As organizations around the world seek to implement enterprise AI, they face a fundamental challenge: ensuring that AI does not have blind spots in understanding how the business works within its operating ecosystem. Without this understanding of the enterprise ecosystem, AI agents cannot make a real impact, which is why many companies find it difficult to realize a meaningful return on their enterprise AI investments.
In this context, Celonis has presented the Celonis Context Model (CCM) and has announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire Ikigai Labs, a leading company in AI-based decision intelligence, with the aim of strengthening its technological ecosystem and expanding the capabilities of enterprise AI.
CCM solves this challenge by providing a dynamic, real-time digital twin of operations, translating business language into a language that AI can understand within the entire corporate ecosystem. Based on process data and business knowledge of all the systems, applications, devices and interactions that make up the enterprise ecosystem, CCM gives enterprise AI the operational clarity needed to reason correctly, act reliably and deliver results at scale.
The acquisition of Ikigai Labs will bring cutting-edge business decision intelligence solutions and advanced AI innovations—including planning, simulation and forecasting capabilities—to the Celonis ecosystem, enabling organizations to model future scenarios within their operational ecosystem, predict and prevent process failures, and make more reliable decisions.
The importance of the operational context
With the addition of CCM, Celonis is defining a fundamental new layer within the business technology ecosystem: the context layer. This layer unifies process data, business knowledge, and operational intelligence so that AI is coherently integrated into the organization’s real ecosystem and continually evolves from the actions and results generated throughout the company.
“AI is only as effective as the context it has. Every organization must provide its enterprise AI with a holistic and dynamic model that reflects how its business ecosystem really works,” says Carsten Thoma, president of Celonis. “With Ikigai Labs, we further strengthen our platform ecosystem, expanding its intelligence to not only understand how the business works today, but how it should—and could—work tomorrow.”
“Accuracy is critical in healthcare, and you can’t accept AI that is only right most of the time,” said Jerome Revish, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Cardinal Health. “The context of processes within our operational ecosystem allows AI agents to help our teams act with precision and confidence.”
“Our goal at Cosentino is to create a digital team of AI agents capable of managing and improving our large-scale operations within a complex business ecosystem,” explains Rafael Domene, CIO of Cosentino. “We have learned that an agent is only as effective as the context it receives from the ecosystem of processes, data and business rules.”
“At Mondelez International we are laying the foundation for autonomous AI, initially improving our end-to-end flows within a very diverse global ecosystem,” says Filippo Catalano, Chief Information and Digital Officer at Mondelez International. “The operational context within that ecosystem is not optional: it is the key for AI to generate real value.”
AI agents you can trust
The acquisition will unite Ikigai Labs’ talent with Celonis’ global ecosystem, combining expertise in AI, machine learning, causal inference and large-scale simulation. This integration strengthens an ecosystem capable of dramatically reducing planning and forecasting cycles in complex business environments.
“Celonis has codified business processes and Ikigai Labs brings advanced models for structured data. Together, we offer unprecedented operational representation within the business ecosystem,” said Devavrat Shah, co-founder of Ikigai Labs.
Context Model drives trust ecosystem
The Celonis platform and ecosystem offer comprehensive capabilities to analyze, design and manage AI-powered processes, facilitating business transformation. This ecosystem allows customers to not only provide AI with the right context, but also coordinate agents, people and systems to work together.
Celonis has codified business processes and Ikigai Labs provides advanced models for structured data
Celonis has built an ecosystem of alliances with leaders in both the data and agent execution layers, acting as a bridge between the two. Thanks to this ecosystem, the Context Model is accessible and usable regardless of how customers build and deploy their AI agents.
The future of the company involves applying AI and being composable
Celonis sees the Context Model as a decisive step towards a composable AI-powered enterprise, where systems, data, processes, people and agents collaborate within a shared ecosystem. In this model, the business ecosystem continuously adapts, improves its efficiency and drives innovation with greater agility.
Celonis’ acquisition of Ikigai Labs is expected to close imminently, further bolstering the company’s enterprise AI ecosystem.
