I'm proud to share that Camunda has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave: Adaptive Process Orchestration Software, Q3 2026.[1]
Adaptive Process Orchestration (APO) is a category Forrester defines around vendors that use AI agents and nondeterministic control flows, in addition to traditional deterministic control flows, to meet business goals, perform complex tasks, and make autonomous decisions. The end result of this adaptive orchestration is complex end-to-end agentic orchestration and legacy modernization at enterprise scale; these are the challenges that Camunda has spent over a decade solving, and have adapted for a world where AI agents, not just people and systems, are part of every process.
Why adaptive process orchestration is so important now
Every process running in the enterprise today was designed for a world without AI. Enterprises are deploying AI agents faster than ever, but there's a widening gap between what those agents can do and what the business actually gets from them. Add a new agent to a fragmented process and you don't remove the fragmentation, you add another silo, with its own behavior, its own data, and no shared context with the rest of the journey.
That gap is exactly what adaptive process orchestration is meant to help close. It requires a platform that can coordinate agents, people, and systems across the full, end-to-end process, not just individual tasks, while staying observable, governed, and auditable enough to trust with real operational authority. We call this agentic orchestration, and it's the foundation of our platform.
Our vision recognized
Camunda's vision is built around what we call open orchestration architecture: a reference architecture for the AI-native enterprise organized across three layers — engagement, orchestration, and core systems and data. The orchestration layer is the most critical of the three, and it's where Camunda has always been strongest.
Within that layer, we deliver something no one else does in one governed engine: outer orchestration (outside the agent), which coordinates agents, people, and systems across the end-to-end process, and inner orchestration (inside the agent), which governs the operating procedures between an agent's reasoning and the tools it acts through. Deterministic control at the macro level, adaptive reasoning at the micro level, running on the same battle-tested engine, Zeebe, that already powers millions of process instances a day for 700+ enterprises, including nine of the top ten US banks.
ProcessOS, our human-in-the-loop AI layer currently in closed beta, extends that vision further. It accelerates what we call the great re-engineering: not bolting AI onto processes built for a pre-AI world, but redesigning them, from discovery through continuous improvement, around the outcomes the business actually wants. That’s why we’ve been building toward a market whose needs have shifted from task automation to agentic orchestration, and that reframing is squarely aligned with the direction we've been building toward. We are pleased to have received Forrester's highest possible rating in the Vision criterion, which we consider in part for these elements.
Built for the complexity real enterprises face
Vision means little without the capability to back it up, and this is why we are proud of our results in this Wave. We received the highest marks available across the current offering criteria that we believe matter most at enterprise scale: reliability architecture, adaptivity architecture, process complexity handling, process volume handling, operate observability, control, and governance, and optimize observability, control, and governance criteria.
That combination is deliberate. Zeebe is distributed and stateful, with no central database and no single point of failure, so processes fail safely, recover cleanly, and keep running through updates with zero downtime. Adaptivity means swapping an LLM, a model host, or a backing system without rewriting the process logic that runs on top of it. And because every process execution, every agent decision, and every exception is captured automatically, Operate and Optimize give teams a real answer when a regulator asks why something happened, or when a customer wants to know where their case stands.
Powered by adoption and community
We received the highest score possible in the Adoption criterion as well. We believe that result reflects our Customer Success organization built to move customers from a free trial to production scale, Camunda Academy's role in training tens of thousands of users a year, and an active, sizable open-source community that gives teams a lower-friction way to prove value before they scale up.
Thank you
None of this happens without our customers, partners, and the Camunda community pushing us to build the right thing. We believe being named a Leader in this evaluation is a meaningful milestone, but it's one step in a much longer journey toward making agentic orchestration something enterprises can actually trust with their most important work.
Learn more
Access a complimentary copy of The Forrester Wave: Adaptive Process Orchestration Software, Q3 2026 report below, or get in touch with us for a free customized demo to see what Camunda can do for you.
[1] Forrester, The Forrester Wave™: Adaptive Process Orchestration Software, Q3 2026, Bernhard Schaffrik, Chris Gardner, September 2026.
