Imagine it’s 10,000 years ago and you’re among the first humans to attempt agriculture. Your tribe has been planting wheat, growing it, harvesting it, cutting it, storing it, and moving it to other tribes for a few years. You’re doing a pretty good job. But now another tribe is growing more wheat, better wheat, and moving it faster. You, being a resourceful type, want to do something about it to safeguard your tribe’s future.
So you start thinking about the processes behind it all. Question is: do you do things as they’ve always been done, and try to make ramshackle improvements based on your best guesswork? Or do you first observe the way your processes are actually working to better understand how things can be improved?
We’d advise the latter and, according to our latest report on how enterprises are making their processes work, the majority of today’s leaders would likely do the same. Let’s look at the data.
A massive 79% of enterprise leaders say they urgently need to better understand how their processes work so they can find improvement opportunities and, ultimately, unlock value in varied forms. That’s according to Making processes work, the 2025 edition of our Process Optimization Report. And here are what they see as their greatest opportunities: increasing productivity and getting the most out of emerging technologies like AI.
In fact, 89% of the 1600+ global business leaders we surveyed say it's crucial that AI understands their processes, policies, and procedures in order to be deployed effectively. More than half (58%) go so far as to say they’re concerned poor processes will limit what they are able to achieve with AI.
Enterprises are putting time and effort into process optimization. Business leaders say they’re spending around two days of their working week (42% of working time on average) on improving processes.
And 55% of them have fully optimized a process in the last 12 months. That’s an increase from the 49% that had done so when we asked the same question for last year’s report. (In the report we define ‘fully optimizing a process’ as identifying a business-critical process in need of improvement, zeroing in on the root cause of the issue, and taking sustainable action to optimize it.)
So there’s progress. But business leaders remain worried they may not necessarily understand many of their processes well enough to effectively optimize them.
We asked business leaders about the key warning signs that a process isn’t understood well enough by the organization. The top three they highlighted:
All of which makes a lot of sense. If you tried to force a new wheat harvesting tool upon your tribe and most of them hated it, had a hard time using it, or ended up working more inefficiently because of it, it would suggest you’d misunderstood something pretty fundamental.
Fortunately, most enterprise leaders appear to recognize the inherent connection between these problems and their business processes, and are using a variety of tools and tactics to improve their understanding of how they really work.
