In today’s increasingly complex, interconnected and automated world, organizations are grappling with a growing sense of unease—a fear that “digital chaos” will overwhelm their business.
Camunda’s newly released 2025 State of Process Orchestration and Automation Report highlights that 8 in 10 organizations are concerned about the impact of digital chaos as business process complexity increases. Processes are rarely a simple series of linear steps anymore. The growing API economy means there are more connected applications than ever, and most large organizations typically use hundreds of different applications daily. At the same time, the volume and variety of endpoints—spanning people and devices—have grown significantly. According to our report, organizations now manage an average of 50 endpoints to execute tasks that are part of a process in their business (this is a 19% increase over the past five years).
Dawn of “Automation Armageddon”?
Many organizations are struggling with siloed tools and technologies, which are hindering their ability to streamline operations or achieve full visibility. As a result, automation programs risk overwhelming organizations with fragile solutions, lack of comprehensive governance, excessive total cost of ownership and increasingly reduced agility to meet changing business needs.
As a result:
- Compliance risks have risen for 82% of organizations.
- Core business process failures concern 77% of organizations.
- 82% fear that if these risks go unchecked they could lead to what could be described as “Automation Armageddon.”
The double-edged sword of AI
Organizations increasingly recognize the value that AI could bring to their business, when it comes to transforming business operations and customer experiences. AI can augment many different human workflows, helping to streamline complex processes, improve decision making, and unlock efficiencies that simply can’t be achieved manually.
However, our report reveals that 85% of organizations face challenges scaling and operationalizing AI across their business. In many cases, AI is only deployed as a point solution to tackle a single task, rather than supporting a business-wide strategy, and fails to provide deterministic guardrails where needed.
Certainly if organizations are to successfully operationalize AI across their entire business, AI applications and services must be orchestrated like any other endpoint within automated business processes. This will ensure they remain compliant and maximize the return on investment from their AI investments.
Playing the right tune with process orchestration
Our report highlights that while 79% of organizations have implemented significant automation, many lack effective ways to control, manage and sustain it. Furthermore, 82% recognize the need for better tools to manage how their processes intersect.
For organizations that are delivering or unlocking additional value through automation, a key success factor is process orchestration.
Although the business benefits of process orchestration are well recognized, our report reveals maturity levels of process orchestration vary from one organization to another. The reality is very few companies so far have successfully implemented process orchestration on an organization-wide scale.
Yet, for concepts like hyperautomation and the autonomous enterprise to succeed, end-to-end process orchestration is essential, providing the control, visibility and integration necessary to manage complex systems and realise the full potential of automation.
Learn more about the State of Process Orchestration and Automation
For more insights, download the full 2025 State of Process Orchestration and Automation Report today.
Dive deeper into the trends with our webinar
Be sure to join our webinar on February 20, 2025 to explore the latest trends in the report in even more detail.
