Sweet $10M success: How we’re building towards self-healing processes at Mondelēz International

Getting iconic snacks like Oreo, Cadbury, or Milka into the hands of billions of customers in more than 150 countries? That takes some heavy lifting behind the scenes, as you can imagine. When you operate at our scale, hidden process problems can directly impact how we make our chocolate, track retailer shipments, or pay suppliers.

That’s why we at Mondelēz International — like any major enterprise — are racing toward becoming an autonomous, AI-driven business. But as any technology leader will tell you, there is quite a difference between launching a single pilot and scaling artificial intelligence across business units and countries.

At Mondelēz, we’ve seen first-hand that without our business context, even the most advanced LLMs and agents risk making the wrong call. So for us, our path to Enterprise AI started with the core fabric of our business: our processes.

Our AI transformation has a clear philosophy. To truly transform, we must achieve three things: AI-ready data, end-to-end process visibility, and the organizational capacity to change. Celonis allowed us to push all three forward. Here is how.

1. Data won the argument

Full disclosure: We initially embarked on our Celonis journey without having AI in mind. We first wanted to get process visibility to be able to improve the way we work. While our business units considered themselves data-driven on paper, knowing how our processes really performed was a very slow, manual exercise.

The beauty of Celonis is that the platform connects our entire technology landscape. As with every CPG company, we deal with rigid legacy tech and messy data. Celonis plugged into all of it (our 20 core systems of record, to be precise) so we could start creating digital twins of our processes, showing us exactly how our business actually runs.

We started our Celonis journey with a very targeted use case at the end of 2024: cross-checking and optimizing payment terms. We were blown away by the visibility Celonis gave us. Seeing a digital twin of our entire Source-to-Pay operations — and where we left money on the table — eliminated any doubts we might still have had. You could say the data made the decision for us.

Six months later, we embraced Celonis as an enterprise strategic platform, moving fast from one tactical use case to making Celonis the heart of our AI transformation. (See our full Celonis journey here).

2. Deliver P&L impact to fund innovation

Our early use cases with Celonis gave us the hard financial metrics we needed to justify rapid expansion across seven core end-to-end processes: Source-to-Pay, Order-to-Cash, Record-to-Report, Hire-to-Retire, Master Data Management, Innovate-to-Market, and Go-to-Market.

In less than 18 months, we’ve unlocked $10 million in direct P&L value and freed cash flow. The work we’ve been doing so far — optimizing our processes with Celonis — also laid the foundation for our broader Enterprise AI strategy. I think I can speak for many IT leaders, that one of the core challenges is scaling AI in a way that actually generates true P&L impact.

Our plan is to use Celonis to close that gap as the platform allows us to:

• Identify high-ROI use cases. We can pinpoint exactly where to deploy AI agents for maximum financial return.
• Monitor AI impact. We can track the downstream effect of every AI action across our systems so we can continuously refine agent set up.
• Optimize Total Cost of Service. We can measure the operational cost of human versus agent workflows.

That kind of visibility fundamentally changes the way we work. It allows our teams to shift from doing manual work to overseeing AI agent performance right inside Celonis — stepping in only to handle complex exceptions, so they can instead focus on strategic work.

3. Winning hearts and minds

There’s no point in sugarcoating it: Driving change at this scale requires a huge shift in corporate culture, and that’s not often straightforward. People don’t always get what Process Intelligence can do for them right away. But once they see the value and how intuitive Celonis is, it’s like flipping a switch.

The visibility that Celonis provides is empowering our teams to really take action and build new capabilities along with us. To democratize this power, we established a Hub-and-Spoke Center of Excellence (CoE), meaning we enable teams to drive and own their process improvements while maintaining centralized governance. Our ambition is to see our 500 users co-innovate with us on the platform.

Today, our progress is mentioned at every single town hall and forum. The teams feel it, and they understand that we are on the right trajectory, both for them professionally and in terms of the value we deliver to the company.

4. Context over hype

Celonis gives us something we desperately need to become an autonomous, AI-driven enterprise: business context. That context enables our agents to understand not just what is happening and why, but also lets them predict what might happen in the future. Without this, any AI investment is just an expensive guessing game.

What sets Celonis apart is how easily it connects with your systems, and the user experience is incredibly simple and intuitive. Building a digital twin and accessing your business knowledge happens almost naturally.

5. Going all in on Agentic AI, powered by context

For the near future, we have set our eyes on implementing the Celonis Context Model. This will allow our business to combine process intelligence with predictive scenario planning. Our ultimate vision is to build “self-healing” processes that anticipate disruptions, adjust workflows, and solve problems before they occur.

My ultimate goal? For Celonis to become almost invisible, just like electricity – something that powers our operations. It’s a bold vision, but I believe going all in is the only way.

For other companies looking to lean into AI and scale Celonis, I can’t put it better than one of my colleagues did: Stop wasting time wondering if it makes sense. The value is already proven.

Rossana Rizzotto is Head of the CIDO office at Mondelēz International. Her team bets on the Celonis Platform to fast-track their journey toward a self-healing, autonomous enterprise.