation that’s tailored to your business’s KPIs and needs. AI-enhanced process mining plays a vital role in turning your two-dimensional data into a three-dimensional Process Intelligence Graph with business context and actionable insights layered in.

3- Make the data more digestible and comprehensible

Process mining is only useful if you can easily visualize, interrogate, and analyze the data and insights it provides. Merely consolidating your process data won’t get you very far on the road to efficiency, actionable insights, and tangible business value.

AI-enhanced process mining in the Celonis Platform comes with AI capabilities for streamlining how you view, access, and operationalize your data. Celonis Studio, for example, is a low-code environment where you can build custom dashboards that show teams the process performance insights that matter to their role.

Natural language assistants, meanwhile, allow teams to get rapid responses to questions about key metrics, process adherence, and more. Then teams can act on these insights and automate optimizations with copilots. All without having to perform data analysis themselves.

Discover why AI-enhanced process mining is the solution for lasting business process improvement

The Celonis Platform’s AI-enhanced process mining gives organizations a market-leading data foundation in the form of the PI Graph. And our extensive APIs make it as easy as possible to integrate process data into your other business systems. That includes setting up a continuous loop of process-mined insights and business context back and forth with your AI solutions, so they also understand how your business runs.

Once process mining has determined the cause and effect between underperforming processes and limited business outcomes, Process Intelligence can inform optimizations to implement. Because Celonis is an open platform, you can bring your own AI solutions and automations to use this intelligence layer. Or you can use the AI-powered apps and automations, tailored for common, high-value use cases, that Process Intelligence puts at your fingertips. The choice is yours.

And you’ll want to know that these improvement actions are working – which is another reason why AI-enhanced process mining stands head and shoulders above other business process improvement methods. With fresh data loads regularly pulled from your source systems, the technology supports continuous improvement and process monitoring.

To see how this all comes together in practice to create sustainable business value, browse our gallery of process mining demos.