This week in process excellence

It’s been another busy week in the world of process excellence with artificial intelligence (AI), digital transformation and business process management (BPM) all in the headlines.

On Monday, our Research & Reports bulletin covered new findings Verified Market Research predicting robust growth for the global process mining market. Driven by continued demand for operational insights and process optimization, increasing investments in AI and machine learning are expected to enhance process mining capabilities, making solutions more predictive and adaptive. The process mining software market is expanding across key regions, including North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America. North America and Europe are currently dominant due to their high adoption of digital transformation technologies, according to the report.

Elsewhere, the results of the M-Connect Survey by Mediagenix indicated that media companies face considerable hurdles in digital transformation, with more than half of firms struggling to implement automated workflows and system connectivity. “The industry needs to step up its use of smart workflows to remain competitive,” commented Gunel Mammadova, , director at media company MBC GROUP .

Meanwhile, 微软 and consultancy firm Mandala Advisory Partners, LLC published a new report highlighting Australia’s most promising AI opportunities. The paper outlines targeted actions industry and government can take to capitalize on AI, including support for local startups and new technologies, securing renewable energy and developing Australia’s AI workforce.

There was also new research highlighting how digital transformation efforts substantially augment long-term merger and acquisition (M&A) performance and a study exploring the application of OPEX within a sales organization along with the the benefits of OPEX in improving efficiency, reducing waste, enhancing employee satisfaction and time management.

On Wednesday, our Vendor news article rounded up the latest updates from multiple software and service providers. Process automation leader Appian announced the integration of ProcureSight with its Requirements Management tool in the Appian Government Acquisition suite to streamline the government procurement process using AI and semantic search. This integration enables acquisition professionals to build precise requirements packages more efficiently as well as allowing the user to centralize award, vendor, solicitation and protest data from multiple sources.

In other news, FlowForma , announced the launch of FlowForma Copilot, an innovative addition designed to fast-track process automation. Powered by Agentic AI and the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model, FlowForma Copilot helps process builders create workflows quickly and accurately by guiding them through process steps, suggesting relevant information and generating complete process frameworks.

Elsewhere, IBM revealed the expansion of its Apptio, an IBM Company portfolio on Microsoft Azure to assist with digital transformations and SAP grew its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) by making SAP Signavio solutions available on AWS Marketplace.

On Friday, we explored the biggest news across the process excellence Community. The world’s premier mixed martial arts organization, Ultimate Fighting Championship , announced plans to enhance fight analysis and fan viewing experiences with AI, with IBM becoming UFC’s official global AI partner. The core of the partnership will feature UFC Insights Engine built with IBM watsonx. Insights Engine will harness IBM’s expertise in data and AI technologies – including its family of Granite large language models (LLMs) – and UFC’s rich data feeds to provide the UFC global viewing audience with more timely, in-depth information. This includes unique insights and advanced analysis of live bouts, fighter tendencies, projections of possible match outcomes and method of victory – all of which will be engineered to update in real-time on-screen as more live data is generated. "This partnership with IBM is one of the most significant milestones for UFC and a game changer for how fans will experience our sport,” said Grant Norris-Jones , head of global partnerships at TKO . “Together, we’re pioneering a product to revolutionize analytics and information in live sports.”

Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI is preparing to release an autonomous AI agent that can control computers and perform tasks independently. Also, Microsoft has joined Europe’s first responsible AI agents initiative. In other news, the UK’s financial regulators abandoned plans to mandate that “critical third party” (CTP) organizations disclose new software vulnerabilities to them in response to feedback on a set of new policies designed to enhance the operational resilience of the UK’s financial system. In a joint statement, the Bank of England , Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) recognized that the mooted rules could have unwittingly invited additional cyber risks.

In other news, sports betting and gaming company Entain announced the appointment of Dafne Guisard as the new chief operations officer (COO) to drive OPEX. Also, Brazilian multinational aerospace corporation Embraer showcased its latest developments in digital transformation as it won the sixth edition of the Global KAIZEN Award. Further, psychology and BPM converged in the latest episode of the New Process Podcast and the Small Business Tech Consortium launched to support Irish firms with digital transformation.

Wishing you all a great end to the week and we’ll be back with more of the latest news headlines next week!