Celonis Process Connectors: Free your processes and fuel your AI revolution

Data is the definitive double-edged sword. It’s the key differentiator for today’s enterprises. Harness it well and it's the fuel that powers your business to commercial success. Anything else, and data becomes a rising tide set to overwhelm and sink the ship.

Why? Because modern tech stacks are big, data-hungry big beasts shaping every business process.

Even small to medium-sized companies can have hundreds of software applications – with large enterprises it can be in the high hundreds. And each tech solution consumes, analyzes, and produces vast quantities of data. One of our global tech customers operating in the grocery logistics space, for example, currently processes over 20 billion records within the Celonis platform…and is planning to quadruple its data volumes to enable analysis of seasonal demand.

The AI data premium

Just as data volumes have increased exponentially, the importance of effective data management – specifically leveraging data as a strategic resource – has grown right alongside. And that’s due – a little inevitably – to artificial intelligence (AI). Every single data point can fuel AI’s transformative impact. The better informed the AI platform, the more effective its powers of decision-making and optimization.

But here’s the thing. This raw data needs to be structured, harmonized and combined with business context in order for AI to understand how the business runs and how to make it run better. Business context is the “who, what, when, where, and why” of your operations (e.g., process metrics, KPI definitions, process models, benchmarks, etc.). Celonis’ 2025 Process Optimization Report shows that the vast majority of enterprise leaders (89%) agree it’s crucial for AI to have the context of how their business runs if it is going to deliver meaningful results and increase operational efficiency. In order to achieve both of these goals, businesses need a platform that can transform the data from hundreds of different sources into an interrogable model.

Before any of that can happen however, the ocean of information needs a conduit through which to connect with this platform – efficiently and securely. Connectivity is the key in activating enterprise data. The Celonis Process Intelligence platform satisfies both of these requirements.

Consolidation and context

At the heart of the Celonis platform is the Process Intelligence Graph (PI Graph). The PI Graph combines process data and business context to create a living digital twin of business operations. It’s system agnostic, without bias, and uses object-centric process mining (OCPM). And Celonis can use data from any source—on-prem or cloud-based ERPs, CRMs, data warehouses, desktop applications and more. No more struggling to get new and legacy solutions to play nicely together; Celonis can bring data together from these often disparate and disconnected sources into a single, powerful resource.

Celonis provides the essential input for AI, along with the understanding and governance guardrails AI needs to work more effectively for our customers . In this way, Celonis acts as an enablement layer of the enterprise AI stack, sitting between the raw data and AI applications, guiding their actions and maximizing the ROI of AI deployments. That’s why we strongly believe “there’s no AI without PI”.

Multiple routes to enhanced process connectivity

The more customer data points our platform can ingest, the higher the definition of process understanding and AI impact. At Celosphere 2024, our annual user conference, we announced the Celonis Data Core, a series of platform enhancements that makes getting data into Celonis easier and once it’s in, makes transforms, loads and queries faster. With Data Core, we give customers multiple ways to integrate data from their source systems:

Process Connectors

Even a single process is typically supported by multiple IT systems crunching terabytes of data. To ingest this data into our platform, we’ve built more than 100 different Process Connectors for the most common applications available to our customers – from ERP to CRM systems, TMS to all manner of databases (including Oracle, Microsoft SQL, Azure, and PostgreSQL). These Connectors offer pre-built extraction and transformation capabilities to enable businesses to quickly connect their process data with Celonis.

Some of the most in-demand Process Connectors relate to providing connectivity with SAP ERP systems. More than 600 teams around the world are actively using our Extractor for SAP to connect their process data to the Celonis platform, for example, to facilitate their S/4HANA migration.

The Extractor supports SAP S/4HANA and SAP ECC running on HANA as well as on Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and other platforms. It enables extraction queries to be set up by named SAP users, with data replicated according to a predefined schedule.

Celonis Standard Data Ingestion API

In addition to the individual native Process Connectors we’ve built at Celonis, we’re also following a broader approach – opening up the platform to other data applications. This means customers can use their preferred ETL tool, iPaaS solution, or data lake to push their data into the Celonis platform via our Standard Data Ingestion API.

This API is compatible with pretty much any data tool, such as Microsoft Fabric, Databricks, Boomi, or Informatica. For enterprises with established data stacks and data stewards in place, this API route is often an attractive option. It allows them to reuse existing workflows deployed to feed other data consumers (such as business intelligence functions) rather than build a solution from scratch.

The Extractor Builder

We’re building new Process Connectors all the time. But there will always be new use cases or niche source systems requiring a connectivity solution to get data into the Celonis platform (to optimize processes and power AI solutions). Our Extractor Builder helps bridge this gap.

The Extractor Builder not only allows users to connect with any REST-based API in order to connect systems to Celonis, but also enables customers to extend pre-built extractors and even build their own. This approach has led to over 100 new source systems being connected to the platform for which we’d had no previous use case. With the ability to create bespoke connectivity, businesses from any industry, using any system, can generate the Process Intelligence that underpins successful AI deployment.

Zero Copy Integration

Zero Copy Integration is a rapidly growing trend in the SaaS / data space—and one which the Celonis platform supports. As the name suggests, rather than ‘pushing’ data into a platform – copying the data – the zero copy option enables users to read the data in place from the source without need of duplication. Keeping the data in a single location offers several strategic advantages, including speed (real-time updates), convenience, data security, and governance.

In April 2025, Celonis announced a zero copy integration with Microsoft Fabric. This lets Microsoft users seamlessly embed Process Intelligence into any solution they’re building – including AI agents in Microsoft Copilot Studio. This integration provides customers with a single source of truth, lower storage and transfer costs, reduced latency, fewer data errors, and simplified data governance. Further integrations with other platforms are expected in the months ahead.

Flex your tech stack

Like it or not, businesses are in a digital arms race. How far they capitalize on AI’s transformative impact will increasingly determine their ability to compete. This means ensuring AI is fueled by Process Intelligence. And with the Celonis Process Intelligence platform and Data Core, you can flex your tech stack to its fullest effect.

Process Connectors are available from the marketplace for the vast majority of core processes across Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Supply Chain, Procurement, and beyond.