What are AI development tools?

Picture an iceberg. There’s the part you can see, and then there’s the unknown but much greater part beneath the surface. Most businesses’ understanding of AI is similar.

When businesses think of AI, they still tend to think of applications like customer support chatbots and code generation tools for developers. Useful? Yes. Mighty? Maybe not. But there’s a load of lesser-known, even more valuable AI use cases. These higher-ROI opportunities – where the millions, rather than thousands, of dollars in value lie – all rest on using AI to improve and automate business processes.

AI development tools use software and platforms to create, deploy, and manage AI-driven capabilities within business environments. Specifically, we’re talking about the development of AI assistants, copilots, and agents. These solutions grow in sophistication from AI assistants simply making recommendations, such as how to improve processes, all the way up to AI agents (aka agentic AI) that autonomously take those actions for you.

• Discover the difference between AI assistants, copilots, and agents by reading ‘Destination AI’.

AI solutions bring internal benefits for businesses, boosting team productivity and decision-making. But this ripples out to external benefits too, ensuring better product and service outcomes for customers by reducing errors and streamlining cycle times.

But why not just use generic, standardized AI technology, you might wonder. While AI software can be designed for particular business processes, such as Supply Chain or Finance automation, the trouble is that processes don’t run the same way from business to business. And not only that, but every business has different rules, benchmarks and KPIs, too. So any AI solution lacking process understanding and business context is going to be DOA.

So bespoke AI solutions are the way to go. And for that, you need AI development tools.

AI development tools allow businesses to craft and tailor custom solutions for their specific processes and departments. That means businesses can maximize the ROI of AI investment, as each recommendation and action is aligned with, and designed to support, specific organizational goals.

If you’re wondering where Celonis fits in, the Process Intelligence Platform ensures the AI solutions that businesses build and deploy are grounded in real-time data and business context (more on that later), so they make even smarter, more responsive decisions.

• Firm up your understanding of AI assistants, agents, and copilots with a handy visual overview of their strengths and limitations in our AI cheat sheet.

What are the key types of AI development tools?

The first wave of AI tools – Generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude – are capable of handling Q&A conversation flows. And until relatively recently, they were seen as the apex of AI development. But while their responses might be growing more complex with each new iteration, these chatbots only represent a small piece of the much greater AI pie.

To understand just how much more there is to AI technology, let’s unpack the three names you need to know on the AI development scene: assistants, copilots, and agents.

What are AI assistants?

The most basic of our three AI musketeers are AI assistants. These non-autonomous solutions can answer queries and provide recommendations for simple business problems. Just don’t expect them to take action, as AI assistants require humans to review and execute their recommendations.

These limitations might mean assistants aren’t as powerful as the more advanced AI development tools we’ll come on to, but their big appeal is for workforce productivity. AI assistance makes it breathtakingly easy to find and check information within vast datasets and processes. Want to cross-reference an invoice with a purchase order? Need to get to the root cause of recurring payment blocks? No problem: these are bread-and-butter use cases (along with plenty more we’ll share later, too) for an AI assistant to investigate and troubleshoot.

While short on truly show-stopping AI capabilities, assistants lay the template for more advanced AI development tools to build on.

What are process copilots?

AI tool development starts to ramp up with AI copilots. These chatbots get their name from their ability to provide insights, information, and answers to users’ questions – just as a pilot might turn to their second officer in the flight deck for a status update on the flight’s progress or advice on how to approach landing.

Copilots cast assistants in the shade because they can take on complex problems – and not just by recommending actions, but executing simple ones, too. Quite the upgrade.

As the name suggests, a process copilot focuses specifically on business process insights. It allows you to interact with and interrogate your process data by asking questions as naturally as you’d talk to a colleague. Questions like how a process is running and how it could be improved with automation, for example. Responses can be text-based, but a process copilot can also provide workflows, graphs, and charts of process analysis.

So how does a process copilot form its responses? A knowledge model is configured that gives the copilot access to business process data. The AI can even identify improvements you can make to the knowledge model to enhance the quality of the copilot’s results.

Once set up, a process copilot can offer guided prompts to kickstart analysis and questions, as well as templates to structure them. Over time, the copilot will suggest questions to ask based on previous searches, commonly requested responses, and the available data.

What are AI agents?

Now for our most impressive and sophisticated AI tool: agentic AI. It deserves that slick name because these fully autonomous solutions can recommend and execute actions – however complex – sequentially.

Once configured and authorized, an AI agent can toil away in the background, detecting process bottlenecks or inefficiencies, then automatically implement corrective actions. It will happily prioritize and route tickets to unblock customer service, or mobilize alternative procurement to avoid order delays. You can ultimately develop a workforce of AI agents coordinated to autonomously handle your end-to-end processes. Now we’re talking.

It sounds like a lot of control to hand over, but one of the key features of AI tools is they can show you the logic and reasoning behind their recommendations. This allows you to inspect their accuracy and appropriateness – the same as you might cross-reference an AI transcript against the original audio to check it hasn’t been misinterpreted. And if you have the right process intelligence platform, you can continuously monitor each AI agent’s performance to ensure your AI tool development is supporting the needs of the business.

• Want your AI education in the form of a novel-like page-turner? Start reading our Destination AI e-book to follow a story about how AI assistants, copilots, and agents can be used together for greater business efficiency and customer service.

How Process Intelligence makes your AI smarter

Even if you’ve established the process you want to improve and the particular AI tool you want to develop, there’s one last piece of the AI development puzzle you need for an ROI slam dunk.

Celonis Process Intelligence is the enablement layer of the enterprise AI stack. It gives AI the context it needs to understand how your business runs – from business rules to KPIs and ideal process models. This in turn translates into smarter decisions about how to make your business run better – which is particularly important when AI agents are acting on those decisions autonomously.

What can Process Intelligence-powered AI achieve in practice? Just ask Rafael Domene, Global CIO at Cosentino, who implemented a Celonis-powered AI assistant for credit block management that’s “been a game changer for our order management operations, streamlining our processes and resulting in faster, more reliable outcomes.”

Let’s go behind the scenes with a more in-depth look at how Process Intelligence enhances your AI capabilities.

Improve AI performance

When AI solutions have to rely on unstructured knowledge models, they struggle to deliver accurate answers. Process Intelligence consolidates and standardizes your process data into a digital twin of business operations. Free from incomplete or inconsistent data, AI can draw high-quality responses from the knowledge model.

Process Intelligence also improves AI decision-making by enabling the solution to learn from how similar decisions were made in the past.

AI powered by Process Intelligence understands the how and why behind a process’s design, along with exceptions, and the systems that processes move across. This allows AI to sense deviation or suboptimal process performance, while knowledge of the context (business rules etc.) and how each process interrelates allows it to reason and act within defined guardrails.

Find use cases with validated business impact

The digital twin constructed by Process Intelligence creates end-to-end visibility, so you can pinpoint AI opportunities such as underperforming processes or time-consuming manual tasks that could be automated.

But what if you could also quantify and assess the potential impact of these optimizations? The Celonis Platform makes that possible by allowing you to simulate the outcome, using your system-agnostic Process Intelligence Graph, before committing to any changes and altering processes. You can then prioritize use cases with maximum value.

Manage AI agents by orchestrating them alongside RPA bots, workflows, and more

Process Intelligence also acts as an enterprise-wide orchestration layer. You can use the Celonis Platform to integrate AI solutions seamlessly into workflows, manage routine task automation, and set up triggers that automatically deploy agents at the right time. You can also create alerts to notify teams if human intervention is required.

• Grab the popcorn and watch our intro to Process Intelligence demo to discover more about how the Celonis Platform connects AI to your business.

Common AI development challenges and how to overcome them

The sheer complexity of developing AI solutions can also limit the ROI of AI development, quickly eroding the heady promise of potential value. Here are the common AI development pitfalls to watch out for – and how the Celonis Platform can help you avoid falling into them.

Knowing where to implement AI

The first stumbling block in AI tool development is figuring out which process or task is a good candidate. The risks are twofold. Firstly, you can pick a process that doesn’t meaningfully benefit from AI and achieves negligible improvement at best. Secondly, you can implement AI in an area that generates value (phew!) but overlooks the business’s more urgent, higher-ROI opportunities.

Both instances come down to relying on subjective impressions of how the business runs, rather than end-to-end visibility and objective, data-backed decision-making. Celonis Process Intelligence provides visibility into business operations, so there are no blindspots where processes in need of AI development can hide. By centralizing process insights into a digital twin, you can run simulations and make targeted decisions about where to deploy AI assistants, copilots, and agents for maximum ROI.

Security and privacy

Concerns about how business data is used and protected can hamstring an AI initiative before it’s even begun. It’s widely known that generative AI is trained on large, often publicly available data sets, but this can make businesses wary of inadvertently sharing sensitive information with an AI platform.

Celonis gives companies reassurance as AI knowledge models only permit access to the data the solution needs, so you’re not exposing your entire business repository. What’s more, Celonis also guarantees that proprietary customer data will never be used to train models for other customers.

Data quality and availability

AI is only as good as the data that feeds it. But many businesses rely on disparate spreadsheets, disconnected processes, and systems that don’t play well with each other. That vital data ends up scattered and siloed, with 36% of IT leaders reporting that availability and quality is a concern for enterprise AI use, according to our 2025 Process Optimization Report: AI Edition.

Celonis extracts and standardizes the data from your systems (whether that’s your ERP, CRM, or Excel) and uses process mining to turn it into a digital twin of your end-to-end processes. As well as integrating that data with the AI solutions you develop, we help you make sense of it by using AI algorithms and a decade of our own process improvement knowledge. Both you and your AI development tools are left in no doubt as to how to make your processes work.

AI integration

AI development can be derailed when it comes to integrating assistants, copilots, and agents with your existing tools, systems, and workflows. Snags at this stage can lead to AI solutions failing to be deployed, not sharing insights with other tools, duplicating work performed by other systems, or disrupting workflows.

The Celonis Platform takes care of that with dozens of APIs that enable AI solutions to coordinate seamlessly with all your other automations, bots, and systems. Sitting on top of them all is the Orchestration Engine, which can govern and execute your AI and workflows across all your AI applications. This helps your AI software and tech stack work seamlessly and collaboratively, without ongoing manual effort from teams to manage AI integration.

Time to value

Every AI investment needs to deliver ROI, especially if it’s to justify and incentivize ongoing development. But the ability to demonstrate ROI from AI is a concern for 37% of IT leaders, according to our Process Optimization Report.

To help you see AI impact faster, Celonis offers prebuilt apps, developed by us and our ecosystem, that are proven to generate value in common business use cases. Whether it’s flagging duplicate invoices or proactively monitoring plant maintenance, these targeted apps can turbocharge an AI initiative or a proof-of-value project in a new business area.

Go beyond AI development tools with the Celonis Platform

If there’s no AI on your team, you’re leaving value on the table and falling behind your competitors. But not all AI development tools will help you cut costs, boost productivity, and drive transformation as effectively as others.

With Celonis AI development tools, you can develop cutting-edge, custom-built AI solutions that measurably enhance your business operations. Copilots, assistants, and agents, all grounded in your organization’s unique process data. All fuelled by Process Intelligence and all orchestrated seamlessly. The result? AI with real ROI because AI knows how your business flows.

Learn more about the Celonis AI development capabilities you can take advantage of. Or talk to a Celonis expert about your business needs, AI development approach, and how Process Intelligence can help.