Operational excellence with AI: How companies are boosting success with process intelligence everyone can access
As originally appeared in VentureBeat.
According to the Process Excellence Network, 2025 will see a laser focus on operational excellence as a pillar of survival and competitiveness. Optimized process flows — the right people, following the right rules at the right time — make for happier customers, more motivated employees, better staying power and a healthier bottom line. And it’s against this backdrop that technologies that power process intelligence have gained significant traction.
Now, that landscape is shifting. And how! Generative AI is reshaping the business world, revolutionizing operations and enabling AI-powered process optimization. But, in a business world still generally defined by process immaturity, rushing to roll out emerging technologies doesn’t necessarily equate to faster time-to-value. Sorry to say! So where should enterprises be focusing their use of AI to boost operational efficiency? Without doubt, some of the most meaningful operational changes are happening at the interface between intelligence and its application — the human behind the keyboard.
Use case: AI makes everyone a process expert
Here’s an example: Using AI to make business process transformation accessible to everyone across the value chain, a world-renowned mortgage provider translated a technical exercise into a value exercise.
At this mortgage company, the organization is constantly stretched between process excellence and heavy regulatory obligations. Thousands of employees manage the touchpoints in each mortgage process from application to acceptance and disbursement, and in many cases, detailed rules apply to ensure compliance. Failure to deliver on the process can have serious financial consequences for a customer as well as trigger a regulatory audit or fine. But following the right rule at the right time involves a laborious search each instance — a massive source of process waste.
So, the company decided to make it possible for every person in the process chain to have responsive and dynamic access to the specific best practices needed for each step — presented in a way everyone could understand. Embedding AI meant it could ‘democratize’ access to process knowledge enabling each team member to search for relevant rules based on natural language rather than technical terms.
The operational impact has been huge: Now, everyone can feed suggestions back into the process, providing context. And the company learns from any errors or breaks in the process — tightening them up just in time.
AI-powered process intelligence: A motor for achieving time-to-value
It’s becoming increasingly challenging for companies to innovate in the realm of process excellence these days. Long lead times come at a huge cost; reducing competitiveness; adding internal process waste; shifting perspectives away from evidence-based transformation, and ultimately leading to poorer process performance.
Time-to-value is, therefore, one of the most compelling reasons for embedding AI into process intelligence with most impact made in the areas of process automation and operational resilience. Here’s why:
1.Process automation companies first need to understand how their processes are performing — where bad practices threaten strategic targets — and discover opportunities for improvement. This requires both data and context to identify next steps and meaningful outcomes. Traditionally, this has been an expensive and time-consuming practice, requiring experienced resources and long-running analyses.
AI is a differentiator: The right tooling can make a company’s processes visible and accessible to more than just its process experts. With strategic stakeholders and lines of business users involved, the very people who best know the business can contribute to innovation, design new processes and cut out endless wasted hours briefing process experts. AI, essentially, lowers the barrier to entry so everyone can come into the conversation, from process experts to line-of-business users. This speeds up time-to-value in transformation.
2. Operational resilience companies are required to perform a combination of practices to prevent, respond to, recover and learn from business disruption. This too can be expensive — both in terms of the time it takes to setup and the impact of failure.
AI is a differentiator: Rather than simply ‘survive,’ companies can use AI to build true resilience — or antifragility — in which they learn from system failures or cybersecurity breaches and operationalize that knowledge. By putting AI into the loop on process breaks and testing potential scenarios via a digital twin of the organization, non-process experts and stakeholders are empowered to mitigate risk before escalations.
Imagine building the practice of antifragility into an end-to-end process lifecycle: Making everything visible via AI, analyzed through AI, kept up to date through AI and adaptive to change with AI — all at a minimal cost. For some, this is already a reality.
Data is king, context is crown
So how, on a practical level, does the right AI technology enable operational efficiency? Firstly, it earns its buy-in by making highly technical information understandable by and available to a wider audience (full access). Secondly, it provides a holistic context by means of its integration into a single process intelligence suite (full lifecycle).
Full access: Non-process experts must be able to make data-driven decisions faster with AI powered insights that recommend best practices and design principles for dashboards. Any queries that arise should be answered by means of automatically generated visualizations which can be integrated directly into apps — saving time and effort. While Generative AI (the choreography) powers most of this, the right solution also includes agentic AI (the dance steps) that has the power to be utilized for good in advanced automation applications.
Full lifecycle: In the mission to achieve operational excellence, pockets of success simply won’t cut it. AI must be deployed across the full process intelligence lifecycle — not just at a use case, capability or functional level. Only when utilized across the entire enterprise — horizontally and vertically — can its insights be understood in true context and reliably aligned to strategy.
Turn your process intelligence into business value with ARIS
When you embed AI into every part of a single, platform-agnostic process management platform, and make your processes transparent and accessible to all, everyone can be part of the solution. That’s the ARIS advantage.
Recognized as a leader by Forrester and Gartner, ARIS is a unified process intelligence suite powered by AI with an AI Companion designed to enable non-process experts to achieve faster time-to-value.
Helping more than 30,000 global brands to excel through process excellence, a Forrester Total Economic Impact of ARIS reported customers realizing a whopping 301% ROI. Over a three-year analysis period, respondents were cumulatively able to:
- Reduce employee time spent on business process analysis by 25%
- Set up new, transformational processes 40% faster
- Cut legacy infrastructure costs by 30%
Boost employee productivity by $3,439,401
Democratizing process intelligence
Your company is awash in data, much of it arising from your processes. Understanding that data and being able to use it to make your processes more efficient and your organization more resilient is where many companies stumble.
Too often, solutions that promise to improve your processes offer intelligence that’s inaccessible to many of your team. To empower operational excellence, enterprises need to harness AI-infused process intelligence designed to enable individual users, stakeholders and lines-of-business leads. And unite them all behind a common language that spans the full enterprise process lifecycle. There’s no question that, from a business standpoint, AI is ushering in remarkable changes across innovation, profitability and predictability. It’s truly extraordinary. But even more extraordinary is the untapped potential within every individual in your organization to drive operational excellence and meaningful transformation.
J-M Erlendson is Chief Evangelist for ARIS.