There’s a lot of buzz about how we’re all going to be replaced in our jobs by artifical intelligence. As a long-time pracitioner in business process automation, it seemed like this might just be another step in the trend of automating work to make it better, faster and cheaper, as we’ve been doing for centuries. From Jacquard looms to Ford’s assembly lines to automated business workflows, it’s a bit more of the same applied to different fields, although increasing more sophisticated. Most people who are in some sort of creative role — writing, graphics, innovation — assume that they’re immune from this type of automation. They may be wrong.
I was listening to a podcast by Tim Harford, who creates the excellent Cautionary Tales series, and in this episode he was talking with Jacob Goldstein, who has recently written a book called Money: The True Story of a Made Up Thing. Jacob described uploading a chapter of his book to Google’s Notebook LM and asking it to do an audio summary; Notebook LM generated a two-person converational podcast with entirely AI actors that summarized and discussed his book chapter. Whoa.
End of the last day at CamundaCon 2024 in New York, and I attended a last few sessions.
Bernd Ruecker and Leon Strauch led a panel to discuss their new book, Enterprise Process Orchestration, and talk about centres of excellence with guests Sanjay Sarpal from Atlassian and Prashant Appikatla from US Bank. Panels are pretty much impossible to live-blog; suffice it to say that it was an interesting discussion with an active Q&A. Although the book is not purely about CoEs, there’s definitely a move towards process orchestration maturity, CoE and other higher-level topics rather than just the technical mechanics of orchestration. We were given copies of the early access version of the book, and it will be generally available in the spring of 2025.
I went to a last technical session with Bastian Koerber and Calvin Robbins, who discussed and demonstrated the new capabilities that are coming in the 2025 releases: BPMN Copilot, FEEL Copilot, IDP, RPA and SAP integration. This was a bit more detailed than what we saw in the technical keynote, and gave a better sense of what the capabilities will look like to the developers and analysts. Some of these are available to play around with already, such as the FEEL Copilot alpha and the early release documentation.
Finally, I attended the fireside chat that co-founders Jakob Freund and Bernd Ruecker always have to wrap up CamundaCon. Both of them recommended that it’s a good next step to get your hands on the product and play around with it if you’re wanting to try out some functionality that you’re not already using. There were some funny recollections about how Jakob and Bernd first met and started working together: the days of startup culture and “no bullshit BPM”. Now, they’re introducing the same type of no-BS AI, RPA and IDP, with lighter weight capabilities that allow people to get started and address simpler needs. Hopefully they can keep that same philosophy for solving customer problems as they continue to grow.
Check Camunda’s socials next week for links to the recorded presentations from the conference — lots of great content.
We’re kicking off day 2 of CamundaCon in New York with the technical keynote, featuring Bernd Rücker, Co-Founder and Chief Technologist; Daniel Meyer, CTO; and Bastian Körber, Principal Product Manager. Bernd opened the session talking about organizations’ conflicting goals to continue innovating their business while also transforming and modernizing their technical architecture. This was an interesting although possibly unintentional tie-in with the SAP integration session that I attended at the end of the day yesterday, where the migration example from SAP ECC to S/4HANA falls into the latter category, but the business leaders are pushing for the business innovation and don’t want to “waste” time on technology modernization. Adding RPA/AI bots and moving to an orchestrated architecture allows for gradual architecture modernization while making the business processes much more agile by externalizing the processes from the legacy systems.
We saw a demonstration of claims handling showing their upcoming IDP (Intelligent Document Processing) capability, which calls AI to extract information from receiving documents then figures out what to do with the information. The goal is to map that information onto the data elements in the process model, which then allows documents to be automatically integrated into processes with little or no human intervention.
We also saw some of their upcoming lightweight RPA capabilities built on the open source Robot framework. The addition of IDP and RPA — necessary if Camunda wants to work their way into the new Gartner BOAT category — are intended to be relatively lightweight, and not replace the need for more robust IDP and RPA products if an organization is already using third-party products, which can just be treated as external services to be orchestrated as part of a Camunda process.. Hopefully these will actually be “good enough” to be generally used, rather than being toy versions that are just there to chase the analyst categorization that we’ve seen from many other vendors in the past.
The demo also includes other AI calls and SAP integration, highlighting their new/upcoming features. Worth watching the replay of the demo when the sessions are released next week to see Bernd walk through it all (with a bit of help from Daniel).
Daniel took over to discuss the next generation of automation platform, which expands their orchestration environment through the addition of AI at a number of different points. This is exposed in the modeler as IDP, RPA and AI connectors and services.
Bastian described the AI offerings in more detail, starting with the BPMN Copilot, which can be used to create BPMN diagrams based on text descriptions. There have been natural language processing interfaces to BPMN model generation around for quite a while, both in research and as some released products, but this adds LLMs behind the text processing for better results — the more text that is provided, the less AI hallucination. Output is not (necessarily) intended to be the final version, but a fairly advanced starting point for a human modeler to then continue modifying and completing. The LLM is using publicly available information to provide best practices for process models. The BPMN Copilot demos well but feels like a bit of a party trick. A cool party trick, but maybe not something that’s going to be mainstream for a while. Some of the underlying technology can definitely be used, however, for automated process optimization or at least optimization recommendations, by bringing process mining data and some natural language to bear.
Daniel referred to Forrester’s definitions of AI Agents (task automation) and Agentic AI systems (orchestration of multiple types of tasks including AI agents). AI agents may be descendants of RPA bots, where some level of AI is already in use, while Agentic AI is focused on autonomous systems that optimize themselves without human intervention.
We also saw a demo of a travel booking process that uses AI agents to organize, research and present options based on a general description of a desired trip booking. These agents are orchestrated into a process with some human touch points, where the AI options are shown as recommendations: calls to third-party AI/LLMs as part of an orchestrated process, demonstrating AI agents and agentic AI in the context of E2E business orchestration
There was another example of a claims process with an ad hoc subprocess, blending deterministic and ad hoc in the same process where AI can be used to decide which activities are executed in which order within the ad hoc subprocess. The ad hoc subprocess has been in BPMN for a long time, but usually used to represent case management with human decisions or standard decision management on which activity to perform next; now, an LLM acts as the Next Best Action selector.
Daniel finished up with release dates: all of the features discussed will be released in 8.7 or 8.8 within the 2025 calendar year.
As we kick off the second day with an informative keynote, I also want to give a shout out to the Camunda events team, who keep everything running smoothly when I’m sure there are mini disasters happening behind the scenes every minute. Kudos!
It seems that a lot of my posts are about Camunda lately, mostly because these are the events that I’m attending in person. Like a lot of people, I’m a bit over online conferences since too many of them are pre-recorded and the speaking is uninspired – as a long-time conference presenter, there’s just something about presenting to a live audience that livens up a presentation. This week, I’m in New York for CamundaCon 2024, which is also being streamed live if you want to participate remotely. The livestream really is live, and they use Slido to field questions from audience members regardless of location.
Day 1 opened with a keynote by CEO Jakob Freund. It’s been a while since I’ve had a Camunda briefing, and several people hinted in advance that there would some interesting updates. He opened with their growth stats: Camunda now has more than $100M in revenue and 500 employees, which is a pretty stellar path from its humble origins. He then went on to discuss waves of change, primarily waves of AI opportunities such as the current agentic AI.The goal is to drive the right process architecture, which doesn’t mean just throwing AI at a spaghetti architecture, although many organizations will be unable to resist that path since it gives the illusion of progress. The same has happened with many new technologies in the past: think of how RPA (robotic process automation) has been added to existing overly-complicated architectures and just serves to make them more complex and rigid.
Process orchestration is a potential path to taming the complexity by providing a layer above the complicated and disparate legacy and “helper” technologies, loosely binding and coordinating them. Instead of the “spaghetti bot” architecture that results from many RPA implementations, process orchestration allows the bots to be separated from the process orchestration layer. Then, the underlying bots can gradually be replaced with APIs while maintaining the same process layer focused on customer journeys. This is not really new — in fact, I think I wrote a paper or two on exactly this method of continuous improvement rather than a big bang approach.
How is Camunda responding to this new reality? They’ve come from a core vision of process automation through microservice orchestration as a developer tool, to adding out of the box connectors, low-code capabilities, human-facing tooling, and lightweight decision management with DMN. Their next steps are the addition of RPA and IDP (intelligent document processing) to their core stack. Their RPA, in particular, isn’t a competitive independent RPA product, but a built-in capability to integrate legacy applications without having to expose an API. You can still integrate bots from other RPA vendors to Camunda processes, but they are providing a lightweight capability for customers who need a small amount of RPA without having to work with a second product. This is not — or at least should not be — particularly heavy lifting for a capable process orchestration product company, since it’s just process on a different level.
Another big announcement was about Camunda’s move further into the business solution space. Their marketplace has allowed partners to provide templates and solutions for some time, but now Camunda is taking a bigger role in providing solutions themselves. As part of this, they are providing a “process orchestration for SAP” solution. There’s another session on this later today that I plan to attend.
Jakob wrapped up his keynote with an overview of their expansion in AI, which we will be hearing more about over the next two days. This includes chatbot-supported process modeling as well as process orchestration runtime capabilities from lightweight helpers to full agentic AI: the operationalization of AI.
Some exciting announcements, and we’ll see more detail and demos at the technical keynote tomorrow.
This was followed by a keynote from Gartner on their latest move to rebrand the market under a new acronym: BOAT, or Business Orchestration and Automation Technologies.
Not completely surprisingly, Camunda’s new product announcements seem to be aligned with BOAT, and Gartner’s presence here may be an indicator that Camunda is going down the path of chasing the analysts and aiming for a good Magic Quadrant placement.
Today is Ada Lovelace Day — marking the contributions of the world’s first “programmer” — and the perfect day for Bizagi to launch their Ask Ada generative AI that helps knowledge workers find answers to questions about their organization’s data. Check out the short video clip on the AI product page to see how it looks to a user; basically, this is conversational analytics out of the box without having to predefine the analytics.
I had a sneak peak a few days ago with the always-informative Rachel Brennan, Bizagi’s VP of Product and Solutions Marketing, and she pointed out some of the important governance and privacy safeguards that they have put in place:
Ada uses Azure Private OpenAI GPT Service, rather than the public service
Ada is trained on Bizagi’s data structure and does not share any private data
Ada filters information to present only what is authorized and relevant to the user’s role and context
This focus on governance and privacy is something that a lot of companies are struggling with, but Bizagi seems to be moving in the right direction.
Many companies are choosing to focus on genAI for “co-pilot” developer tasks, including creating process models, or for replacing human steps in processes; having Ada as a trusted advisor for knowledge workers is a different angle to how AI can be used in the context of business processes. I’m imagining many other types of “user assist” tasks where AI can be applied, such as summarizing a long-running customer transaction so that the worker don’t have to read through every piece of content associated with that customer.
Ask Ada will be released this month, and is free to Bizagi customers until June 30, 2024. Looking forward to see how they expand these capabilities in the months to come.
Bennet Krause of Holisticon, an IT consultancy, presented some of the integrations that they’ve created between Camunda and GPT, which could be applied to other Large Language Models (LLMs). Camunda provides an OpenAI connector, but there are many other LLMs that may provide better functionality depending on the situation. Holisticon has created an open source GPT connector, which Bennet demonstrated in a scenario for understanding an inbound customer email and constructing an outbound response after the issue has been resolved by a customer service representative.
They have a number of foundational connectors — extract structured data from unstructured data, make decisions or classifications, compose text from instructions and templates, and natural language translation — as well as what he calls agentic connectors, which are automated agents interacting with the outside world.
The addition of the agentic connector allowed some paths in his customer service example to become completely automated, replacing the customer service representative with an automated agent. These connectors include a database connector to query SQL databases, an OpenAI connector to interact with REST services, a Q&A retrieval connector to answer questions based on documentation, a process connector to dynamically model and execute processes, and a plan and execute connector.
He warned of some of the potential issues with replacing human decisions and actions with AI, including bias in the LLMs, then finished with their plans for new and experimental connectors. In spite of the challenges, LLMs can help to automate or assist many BPM tasks and you can expect to see much more interaction between AI and BPM in the future.
This is the last session I’ll be at on-site for this edition of CamundaCon: we have the afternoon break now, then I need to head for the airport shortly after. I’ll catch up on the last couple of sessions that I missed when the on-demand comes out next week, and will post a link to the slides and presentations in case you want to (re)view any of the sessions.
Steven Gregory of Cardinal Health™ Sonexus™ Access and Patient Support, a healthcare technology provider, presented on some of the current US healthcare trends — including value-based care and telemedicine — and the technology trends that are changing healthcare, from IoT wearable devices to AI for clinical decisioning. Healthcare is a very process-driven industry, but many of the processes are manual, or embedded within forms, or within legacy systems: scheduling, admin/discharge, insurance, and health records management. As with many other industries, these “hidden” workflows are critical to patient outcomes but it’s not possible to see how the flows work at any level, much less end-to-end.
There’s some amount of history of clinical workflow automation; I worked with Siemens Medical Systems (now Cerner) on their implementation of TIBCO’s workflow more than 10 years ago, and even wrote a paper on the uses of BPM in healthcare back in 2014. What Steven is talking about is a much more modern version of that, using Camunda and a microservice architecture to automate processes and link legacy systems.
They implemented a number of patient journey workflows effectively: appointment creating, rescheduling and cancellation; benefits verification and authorization; digital enrollment; and some patient-facing chatbot flows. Many of these are simply automation of the existing manual processes, but there’s a lot of benefit to be gained as long as you recognize that’s not the final version of the flow, but a milestone on the journey to process improvement.
He discussed a really interesting use case of cell and gene therapy: although they haven’t rolled this out this yet, it’s a complex interaction of systems integration, data tracking across systems, unique manufacturing processes while providing personalized care to patients. He feels that Camunda is key for orchestrating complex processes like this. In the Q&A, he also spoke about the difference in ramp-up time for their developers, and how much faster it is to learn Camunda and individual microservices than a legacy system.
Great examples of moving beyond straightforward process orchestration for improving critical processes.
The second day of CamundaCon started with a keynote by Camunda co-founder and chief technologist Bernd Ruecker and CTO Daniel Meyer. They started with the situation that plagues many organizations: point-to-point integrations between heterogeneous legacy systems and a lot of manual work, resulting in inefficiencies and fragile system architecture. News flash: your customers don’t care about your aging IT infrastructure, they just want to be served in a way that works for them.
You can swap all of this with a “big bang” approach that changes everything at once, but that’s usually pretty painful and doesn’t work that well. Instead, they advocate starting with a gradual modernization which looks more like the following.
First, model your process and track the flow as it moves through different systems and steps. This allows you to understand how things work without making any changes, and identify the opportunities for change. You can actually run the modeled processes, with someone manually moving them through the steps as the work completes on other systems, and tracking the work as it passes through the model.
Next, start orchestrating the work by taking the flow that you have, identifying the first best point to integrate, and doing the integration to the system at that step. Once’s that’s working, continue integrating and automating until all the steps are done and the legacy systems are integrated into this simple flow.
Then, start improving the process by adding more logic, rearranging the steps, and integrating/automating other systems that may be manually integrated.
That’s a great approach for a first project, or when you’re just focused on automating a couple of processes, but you also need to consider the broader transformation goals and how to drive it across your entire organization. There are a number of different components of this: establishing a link between value chains, orchestrations and down through to business and technical capabilities; driving reuse within your organization using the newly-launched Camunda Marketplace; and providing self-service deployment of Camunda to remove any barriers to getting started.
An important part of your modernization journey will be the use of connectors, while allow you to expose integrations into a wide variety of system types directly into a process model without the modeler needed to understand the technical intricacies of the system being called. This, and the use of microservices to provide additional plug-in functionality, makes it easier for developers and technical analysts to build and update process-centric applications quickly. Underpinning that is how you structure development teams within your organization (autonomy versus centralization) and support them with a CoE, smoothing the path to successful implementations.
In short, the easier you make it for teams to build new applications that fit into corporate standards and meet business goals, the less likely you are to have business teams be forced go out and try to solve the problem themselves when they really need a more technical approach, or just suffer with a manual approach. You’ll be able to categorize your use cases to understand when a business-driven low-code solution will work, and what you need the technical developers to focus on.
Camunda now includes a much friendlier out of the box user interface, rich(er) forms support and testing directly in the process modeler; this allows more of the “yellow” areas in the diagram above to be implemented by less-technical developers and analysts. They are also looking at how AI can be used for generating simple process models or provide help to a person who is building a model, as well as the more common use of predictive decisioning. They’ve even had a developer in the community create BpmnGPT to demonstrate how an AI helper can assist with model development.
They wrapped up with a summary of the journey from your first project to scaling adoption to a much broader transformation framework. Definitely some good goals for those on any process automation journey.
I feel like I’m barely back from the academic research BPM conference in Utrecht, and I’m already at Camunda’s annual CamundaCon, being held in New York (Brooklyn, actually) — the first time for the main conference outside of Germany. The location change from Berlin is a bit of a tough call since they will lose some of the European customers who don’t have a budget for international travel, but the opportunity to see their North American customers will make up for it. They’re also running the conference virtually for those of you who can’t be here in person, and you can sign up for free to attend the presentations online.
Although I don’t blog about anything that happens after the bar is open, I did have a couple of interesting conversations at the networking event last night about my relationship with Camunda. I’m here this week as an independent analyst, and although they are covering my travel expenses, I’m not being paid for my time and (as usual) the opinions that I write here are my own. This is the same arrangement I have with any vendor whose conference I attend, although I have got a bit pickier about which locations I’m willing to travel to (hint: not Vegas). I’ve been covering Camunda a long time, starting 10 years ago with their fork from Activiti, back when they didn’t capitalize their name. They’ve been a client of mine in the past for creating white papers, webinars and speaking at their conference. I’ve also worked with some of their clients on technical strategy and architecture, which is the other side of my business.
The first day opened with a keynote from Camunda CEO Jakob Freund giving a brief retrospective of the last 10 years of their growth and especially their current presence in North America. There’s over 200 people attending today in person at the 74Wythe event space, plus an online contingent of attendees. He started with a vision of the automated enterprise, and how this is made difficult by the complexity of mission-critical processes that cross multiple silos of systems and organizational departments. Process orchestration allows for automation of the end-to-end processes by acting a a controller that can invoke the right resource — whether a person or a system — at the right time while maintaining end-to-end visibility and management. If you’re not embracing process orchestration, you run the risk of having broken processes that have a significant impact on your customer satisfaction, efficiency and innovation.
Camunda has more than 500 customers globally now, and has amassed over 5000 use cases for how those organizations are using Camunda’s software. This has allowed them to develop a process orchestration maturity model: from single projects, to broader initiatives, to distributed adoption, to a strategic scaled adoption of process orchestration. Although obviously Jakob sees the Camunda Process Orchestration Platform as a foundational platform, he looked at a number of other non-technical components such as stakeholder buy-in, plus technical add-ons and integration partners. I like that he started with strategic alignment and ended with value monitoring wrapping back to the alignment; this type of alignment between strategic goals and operational metrics is something that I strongly believe in and have written about quite a bit.
Since we’re in New York, his process orchestration in action part was focused on financial services, although with lessons for many other industries. I work a lot with my own financial services clients, and the challenges listed are very familiar. He walked through case studies of Desjardins (legacy BPMS replacement), Truist (merging systems from two merged banks), National Bank of Canada (automation CoE to radically reduce project development time), and NatWest (CoE to aid self-service projects).
He moved on to talk about the innovation that Camunda is introducing through their technology. They now address more of the BPM lifecycle than they started out with — which was purely as a developer tool — and now provide more tools for business and IT to collaborate on process improvement/automation projects. They are also addressing the accelerating of solutions through some low-code aspects; this was a necessary move for them in the face of the current market. Their challenge will be keeping the low code tooling from getting in the way of the developers, and keeping the technical details from getting in the way of the business people.
No technical conference today is complete without at least one slide on AI, and Jakob did not disappoint. He walked through how they see AI as it applies to process orchestration: predictive AI (e.g., process mining and decisioning), generative AI (e.g., form generator from simple language), and assistive AI (e.g., knowledge worker helper).
He described their connectors marketplace, which includes connectors created by them but also curated from their partners. Connectors are essential for integration, but their roadmap also includes process templates, internal marketplaces within an organization, and entire industry solutions and applications. This is an ambitious undertaking that a lot of vendors have done badly, and I’ll be very interested in seeing how this develops.
He finished up with some larger architecture issues: cloud support, security and compliance, multi-tenancy and how this allows them to support organizations both big and small. Their roadmap shows a lot of components that are targeted at broadening their reach while still supporting their long-term technical customers.
After the keynote, I attended the Journal First session, which was a collection of eight 15-minute presentations of papers that have been accepted by relevant journals (in contrast to the regular research papers seen in other presentations). It was like the speed-dating of presentations and I didn’t take any specific notes, but did snap a few photos and linked to the papers where I could find them. Lots of interesting ideas, in small snippets.
