Finally Enterprise AI gets the context it needs to succeed, Celonis:NEXT 2026

The honeymoon phase for enterprise artificial intelligence is officially over. While the last few years were defined by the excitement of demos and email summarization, companies now face immense pressure to industrialize AI across the entire enterprise and drive meaningful ROI.

During the Celonis:Next 2026 product showcase, Dan Brown, Chief Product Officer and EVP Engineering at Celonis, articulated why so many initiatives stall. "AI models are brilliant reasoning engines, but they’re probabilistic," Brown explained. "When it comes to how things work in your specific business, they have major operational blindspots."

To bridge this gap, Celonis announced a suite of innovations centered on providing the "missing piece" of the AI puzzle: business context.

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The Celonis Context Model: The new heart of the platform

The headline announcement of the showcase was the launch of the Context Model, which sits at the heart of the Celonis Platform. Built on the Celonis Process Intelligence Graph, the Context Model creates a living digital twin of business operations by integrating three critical pillars:

• Process Data extracted from all underlying systems, encompassing the current state and history of operations
• Business Knowledge: Unique organizational goals, best practices, and ways of working.
• Decision Intelligence: The ability to anticipate future outcomes and simulate change.

A key driver of this new capability is the acquisition of Ikigai. By combining Ikigai’s cutting-edge AI-driven forecasting models and Decision Intelligence with Celonis technology, the Context Model allows AI agents to simulate different scenarios and act with clarity about the past, present, and future of a business.

Additionally, Celonis introduced Prediction Builder, now in private preview, allowing customers to deploy machine learning models directly in the platform to forecast outcomes, surface risks, and optimize operational performance.

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Data Core: Powering the Context Model at scale

A digital twin is only as effective as the input it receives—from the data, the systems, the applications, the devices, and interactions happening across the enterprise. Celonis highlighted major updates to the Data Core, its high-performance infrastructure designed to transform any data—structured, semi-structured, or unstructured—into an object-centric model.

The Data Core delivers rapid query performance across billions of records. It’s up to 20 times more powerful than alternatives and delivers the fastest, most consistent end-to-end lead times in the industry. Early adopters across more than 80 enterprise customers are seeing load times cut in half, a 75% reduction in runtime variance, and a 14x reduction in processing time. To further eliminate data silos, Celonis announced new inbound, zero-copy connectivity for Amazon S3 in private preview and Snowflake coming soon. These announcements complement the existing integrations with Microsoft Fabric and Databricks and complete Celonis’s native zero-copy coverage across all major cloud data platforms.

“With zero-copy, we’re seeing customers achieve data transformations up to 10 times faster,” said Brandon Ortiz, VP of Integrated Marketing at Celonis. “And because Celonis is built on open standards and protocols, you can expect zero-copy coverage to continue expanding over time.”

Additionally, Celonis announced that outbound data sharing is now in private preview. This allows organizations to bring together raw data and business semantics inside Celonis and feed that enriched data back into their centrally-governed environments using open Delta Sharing protocols, powering downstream AI workflows and custom dashboards.

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Task Mining and Celonis Catalogue updates

To ensure AI agents understand how people actually get work done, Celonis announced AI-driven Task Discovery in private preview. This capability automatically contextualizes manual work—like clicks and messages—and links those labeled actions to business objects within the Context Model.

To accelerate the intake of this data, the Celonis has added 16 new connectors to the Celonis Catalogue, for platforms like Oracle, making it faster and easier to bring from every corner of the organization the Context Model.

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Celonis Networks enters private preview

To extend operational clarity beyond organizational walls, Celonis announced that Celonis Networks is moving into private preview for Procurement and Order Management. This new capability allows organizations to securely share data and collaborate across company boundaries. Early design partners, including Conrad Electronic, TD Synnex and Schukat electronic, have used Networks to exchange 5,000 automated order updates daily, instantly breaking down cross-company silos without heavy, custom integration work.

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Enhanced Build Experience: Analyze, design, and operate

The showcase highlighted a continuous cycle of Analyze, Design, and Operate (ADO) within the enhanced Build Experience:

• Analyze: Celonis made its latest mining and adherence tools generally available, including Instance Explorer, Performance Spectrum, and Object-Centric Performance Metrics. This phase is fully supported by the Transformation Hub, now embedded directly into Views, providing an audit-ready record of financial ROI and value attribution for AI-driven solutions.
• Design: The Process Designer now features intuitive drag-and-drop functionality, creating a smooth path from discovering an operational insight to reimagining a workflow.
• Operate: The Orchestration Engine, with over 100 customers already coordinating workflows across AI agents, humans, and systems, has been upgraded with advanced branching and looping capabilities.

"The Context Model helps you gain complete operational clarity, and the Build Experience empowers you to turn that into AI-driven composable solutions deployed across the enterprise, delivering real outcomes like never before," said Divya Krishnan, VP, Process Analysis at Celonis.

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Expanding the AI ecosystem: MCP and Industry Suites

To ensure these insights are actionable, Celonis expanded its Agent Toolkit via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing external agents built on platforms like Microsoft Copilot Studio or Amazon Bedrock to pull in operational context. New extensions include Orchestration Engine Tools, allowing agents to execute deterministic processes on the fly, and upgraded Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) search capabilities via vector stores to tap into unstructured knowledge in real time.

Finally, to accelerate time-to-value, Celonis introduced Industry Suites. These pre-packaged accelerators deliver "ready-to-run" solutions on day one by combining system connectors, pre-defined process data, business context, simulations, and partner-built apps tailored to complex value chains. The suites launch with deep vertical coverage across sectors including Manufacturing, Automotive, Life Sciences and Pharma, and Banking and Insurance.

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Strategic technology partnerships

The showcase concluded with major ecosystem announcements. Celonis has partnered with Oracle to deploy the Celonis Platform on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), enabling customers to reduce risk during migration projects and deploy AI across their Oracle landscapes. Additionally, Celonis is a strategic launch partner for Microsoft Agent 365, Microsoft's enterprise control plane for managing and governing AI agents at scale, helping companies optimize hybrid workflows and measure their true return on AI investment (RoAI).

As Dan Brown summarized, "The context revolution is really an evolution for us... we’re putting it all together to provide the missing piece of the trillion-dollar AI puzzle."

For more information on the new and updated features and capabilities announced during the event, watch the on-demand Celonis:Next video embedded above.