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Each year, 3,000 business leaders from around the globe and across domains gather in Munich for Celosphere. They learn about the latest developments in Process Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence (AI), discuss their everyday challenges, and celebrate their successes. And this year, in nearly every conversation I had, people expressed their desire for the benefits of AI, but didn’t feel their organization was truly prepared for it.

Beneath the surface, most companies are still held back by processes that evolved over years, shaped more by systems and habits than by intention. Composability offers a way out — not as a technical concept alone, but as a new way for an enterprise to transform, to survive and to thrive.

What composability really changes

**AI **and the **Composable Enterprise **permeated the technical sessions, strategic discussions, and the informal discussion between attendees at Celosphere. And what emerged was a shared recognition that these two forces are reshaping how modern organizations must operate.

A third thread ran quietly, but consistently, through many of these conversations — the idea behind the ‘Free the Process’ movement. It frames a simple question with far-reaching consequences - how can any company hope to become composable and genuinely AI-driven if its data and processes remain locked inside monolithic systems?

The term ‘composable’ is often reduced to architecture diagrams or technical design patterns. Yet a Composable Enterprise is not defined alone by the tools it uses. It is also defined by the way it operates. It is a business model built on modular capabilities that can be assembled, reassembled or replaced without bringing the entire system to a halt. A company designed in this way behaves more like a living organism than a traditional corporate structure. It adapts as conditions change and does so without the friction that typically slows large organizations down.

Many enterprises aspire to such flexibility but encounter a fundamental obstacle. They cannot see their processes clearly enough to design modular capabilities in the first place. Work moves through inboxes, spreadsheets, undocumented handoffs, and legacy systems. The organization performs, but the logic behind how it performs remains largely hidden.

This is where Process Intelligence becomes indispensable. It reveals the structure beneath the surface. It shows how data flows through the enterprise, where decisions accumulate, where detours have become normal, how individual actions shape broader outcomes, and how value is created. With this level of transparency, modular capabilities stop being an abstract ambition. They become a practical design principle. Over time, what emerges is more than just a static process map — it is a living digital twin of the organization - a continuously updated reflection of how work truly happens, how decisions ripple through systems, and how the enterprise can adapt in real time to change.

Once the living digital twin exposes how the organization truly runs, automation can take on a different role. What begins as task-level efficiency evolves into something more foundational. Automated activities become repeatable and reliable. They turn into building blocks that operate consistently regardless of scale or season. Automation becomes less about eliminating manual effort and more about creating stable components the organization can build on.

Orchestration extends this idea. It connects these components and coordinates complex workflows across AI agents, human tasks, and system automations. It assigns logic and ensures that work progresses without relying on individuals to stitch everything together manually. Humans remain part of the flow where judgment, context, or exception handling is needed. When orchestration takes hold, the enterprise stops functioning as a landscape of disjointed teams and begins to behave as an integrated network.

AI then enters a system that has already been made legible through Process Intelligence. AI does not need to guess how the business works, because the underlying flows, dependencies, and decision paths are visible and traceable. With this clarity, AI can identify patterns that humans might overlook, highlight anomalies as they emerge, and surface the information required for better decisions. In many situations, AI enables people to decide with greater confidence by presenting context that would otherwise remain buried. In others, it collaborates with humans by proposing next steps or evaluating possible outcomes. And where decisions are repetitive, data-driven, and well understood, AI can take them over safely within defined boundaries. In this environment, AI does not replace human judgment. It becomes a partner within an operating model whose logic has already been uncovered and stabilized through Process Intelligence.

Composability and the future of transformation

For many organizations, this progression mirrors the broader evolution of their processes. They moved from analog to digital, from digital to automated, from automated to orchestrated. The shift toward composable and increasingly autonomous operations is the next logical phase. It reflects how companies already work in practice, even if their formal structures have not yet caught up. It also signals a shift in how transformation itself must be understood. Instead of forcing new behavior through large, one-time programs, organizations are beginning to redesign the very capabilities that make those behaviors possible.

In this sense, composability becomes a transformative principle rather than a structural preference. Traditional transformation relies on large programs, cascading initiatives, and multi-year roadmaps. But the environment in which modern enterprises operate is changing faster than these programs can adapt. Markets shift within months. Regulatory requirements evolve without warning. Customer expectations rise continuously. Transformation is no longer an episodic effort. It has become a constant condition of doing business.

A composable operating model absorbs this reality. It breaks transformation into smaller and more targeted steps. Instead of overhauling entire processes in one disruptive motion, organizations can refine or redesign individual capabilities without destabilizing what already works. Teams can improve parts of the system while the rest continues running. Each change becomes a building block for the next. Change stops being a disruption and becomes a pattern of evolution.

Process Intelligence plays a central role in this new form of transformation. It reveals where change will deliver value, where risks lie beneath the surface, and where misalignment has silently accumulated. It provides leaders and teams with a shared understanding of what truly needs to evolve. When everyone can see how work flows, change becomes less abstract and more actionable.

Modularity and transparency reinforce one another. The more legible a process becomes, the easier it is to redesign. The more modular a capability becomes, the more confidently teams can adjust it. Transformation emerges naturally from the operating model rather than being imposed on it from the outside.

Designing an enterprise that can keep evolving

A composable enterprise is therefore not only more flexible but also more resilient. Local issues no longer cascade across the organization. New opportunities can be explored without committing the full weight of the enterprise. Teams can experiment and adjust because they are working with components designed to fit together. The company becomes defined less by its constraints and more by its capacity to evolve. And this is the deeper meaning of Free the Process - once processes are visible, modular and not dictated by systems’ limitations, the enterprise can continually reshape itself. Instead of being shaped by the systems, the organization shapes its own way of working.

Composable is more than technology. It is a way of structuring an organization so that transformation becomes continuous, deliberate, and far less disruptive. It turns processes into capabilities, capabilities into building blocks and these building blocks into an enterprise that can grow without losing its footing. It provides clarity where complexity once ruled and creates the conditions under which human judgment, automation and AI can reinforce one another.

The companies beginning this shift today are not chasing a trend. They are building the operating model that future transformations will rely on. They are creating systems that can absorb new technologies without upheaval and team structures that can adjust without losing cohesion. And in doing so, they redefine transformation itself. It becomes not a one-time event but an ongoing capability, embedded in the very design of the enterprise.

And it all starts with a free process.