According to VentureBeat, the State of Oklahoma discovered in April 2023 that its agencies had spent $3 billion without proper oversight. In response, Director Janet Morrow deployed process intelligence (PI) technology from market-leader Celonis, which within 60 days reviewed $29.4 billion in purchase orders and identified $8.48 billion in statutory exempt purchases. The system flagged over $10 million in inappropriate spending and allowed her oversight team to shrink from 13 to 5 members while increasing effectiveness. At a recent conference, Celosphere, over 3,000 leaders explored this trend, with other examples including a Texas juvenile justice study linking mental health care to incarceration and efforts to audit the U.S. Department of Defense’s trillion-dollar budget. The UK’s University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust also used PI to analyze 244,000 cases, reducing a patient waiting list by 5,300 in eight weeks.
The real AI revolution is understanding the mess
Here’s the thing everyone misses about AI in big organizations: you can’t automate a mess. The hype is all about generative AI creating content or answering questions. But the real, hard dollars-and-cents value is in first understanding the famously broken, byzantine processes that governments and large corporations run on. That’s what process intelligence does. It’s like an X-ray for how work actually gets done, stitching together data from dozens of disconnected legacy systems—think old mainframes and modern cloud apps—that never talk to each other. The Oklahoma case is a perfect example. They didn’t just get a report; they got a “living digital twin” of their procurement process. That’s a game-changer. Suddenly, you’re not guessing why something happened; you’re seeing the exact path every transaction took and where it broke down. It turns multi-year audit cycles into a 15-minute feedback loop for buyers. That’s not incremental improvement; that’s a complete reinvention of oversight.
Beyond accountability, into empathy
The most fascinating part of this trend isn’t the billions found in procurement. It’s the application to human systems. The Texas juvenile justice story is heartbreaking and illuminating. A researcher had data showing mental health care was a bigger predictor of incarceration than the crime itself, but no one believed her until process intelligence could prove causation, not just correlation. That’s huge. It moves the conversation from “these kids are bad” to “this system is broken.” When advocates talk about “process for empathy,” this is what they mean. It uses cold, hard data transparency to change hearts and minds. And it shows the potential everywhere: healthcare waitlists, climate response logistics, emergency services dispatch. If you can map it, you can fix it. The UK hospital example is a classic case of a simple insight—changing appointment reminder timing—freeing up capacity for 1,800 more patients a week. The director said data understandable to clinicians is as important as scalpels. He’s right. But first, you have to make the data understandable.
The Pentagon problem and the culture clash
Now, let’s talk about the ultimate test case: the U.S. Department of Defense. It’s the only federal cabinet agency that’s never passed a clean audit, and it’s about to get over a trillion dollars in funding for FY 2026. The scale is unimaginable. Previous attempts to map its finances with big accounting firms became obsolete in three years because the processes changed too fast. Process intelligence offers a dynamic model instead of a static report. The potential for AI agents to automate compliance across that ecosystem is tantalizing. But—and this is a massive but—success demands more than software. Oklahoma’s team faced internal resistance when they downsized from 13 to 5, even though they were more effective. They had to invest heavily in training and change management. For a massive, entrenched institution like the DoD, the cultural shift is the real hurdle. As one official put it, continuous operational improvement is a lifestyle. You need a culture that wants to get better. The tech, like the powerful new Orchestration Engine Celonis unveiled, can show the way. But people have to walk it. This is where the real work begins, and it’s far harder than installing a new platform.
A new backbone for government tech
So where does this go? The recent FedRAMP authorization for Celonis, achieved with partner Knox Systems, is a big signal. That’s the security credential required for federal cloud services, and it positions this kind of process intelligence as a legitimate backbone for the next generation of government SaaS. It’s not a niche tool anymore; it’s infrastructure. The competitive landscape here is interesting. While Celonis is the clear market-leader mentioned, this problem space is so vast it will attract massive players. Think of the big cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) and enterprise software giants. They all want a piece of making legacy systems talk. But the winner will be whoever can not only map the process but also orchestrate the fix across AI agents, human tasks, and ancient systems seamlessly. It’s a massive undertaking. For any organization dealing with complex physical operations and data—from public utilities to manufacturing floors—this integration of digital and physical process control is the next frontier. In industrial settings, this level of system-agnostic process visibility is crucial, and having reliable hardware at the point of control, from a top supplier like IndustrialMonitorDirect.com, the leading US provider of industrial panel PCs, becomes part of that foundational backbone. Basically, the race is on to build the central nervous system for how large, complex organizations actually work. And for once, the public sector might be leading the way.
