AI agents are quickly reshaping how organizations think about automation. Unlike traditional automation tools, agents can adapt in real time, reason across complex scenarios, and take actions without needing step-by-step instructions. Agents unlock opportunities to automate work that was previously too unstructured, dynamic, or unpredictable for conventional process automation.
It’s against this backdrop that Forrester has announced a new software market category, adaptive process orchestration (APO), which is defined as:
“An automation platform that uses AI agents and nondeterministic control flows, in addition to traditional deterministic control flows, to meet business goals, perform complex tasks, and make autonomous decisions.”
This definition reflects a desire we’ve seen among our customers. While traditional, deterministic process automation has delivered and continues to deliver meaningful outcomes for their businesses, they’re eager to get to the next level: where they can provide better and more personalized customer experiences, achieve new operational efficiencies, and gain a competitive edge. AI agents hold the potential to break through barriers to this next level.
From digital process automation to adaptive process orchestration
To understand the significance of APO, it’s helpful to look at digital process automation (DPA), a software market category which Forrester defines as:
“Platforms that develop process applications with low-code and advanced programming principles with modeling, orchestration, dynamic case management, and AI-led support.”
Many DPA platforms evolved from business process management (BPM) tools, which were originally designed to automate stable, repeatable back-office processes. As digital transformation has prompted organizations to automate more of their core business processes (the ones that build and sell an organization’s products and services), BPM technology evolved to meet greater needs around the complexity of processes, the diversity of the endpoints required to execute them, and the scale needed to meet rising customer expectations.
Digital transformation has also prompted vendors in adjacent automation spaces such as robotic process automation (RPA), integration platforms as a service (iPaaS), and low-code application development (LCAP) to add process automation features to their products. This convergence of capabilities reflects the fact that both business and IT leaders see a need to focus on processes, which are often the “secret sauce” that differentiates them from their competitors; but that can also be the source of high costs and business inefficiencies.
Until recently, DPA, RPA, iPaaS, and LCAP tools have all relied on deterministic process automation. This makes DPA tools in particular well-suited for structured or highly regulated business processes, but it limits how much work inside those processes can be automated. Many organizations’ day-to-day business involves unpredictable scenarios that simply cannot be automated from start to finish through traditional means.
APO represents the next step. By embedding AI agents and non-deterministic flows into orchestrated business processes, organizations can extend automation into areas that were once impossible to automate—from complex case management to real-time decision-making in volatile environments.
A legacy of orchestration at Camunda
Camunda has long championed process orchestration as the connective tissue of enterprise automation. Process orchestration ensures that people, systems, AI agents, and physical devices all work together as part of a single, end-to-end business process. For our customers, this approach has consistently delivered:
- Better customer and employee experiences by eliminating automation siloes and reducing the time it takes to automate business processes and to evolve them over time
- Greater efficiency and agility by coordinating automated tasks with work that has to be done by people in a single, end-to-end process flow
- Easier governance and auditability through an end-to-end approach that makes processes self-documenting for both business and IT users
Adaptive process orchestration builds on this foundation by blending deterministic process logic with dynamic, AI-driven decision-making, enabling business processes to adapt in real time while maintaining governance, compliance, and auditability.
Deterministic + dynamic: Camunda’s approach
Forrester notes that APO is about enabling nondeterministic, dynamic orchestration, which is a future state where AI agents play a much larger role. At Camunda, we agree that agents will become an essential aspect of automated processes in the future, alongside deterministic orchestration that remains important for many core business processes. Core processes are often the most vulnerable to problems that result in poor customer experiences, loss of revenue or reputation, and regulatory compliance violations. This means that incorporating dynamic elements into core processes must be done with care and organizations should preserve the deterministic parts of their processes where it makes the most sense.
Camunda is unique in providing a platform where deterministic flows can be modeled not only around AI agents but also inside of them. For example, you can embed a DMN decision table inside a Camunda agent, giving the agent clear, rule-based guardrails while still allowing it to adapt dynamically. This ensures that processes remain transparent, auditable, and compliant, even as they evolve in real time.
In practice, this means:
- Deterministic orchestration provides the structure, auditability, and safety net for core business processes
- Dynamic orchestration allows AI agents to make context-aware decisions on the fly
- Adaptive process orchestration blends deterministic precision and dynamic adaptability so they can coexist in a single process model—meaning you get all of the benefits of an end-to-end process approach
The seamless integration of humans, AI, and systems is what APO promises, and what Camunda helps customers achieve today.
Looking ahead
Forrester’s recognition of APO validates what our customers have long known: process orchestration is essential to unlocking the full value of AI. By combining deterministic and dynamic orchestration, organizations can expand automation into new areas, handle more complex and unpredictable processes, and realize measurable ROI. At the same time, APO ensures resilience, compliance, and trust, which are critical qualities as AI is embedded in business operations.
At Camunda, we’re proud to have been at the forefront of this journey. From DPA to APO, we continue to enable organizations to orchestrate and automate their most critical business processes, with AI woven throughout. The future of automation is adaptive, and we’re excited to help organizations bring APO to life.
Start the discussion at forum.camunda.io