10 trends shaping the future of BPM in 2025

1. Citizen developer tools and automation drive democratization

Business process improvement -- the goal of BPM -- has traditionally been driven by expensive process experts brought in to dissect opportunities for change. These ideas were not always accepted by the managers or users involved in executing these changes. The next wave of BPM will be driven by greater participation across the organization.

"The BPM future is really about cultural change driven by three pillars especially," said Setrag Khoshafian, principal and chief scientist at Khosh Consulting and author of How to Alleviate Digital Transformation Debt. The three pillars are as follows:

• Citizen developer-centric BPM tools enable more users across the organization to identify, implement and measure ideas for process improvement with guardrails.
• Ramped-up process automation simplifies the creation of BPM bot workers that can handle increasingly complex tasks previously done by humans.
• Full-cycle process mining will make it easier for users to discover and improve process maps without the help of process experts. It will also be easier for process experts to implement the appropriate guardrails for using these tools more broadly. But this area still needs more work, Khoshafian cautioned.

He also expects new digital enablers -- such as IoT, augmented and virtual reality, and blockchain -- to extend the domain of BPM.

2. Process monitoring and GenAI team up

Generative AI (GenAI) can be employed to perform real-time analysis of insights gathered through process mining tools. This proactive approach empowers organizations to optimize processes and improve overall business performance, according to Marc Kerremans, vice president and analyst for BPM at Gartner.

"Real-time process mining, when coupled with generative AI's capabilities, enables a proactive approach to anomaly detection. As process mining leverages real-time data, generative AI can expedite analysis of this data," he explained. By fine-tuning a custom model, the AI system can then learn from previously mined process data and become adept at recognizing standard patterns and behaviors.

By analyzing real-time data streams and comparing them against a data set of best practice process flows, GenAI can efficiently identify improved approaches for creating new process models or enhancing existing ones.

3. Customer experience features integrate into workflows

Customer experience (CX) is becoming an increasingly critical differentiator for businesses. A recent study by Pew Research found 86% of consumers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.

BPM platforms will need to begin integrating CX features more seamlessly into their workflows in the coming years. Companies that tie their BPM processes with customer experience will have a distinct advantage in delivering faster, personalized and more efficient services over competitors that don't.

"BPM can identify pain points, delays and areas for CX improvement," said Craig Le Clair, vice president and principal analyst for BPM at Forrester Research.

Better personalization is also in play. "BPM tools include embedded BI and analytic tools that can analyze customer data to personalize interactions. For example, an investment company bank can identify high-value customers and offer them personalized financial advice," Le Clair said.

4. Automated process discovery provides a complete map of enterprise-wide processes

The advent of automated process discovery will be the most significant advance for BPM, according to John Blankenbaker, former principal data scientist at management consultancy SSA & Company. The first embodiment of process mining tools analyzed log files from a single critical system, such as an ERP platform, to understand which business units accessed and updated which data, enabling organizations to construct a picture of business activity. This approach has evolved to a place where the actions of multiple systems are stitched together to determine how data flows and to provide a complete blueprint of an organization's processes.

The offline actions of humans in a business process still need to be discovered through traditional interviews and observations. But as more process steps move online, keyloggers and location trackers can capture more manual processes.

Building a coherent process map out of a series of events is complex. It's helpful that most business processes are somewhat similar. The most significant differences are in the way things are named. Blankenbaker expects to see improvements in machine learning techniques that look for recurring patterns to help harmonize different naming conventions across similar processes, making it easier to understand how the process works and how to optimize it.

5. Adaptive process management supports agile, iterative process modeling

Business process modeling in the early days was mostly done using simple flow diagrams -- highly structured visual representations of a mostly inflexible sequence of activities. Flow diagrams are a great tool for ensuring consistent execution of steps in a highly regulated process. "As the field evolved, BPM system vendors realized that, practically speaking, most processes don't always follow exactly the same sequence of steps," said Donncha Carroll, partner, co-founder and head of data science at Lotis Blue Consulting. A customer onboarding process for an enterprise software vendor, for example, might differ depending on software configuration complexity, systems integration needs and types of users. The sequence of activities in this process would vary in ways not known at the start.

Adaptive process management can accommodate the treatment of unknown factors that become apparent during process execution. Tools such as Oracle Cloud Integration already enable users to model structured and unstructured business processes. As these BPM systems become more sophisticated, they will also be used as an orchestration layer, calling on legacy tools, robotic process automation software, AI and licensed applications like ERP systems. "This evolution in functionality," Carroll noted, "will significantly improve not only the flexibility of these systems but also the power and reach of process automation."

6. Process modeling optimizes business processes, aligns them with business goals

One essential aspect of BPM lies in developing tools to better understand and improve business processes. Expect more enterprises to take advantage of innovations in process modeling, said Dee Houchen, head of product and global marketing at SAP Signavio and LeaniX. Enterprises have previously explored automated tools for process mining and mapping to understand existing processes. Process modeling takes this capability to the next level by enabling teams to ask what-if questions and align results with business goals.

IT leaders are under pressure to demonstrate the value of IT investments in supporting business strategy, Houchens said. So, they need to know the current state, what works well, what doesn't and the potential impact of new deployments. Process modeling can help map business processes to the IT infrastructure that facilitates those processes. A holistic view of systems and processes safeguards complex IT transformation. One additional aspect of this trend is increasing interest in process observability to understand the potential for optimization and improvements. This development mirrors the growth of observability tools in application and microservices management at the process level.

7. AI-powered automation agents gain ground

BPM platforms will rapidly infuse GenAI models that will initially help with process design and integration but will start to build AI-driven workflow agents that create subtasks and use feedback and voting loops to gain a level of autonomy.

"This will introduce model-driven decision management into their platforms. They hope to become agent breeding grounds and leverage their combination of traditional automation (integration and production credentials) to fight off emerging AI-led agent frameworks, " Le Clair said.

8. Low-code and custom development find common ground

Innovations in low-code/no-code development have played an essential role in turning new ideas into smoother business operations. But that hasn't been the case for many organizations. In government, for example, customers often require heavy customization that can reduce the benefits of low-code/no-code tools, said Lorraine Landfried, senior vice president at Booz Allen Hamilton. "Many of our clients," she explained, "have valid reasons for wanting to maintain their legacy systems but want something to orchestrate those systems better." These types of enterprises, she predicted, will increasingly take advantage of teams that follow the Agile methodology and use BPM. Approaches like model-driven development will improve understanding of business processes with tools that use the Business Process Model and Notation and Decision Model and Notation to facilitate collaboration between IT and business teams. New approaches for modeling system behaviors as processes also will improve code reuse capabilities.

9. GenAI reshapes business processes

Generative AI is reshaping every aspect of the business. BPM can play a significant role in building better processes more aligned with business goals and stakeholder incentives. The speed and scale of GenAI help companies reimagine processes and workflows to take advantage of emerging technologies, said Bret Greenstein, partner and generative AI leader at PwC. Generative AI can improve workflows and specific tasks, reduce downstream work and ease process scalability. Greenstein cited a company that integrated generative AI into the front end of its business process to assess incoming requests and recommend actions that "dramatically" changed process flows and reduced the volume of requests. "BPM has historically focused so heavily on human activity and system interactions," he said, "but now it has to account for generative capabilities as well."

10. Continuous business transformation alters BPM landscape

Business transformation has traditionally focused on time-bound projects. "The BPM landscape is rapidly shifting toward capabilities that deliver continuous business transformation," said Shawn Brodersen, executive vice president and head of SAP at IT service consultancy Capgemini. Several factors are contributing to business transformation as part of a continuous and ongoing process, including the following:

• An acceleration of tool convergence digitizes and connects the business architecture to application-enabled processes -- all mapped and monitored against target business key performance indicators.
• AI is getting better at enabling process optimization, simulation and intelligent process capabilities.
• Implementing BPM capabilities when designing and building core applications makes BPM an essential part of architectural patterns.

George Lawton is a journalist based in London. Over the last 30 years, he has written more than 3,000 stories about computers, communications, knowledge management, business, health and other areas that interest him.

Andy Patrizio is a journalist based in Massachusetts. He has covered technology issues for more than 30 years.