Europe needs AI champions to share in the next wave of AI value | Alexander Rinke, Co-CEO of Celonis

Christian (0:07)

Hello, everyone, my name is Christian, welcome back to TNW. Today, our guest is Alex, and I will let him present himself first.

Alexander Rinke (0:14)

Hey, my name is Alex. I co-founded a company called Celonis, and we are the leader in Process Intelligence, which is really all about giving AI the context it needs to understand how a business gets work done, to help reinvent the ways it gets work done, and really implement AI effectively into business processes.

Christian (0:36)

For anybody that doesn't know it yet, what does Celonis do actually, and how it can help them?

Alexander Rinke (0:41)

Yeah, we work with many of the leading companies around the world, and we help them really make AI effective in their business operations. Because AI is only effective if you can really automate and transform your key business processes. The way you onboard customers, the way you process orders, the way you pay bills, the way you manufacture products, the way you serve customers. In order for that, you get this work done across many different systems.

You get a lot of work done outside of any system, right? And what we do is we bring that together, map how is the work really getting done, and then reinvent it with AI.

Christian (1:21)

I see. What is the story of the company? You co-founded 15 years ago?

Alexander Rinke (1:26)

Yeah, we've started 15 years ago. We grew a lot. We are the market leader in our space, active globally over 3,000 people around the world.

Christian (1:34)

Amazing.

Alexander Rinke (1:34)

And have a lot of momentum because AI needs process reinvention to work.

Christian (1:40)

And what is the actual idea behind starting the company? Because 15 years ago, there was not a lot of AI, right?

Alexander Rinke (1:46)

Actually, it's interesting. We actually started building AI type models for businesses even 15 years ago, not language models, but we wanted to build simulation models for business processes. They could simulate how a business works. So then you can say, how can I change it to optimize?

And we found out in order to simulate it, we need information about how it works today. Otherwise, we can't feed the simulation. The simulation needs the information about how things work, how things flow, how things operate.

And what we pretty quickly realized is companies don't have that visibility. You know, we went around and asked them, how does your process work? How do people handle things? Where do things get stuck? How many people do you need here and there? And what do they do? And how do they work together?

Christian (2:31)

They didn't know.

Alexander Rinke (2:31)

They didn't know, you know? So we built an x-ray machine that looks at the data the business generates and x-rays how the processes work.

And then over time that became a lot more powerful and globally adopted. But it's still the same idea to say, hey, in order to feed any intelligent system, whether it's a simulation or an AI model, the right context, we need to actually build a model of how things operate today.

Christian (2:55)

Okay. Let's talk about the acquisitions. What is your idea behind an acquisition? And why do you do it? I know the really powerful make.com story. Yeah.

Alexander Rinke (3:05)

I mean, there's different reasons for different acquisitions. It's always important that there's a fit between what Celonis wants to achieve, what the company we acquire wants to achieve, what the founders want to achieve, what the people that are running it. And then there could be different rationales, right? For example, recently we acquired a company called Ikigai Labs, and they've built, they were a spinoff from MIT, some of the leading AI researches in the world, and they built very specialized models for tabular data and time series data, and things like what-if simulation, that can sort of act as a tool for the large language model to really simulate, look into the future, make better decisions, and plan a business, business questions, right? Planning questions. Like, for example, forecasting a supply chain, simulating supply chain disruption, deciding, should I settle this insurance claim or should I wait for someone to actually audit the claim?

So, they've built really, really strong models on the frontier of those problems, and it was a really good fit for where we wanted to go, and also an excellent team, and we could provide them a bigger platform to sort of realize their ideas and realize their potential. So, that was a really great acquisition. We're really happy about it.

Christian (4:22)

Congratulations.

Alexander Rinke (4:23)

Yeah, thank you.

Christian (4:24)

You mentioned the company vision. So, what is actually the company vision? What is the...