Presented by Celonis
The State of Oklahoma discovered its blind spots the hard way. In April 2023, a legislative report revealed its agencies had spent $3 billion without proper oversight. Janet Morrow, Director of Oklahoma's Risk, Assessment and Compliance Division, got down to track hundreds of monthly transactions across dozens of disconnected systems.
The Sooner State became the primary U.S. state to use process intelligence (PI) technology for procurement oversight. The transformation, Morrow says, was immediate. Real-time monitoring replaced multi-year audit cycles. The platform from market-leader Celonis quickly identified greater than $10 million of inappropriate spending. And the oversight team was in a position to redeploy staff from 13 to five members while dramatically increasing effectiveness.
“Process for Progress”: A worldwide movement
Oklahoma's pioneering success using powerful latest process technology spotlights an emerging global trend. Morrow was amongst greater than 3,000 leaders gathered at Celosphere, Celonis’s recent annual conference, to explore how AI, powered with business context by PI, can deliver business returns in addition to environmental and financial advantages worldwide.
The vision: process intelligence as a foundation for public and social progress.
The movement sees the mixture of AI and PI like Oklahoma’s as a strong technique to help governments and other organizations deliver vital services more affordably, with improved decisions and better-informed policies. From procurement to juvenile justice to healthcare and environment, scores of organizations at the moment are getting a primary take a look at the famously byzantine, opaque way things get done.
For veteran financial leader Aubrey Vaughan — now Vice President of Strategy for Public Sector at Celonis and formerly a top executive at a significant financial software firm — the move toward real process improvement has been a protracted time coming. He recalls testifying proudly before Congress a couple of years ago about uncovering $10 billion in improper government payments at his previous company. Afterward, a senior government official pulled him aside and suggested he downplay the achievement.
The explanation, he was told: "The following query they're going to ask you is, ‘Why is that taking place?’” says Vaughan. “Today we are able to 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 shut the gap is colliding with a tough reality: you possibly can't automate what you don't understand. Listed here are three real-world examples of organizations using PI and AI for higher outcomes.
Oklahoma: Real-time AI spending evaluation boosts accountability
Inside just 60 days of implementation, Celonis reviewed $29.4 billion value 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 inside quarter-hour 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 evaluation has increased accountability by providing key insights into spending patterns and streamlining contract utilization," Morrow explains.
Last 12 months, Oklahoma adopted Celonis's Copilot feature, which uses conversational AI to let executives ask questions in plain language. Now, when the Governor or a cupboard member wonders a couple of 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 evaluation.
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 previous 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. No one believed it.
Frustrated, she partnered with Monica Chiarini Tremblay, a professor at William & Mary College. While traditional evaluation showed correlation, Celonis process intelligence helped the pair show a transparent, quantitative causation: A fragmented mental health system was actively pushing kids toward worse outcomes. Further machine learning evaluation also demonstrated that doubling down on the identical interventions increased likelihood of undesirable out-of-home placement for juvenile offenders.
Recently accepted for educational publication, the real-world findings represent each indictment and opportunity. Espinosa and Tremblay are planning a bigger 2026 pilot implementation of PI-based evaluation, bringing together social services, juvenile justice, mental health providers, and education officials.
"This can be 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 turn into 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 evaluation was obsolete — processes had modified dramatically.
So, when Speer first saw process intelligence, he was truly enthusiastic about what it revealed. "I can see not only the information,” he explained, “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." Each 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 greater than a trillion dollars in funding in FY 2026. It’s also the one 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 in regards to the ability to shift in real time," says Speer. "We all know that’s what happens on the battlefield, but we’d like something on the back end of those enabling processes and systems to make sure that happens accurately."
The pair is working with defense leaders to point out how process intelligence can create the inspiration for transformation — enabling modeling and scenario planning that may support battlefield decisions with data-driven confidence quite than delayed, obsolete information.
Efforts to modernize and optimize complex government systems and processes got an enormous boost recently. Working with partner Knox Systems, Celonis received FedRAMP authorization earlier this 12 months, the safety credential required for federal cloud services.
"Knox powers essentially the most secure and longest-running managed federal cloud," notes CEO Irina Denisenko, supporting 15+ federal agencies. The authorization positions the technology "because the backbone of compliance for the following generation of presidency 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" — using transparency to alter minds and hearts, not only policies.
Says Chiarini Tremblay, who worked on the Texas juvenile offenders’ system: "We’ve got to know complex systems and make data-driven decisions, however the goal is at all times improving outcomes for people."
It’s not only a U.S. movement. Within the UK, for instance, University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust have deployed PI with dramatic effect. Director Andy Hardy used Celonis to investigate 244,000 outpatient cases, revealing massive variation in care delivery.
By optimizing appointment reminders from 4 to 14 days before visits, the trust enabled earlier cancellations and saw an extra 1,800 patients weekly. The waiting list was reduced by 5,300 patients in eight weeks.
Concludes Hardy: "Data comprehensible to clinicians is as vital as scalpels."
Technology continues to race ahead. At Celosphere 2025, Celonis unveiled a number of latest offerings and platform updates for private and non-private sector organizations including the Orchestration Engine, which coordinates actions across workflows involving AI agents, human tasks, and legacy systems.
All are built on the Celonis Process Intelligence Graph, which creates a "living digital twin" of a business or public agency’s processes. It’s system-agnostic, working across disconnected systems typical to government operations — integrating decades-old mainframes and cutting-edge cloud applications concurrently.
Agency heads and others note, nonetheless, that success demands greater than software. For instance, when Oklahoma reduced its oversight team from 13 to five, resistance emerged. Morrow's team invested heavily in training and alter management. Process intelligence reveals improvement opportunities, but people implement solutions’ she explains.
Ongoing, long-term education and cultural change are needed.
“Continuous operational improvement is a way of life,” says Celonis’s Vaughn. “You’ll want to have a culture that desires to construct higher processes, higher systems, more efficient systems.”
The tools are ready. The business case is proven. What stays is the need to alter — and the courage to look clearly on the systems meant to serve the general public good.
Sponsored articles are content produced by an organization that’s either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, they usually’re at all times clearly marked. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.
