Devavrat: It’s a fantastic question. And as you correctly noted, we’re at the cusp of becoming experimental to mainstream as far as AI is concerned. As you know, I’ve been teaching AI at MIT as a professor for more than the last two decades, so it’s no surprise that I’m very bullish about AI’s future in enterprises.
The way I think about where AI can make the biggest difference in enterprises is in decision making, helping enterprise make decisions, or putting it other way, how do we bring decision intelligence to enterprises? As we think about decisions, how do we make decisions today? Take MIT Tech Review, take Celonis, take MIT, take any large organization. We have different types of decisions we want to make in very broad strokes. There are decisions which are strategic decisions like episodic, other decisions which are operational that need to be done with a high frequency. In either of them, we have some processes in place. You do this first, you do that first, you do that first, you do that first. Many of us help coordinate those things. Many of us play roles within it, what Jensen Huang calls task. And once you get those things done step by step, then you reach decision.
Now, it’s those tasks, or what I would call roles, that’s where AI can bring in an atomic manner agentic power so that we can at least parts of decisions, if not all of the decisions, we can augment support and maybe sometimes when it’s a painful automate. And to get to that, to know which role to do, which task to do, we really need to know the context. You can’t just do that in a vacuum. And that’s why context with AI put together in the right way would bring what I would call decision intelligence to enterprise. And that’s where I think there’ll be the biggest transformation that would come.
Megan: Right. To drill down into that into a bit more detail, we know many organizations are, as you say, embracing identic AI right now with this potential for increasingly autonomous decision making. If context isn’t introduced in parallel, what are the commercial risks at play?
Devavrat: Fantastic. Let’s just take the setting I was describing. We are trying to automate a role or support a role or augment a role depending on the type of decision, depending upon type of task. And let’s for a second imagine that all these, as they’re called, frontier labs have built these amazing models and amazing AI infrastructure so that everything that’s happened in the universe and it’s likely to happen in the universe is all there.
Now, we have a small decision that we want to make for that very specific context is there. And without having access to that, this massive system, this extremely bright person would figure that out eventually by asking lots of questions, the way we do it as humans, and then finally do the right thing. The problem is to get to that, it will do so much compute at some level that to get simple tasks done, we are spending massive amount of compute. So that’s scenario one.
In reality, that’s not going to be the scenario, and we’ll miss some important context, important constraint, important guardrail, and then we’ll make a mistake. And sometimes that mistake can be okay. It’s like me giving you a recommendation saying, go restaurant A, and maybe you may not enjoy the dinner, versus sometimes mistakes will be very, very expensive. That is me telling you what the financial forecast is and somehow that leads to the company’s doom.
Megan: Right. So in an enterprise setting, these are really business critical decisions that are being made. So the impact is that much more if we get this wrong, isn’t it? And on a practical level then, what are the different ways that organizations can add in this context layer we’re talking about? How does Celonis, for example, deliver that operational context via a real time digital twin of an organization?
Devavrat: Absolutely. I think if it might be useful just to double click on the history of Celonis. As you know, Celonis, as an organization, came into existence with the mission, with the goal of helping organizations adhere to their ideal processes, build better processes, enable people to work with multiple processes in an intertwined manner. And that’s where their primary, let’s call it a DNA, has been about what I would call process intelligence. Take how enterprises help put multiple things together, digitize them, enable people to get their processes better, understand where the issues are, and then how do you re-engineer the process within organizations so that things can happen better.
Now, if you want to bring decision intelligence into this, each atomic step of this process that was potentially was done before by experts, people, now we want agents to help us enable that. And that’s where knowing this context of a process within enterprise and then bringing AI agents along with that, what I would like to call it as a roled agents, exactly provide the right way to bring decision intelligence to enterprises. And this is how Celonis brings context to help enterprise make better decision.
Megan: Right. And then in terms of how this works as well, how does the context layer relate to both the layer below, that’s the systems of record layer, and also the layer above, that identic layer?
