Celonis and Microsoft Agent 365 partner to target AI ‘pilot purgatory’ with Process Intelligence
Celonis has joined forces with Microsoft Agent 365 to enable enterprises to scale Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents beyond experimentation and into measurable business outcomes.
The partnership will combine Microsoft’s agentic infrastructure with Celonis Process Intelligence capabilities where it is a world leader.
Dan Brown (pictured), the Chief Product Officer and EVP Engineering at Celonis, said that as organisations transition from AI experimentation to full-scale execution, the need for enterprise-grade governance and clear business impact has never been more critical.
“This collaboration brings world-class process intelligence to the Microsoft ecosystem, complementing Agent 365’s native capabilities to ensure that AI agents don’t just perform tasks but deliver measurable business outcomes,” Brown said.
Together, Brown said, Celonis and Microsoft Agent 365 create a closed-loop system: Celonis generates insights on optimal agent performance, and Agent 365 governs, enforces, and scales those learnings to ensure consistent, enterprise-wide impact.
“By freeing the process from the constraints of legacy systems, we empower people and AI to work the way they should: across applications, across value chains, and across the entire enterprise.”
Brown said Celonis Agent Mining analyses the autonomous reasoning and logic behind every agent decision. “Unlike people, agents offer reasoning traces that explain why decisions were made which is a critical factor for continuous learning and self-healing processes.”
Brown added that Agent 365 users can now access specialised insights to monitor agent business impact and ROI in real time.
“The challenge for today’s CIO is no longer building an agent; it is operating hundreds and soon thousands of them with trust and safety. IDC projects that AI agent use will increase ‘by an order of magnitude over the next few years,’ yet many organisations remain ‘process blind’. They lack the deep operational context required for AI to be effective.
“Without a shared understanding of how the business actually runs, AI initiatives often stall in ‘pilot purgatory’. Even when agents are performing as they were designed, they often lack visibility into the larger value chain: systems remain fragmented, departments speak different languages, and teams operate in silos. This is ‘the great disconnect,’ and it is the primary hurdle to achieving a true return on AI (RoAI).”
Brown said that by combining Microsoft’s agentic infrastructure with Celonis Process Intelligence, “we are solving the most complex challenges of the AI era”.
Key capabilities include:
- Holistic KPI improvements: Agent 365 monitors agent-specific success rates and security events. Celonis attributes specific KPI improvements such as reduced cost-per-claim or accelerated cycle times directly to individual agents.
- Eliminating “ghost loops”: The integration identifies and mitigates risks of agents from different ecosystems becoming trapped in unproductive, costly loops (e.g., one agent merging purchase orders to save costs, while another splits them for tax rules). Agent 365 users can now immediately trigger governance protocols to halt or modify the agents involved.
- The learning layer for lifecycle governance: Celonis acts as the “learning layer”, that informs the Agent 365 lifecycle. By identifying which agentic paths lead to the best business outcomes, organisations can refine business rules and optimise human-in-the-loop interventions continuously.
Brown said he was looking to a positive future for agency enterprises. “The future of the enterprise is AI-driven and composable. It is a future where adding a new workflow is as simple as defining it, and the organisation re-composes itself instantly to meet new market demands.”
Rafael Domene, Global CIO at Cosentino and an early adopter of the technology, said, “We have already seen incredible value using Celonis to monitor our digital operations. By enriching our existing Agent Mining capabilities with Microsoft Agent 365 reasoning traces, we will move from simply seeing what our agents do to understanding the ‘why’ behind every autonomous decision.”
