Offered by Celonis
The State of Oklahoma found its blind spots the exhausting means. In April 2023, a legislative report revealed its companies had spent $3 billion with out correct oversight. Janet Morrow, Director of Oklahoma's Danger, Evaluation and Compliance Division, got down to observe 1000’s of month-to-month transactions throughout dozens of disconnected techniques.
The Sooner State grew to become the primary U.S. state to use course of intelligence (PI) expertise for procurement oversight. The transformation, Morrow says, was speedy. Actual-time monitoring changed multi-year audit cycles. The platform from market-leader Celonis shortly recognized greater than $10 million of inappropriate spending. And the oversight workforce was capable of redeploy employees from 13 to five members whereas dramatically growing effectiveness.
“Process for Progress”: A world motion
Oklahoma's pioneering success utilizing highly effective new course of expertise spotlights an rising international development. Morrow was amongst greater than 3,000 leaders gathered at Celosphere, Celonis’s current annual convention, to discover how AI, powered with enterprise context by PI, can ship industrial returns in addition to environmental and monetary advantages worldwide.
The imaginative and prescient: course of intelligence as a basis for public and social progress.
The motion sees the mix of AI and PI like Oklahoma’s as a robust means to assist governments and different organizations ship very important providers extra affordably, with improved choices and better-informed insurance policies. From procurement to juvenile justice to healthcare and surroundings, scores of organizations are actually getting a primary take a look at the famously byzantine, opaque means issues get finished.
For veteran monetary chief Aubrey Vaughan — now Vice President of Technique for Public Sector at Celonis and previously a prime govt at a serious monetary software program agency — the transfer towards actual course of enchancment has been a very long time coming. He recollects testifying proudly earlier than Congress a number of years in the past about uncovering $10 billion in improper authorities funds at his earlier firm. Afterward, a senior authorities official pulled him apart and recommended he downplay the achievement.
The rationale, he was informed: "The following query they're going to ask you is, ‘Why is that happening?’” says Vaughn. “Today we can answer not only why, but how we fix it."
Across the U.S. and the globe, public agencies are tightening budgets. Desire to deploy AI to close the gap is colliding with a hard reality: you can't automate what you don't understand. Here are three real-world examples of organizations using PI and AI for better outcomes.
Oklahoma: Real-time AI spending analysis boosts accountability
Within just 60 days of implementation, Celonis reviewed $29.4 billion worth of purchase order lines, identifying $8.48 billion in statutory exempt purchases and flagging problematic transactions. The system now provides real-time feedback to buyers within 15 minutes of purchases, allowing immediate course correction.
The system revealed agencies were purchasing from a vendor at prices 45% lower than the statewide contract, forcing renegotiation.
"Real-time AI analysis has increased accountability by providing key insights into spending patterns and streamlining contract utilization," Morrow explains.
Last year, Oklahoma adopted Celonis's Copilot feature, which uses conversational AI to let executives ask questions in plain language. Now, when the Governor or a cabinet member wonders about a contract, they get answers in seconds, not weeks, Morrow says. Her group is expanding the technology to other agencies. It’s also exploring how emerging AI agent capabilities can further automate compliance and spending analysis.
In Texas, uncovering a startling hidden pattern in young offenders
At Evident Change, a social research non-profit, Erin Espinosa's work is about good stewardship — not of taxpayer money, but of young lives.
Analyzing 400,000 data points from juvenile justice and public health systems in Texas, the former probation officer-turned Ph.D. made a startling discovery: the mental health treatment that young offenders received (or didn’t) was a stronger predictor of incarceration than the seriousness of the offense that brought them into the system. Espinosa told courts, legislatures, Congress. Nobody believed it.
Frustrated, she partnered with Monica Chiarini Tremblay, a professor at William & Mary College. While traditional analysis showed correlation, Celonis process intelligence helped the pair show a clear, quantitative causation: A fragmented mental health system was actively pushing kids toward worse outcomes. Further machine learning analysis also demonstrated that doubling down on the same interventions increased likelihood of undesirable out-of-home placement for juvenile offenders.
Recently accepted for academic publication, the real-world findings represent both indictment and opportunity. Espinosa and Tremblay are planning a larger 2026 pilot implementation of PI-based analysis, bringing together social services, juvenile justice, mental health providers, and education officials.
"This is a perfect intersection of business, social work, adolescent development, and community financial implications," Espinosa says.
They’re now exploring how AI agent technologies could flag at-risk youth and trigger coordinated responses before patterns become entrenched.
A $1-trillion defense budget — that has never passed a clean audit
The U.S. Department of Defense faces financial challenges on an exponentially larger scale. As Acting Secretary of the Army, Robert M. Speer hired a big-three accounting firm to map the service’s financial processes. Three years later, the analysis was obsolete — processes had changed dramatically.
So, when Speer first saw process intelligence, he was truly excited about what it revealed. "I can see not only the data,” he defined, “but where it's coming from, the business process delivering it."
Tom Steffens, former Deputy Chief Financial Officer of Defense, agrees: "There's clearly a missing piece to the puzzle." Both recently joined Celonis's Public Sector Advisory Board. They see potential for AI agents to automate compliance monitoring across DoD's complex ecosystem.
The stakes are unimaginably huge. The Department of Defense will receive more than a trillion dollars in funding in FY 2026. It’s also the only federal cabinet agency that's never passed a clean audit.
Beyond accounting, fast-changing geopolitics and modern warfare demands systems as dynamic as current battle environments.
"We're talking about the ability to shift in real time," says Speer. "We know that’s what happens on the battlefield, but we need something on the back end of those enabling processes and systems to ensure that happens correctly."
The pair is working with defense leaders to show how process intelligence can create the foundation for transformation — enabling modeling and scenario planning that can support battlefield decisions with data-driven confidence rather than delayed, obsolete information.
Efforts to modernize and optimize complex government systems and processes got a big boost recently. Working with partner Knox Systems, Celonis received FedRAMP authorization earlier this year, the security credential required for federal cloud services.
"Knox powers the most secure and longest-running managed federal cloud," notes CEO Irina Denisenko, supporting 15+ federal agencies. The authorization positions the technology "as the backbone of compliance for the next generation of government SaaS."
Where process meets purpose
Early public sector adopters are proving what's possible with process intelligence — from identifying billions in potential savings to revealing why children enter the prison pipeline. The potential extends wherever public funds shape public good: climate response, education, infrastructure, emergency services.
Advocates often speak of “process for progress” or "process for empathy" — utilizing transparency to alter minds and hearts, not simply insurance policies.
Says Chiarini Tremblay, who labored on the Texas juvenile offenders’ system: "We have to understand complex systems and make data-driven decisions, but the goal is always improving outcomes for people."
It’s not only a U.S. motion. Within the UK, for instance, College Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Belief have deployed PI with dramatic impact. Director Andy Hardy used Celonis to investigate 244,000 outpatient circumstances, revealing huge variation in care supply.
By optimizing appointment reminders from 4 to 14 days earlier than visits, the belief enabled earlier cancellations and noticed an extra 1,800 sufferers weekly. The ready record was lowered by 5,300 sufferers in eight weeks.
Concludes Hardy: "Data understandable to clinicians is as important as scalpels."
Know-how continues to race forward. At Celosphere 2025, Celonis unveiled a number of latest choices and platform updates for private and non-private sector organizations together with the Orchestration Engine, which coordinates actions throughout workflows involving AI brokers, human duties, and legacy techniques.
All are constructed on the Celonis Course of Intelligence Graph, which creates a "living digital twin" of a enterprise or public company’s processes. It’s system-agnostic, working throughout disconnected techniques typical to authorities operations — integrating decades-old mainframes and cutting-edge cloud functions concurrently.
Company heads and others observe, nevertheless, that success calls for greater than software program. For instance, when Oklahoma lowered its oversight workforce from 13 to five, resistance emerged. Morrow's workforce invested closely in coaching and alter administration. Course of intelligence reveals enchancment alternatives, however individuals implement options’ she explains.
Ongoing, long-term schooling and cultural change are wanted.
“Continuous operational improvement is a lifestyle,” says Celonis’s Vaughn. “You need to have a culture that wants to build better processes, better systems, more efficient systems.”
The instruments are prepared. The enterprise case is confirmed. What stays is the desire to alter — and the braveness to look clearly on the techniques meant to serve the general public good.
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