Transforming Business Processes with AI and Orchestration with Camunda’s Daniel Meyer

Hey everyone. Alex Shimmel back here for Tech Trunk tv. I've got a, I think it's his first time on here to introduce you to a new, a new person.

Always exciting. A new company for us here. Uh, I want to introduce you to Daniel Meyer.

My Daniel is the CTO for a company called Kaunda. Daniel, welcome to Tech Drunk tv. It's great to have you on here.

Excited to be here, Alan. Good. Good, good.

So, Daniel, before we jump into about Kaunda and some stuff going on, um, why don't we hear a little bit about you? Sure. Um, so I'm Daniel, you already shared my name.

I work for a company called Kaunda. I've been with that company for a long, long time. So I joined Kaunda in 2010, um, um, back then.

Wow. I was, uh, that was in, um, Berlin, Germany. You can probably tell by my accent that I'm, that I'm European.

Um, and I was studying computer science at the time, and for various reasons, I got interested in, um, business process management of all things. So how can, um, organizations better understand their core business processes? How can they better manage those?

And really, from the start, I was interested in that topic, both from an, let's say, management perspective. Um, like how do we think about that from an organizational perspective? How do we need to work?

Um, who works on what? Um, all of that. But then also from a technical perspective.

So how can we not only document our processes better, um, but how can we also automate them? And that is really the piece that, that, that caught my, my interest. And then I, um, found those, um, two other folks in Berlin, um, the two founders of KAA actually, and, um, Jacob Fro and Banda.

And then I teamed up with them because from the beginning we had this vision of let's help large organizations to improve their processes, make those processes better, um, but let's do it through enabling them to automate those processes through orchestrating all the steps that need to happen in such a process. And that, that is basically what we've been doing for the last 15 years. And now orchestration is taking off.

Suddenly everybody's talking about orchestration. Everybody's interested in orchestration, and we're very happy about that because we've been doing that for the last 15 years. Sure.

I, well, you know what they say if you wait long enough, right? It's the saying about London, if you wait and Piccadilly square long enough, or Piccadilly circle long enough, eventually everyone in the world passes through there. So eventually A boring topic, like, oh, you gotta, you know, you gotta organize your processes better will suddenly become hype.

Yeah. Well, and you know what? It's not boring to everyone, to some people perhaps, right?

But if, when I'm not a, a business process automation person, right? And I, I've never been, but sometimes boring makes the world go round, right? That is the point, right?

I always say, like, as consumers, right? We're all suffering from bad processes. Just try to open a bank account, try to switch your Absolutely.

You know, your cable service or something like that. One, one wanna experience some bad processes. Just do that.

Right? Absolutely. Well, I, I think sometimes companies put bad processes in place just to make it hard for you, right?

Shutting off your cable account or switching, you know, to a different cable company. Airline changes on reservations. Oh my God, is that hard?

But, but you're right. It, you know, that's when good, uh, business processes, uh, automation and so forth. That's when it shines.

When you don't have a problem doing those things. And of course, exactly. You know, Daniel, uh, uh, agentic, ai, chat bots, the whole AI thing promises to revolutionize this world, right?

This is a world, this a market, a business or segment that AI is already, you know, making profound changes. And I'm sure kaunda is on, on top of this, right? At the, at the knife spear, the, not the knife spear, the, uh, spear tip, right?

Leaving the, the charge. But before we get into, yeah, it's read, I'm sorry, just one sec before we get into it. We didn't mention kundos website or anything like that.

I know it's on your background here. Well, that's for the, yeah. For the event.

Yeah, exactly. So Kaunda is, um, as I said, has been around for a while. We were founded in Berlin actually in 2008 in Germany right now.

We're like, we grew to, to a global company. So we're, um, now than more than 700 customers worldwide. Um, we have more than 500 employees.

And basically we are helping, um, large organizations to, um, improve and automate their processes through our technology, which is key to process automation, which is process orchestration. Um, like really the ability to, okay, I'm gonna model my process from start to end. Where does it start?

Is it a customer email? Is it, um, you know, a click on the website? And then what are all the steps that need to happen in order to, um, like fulfill whatever needs to be fulfilled?

So it can be processing an order, it can be, um, you know, create, like setting up a mobile phone contract, um, processing a claim and insurance is, is a big use case. So all of those processes, you want to orchestrate them, um, from, from start to end. And that's basically the software that we provide, and then also the consulting and, and methodology and approach that we propose to our customers in terms of how they can go about it.

So that's, that's what we're all about. com. com.

com will be in New York, um, on October 7th and eight. So we'll be, uh, Midtown. So please join us there.

It's gonna be a fantastic conference, and we're gonna actually talk a lot about egen ai, which I think you were starting to get into, Right? That's where we were going and, yeah. Yeah.

I, I, I pulled off the road there for a second, but thank you for that, Daniel. Let, let's talk a little bit about agentic ai, right? As I mentioned, this is having a major impact.

Um, we talk, you, you know, KADO uses the term agentic orchestration. Let's, let's start with that. What do we mean by agentic orchestration?

Yeah, so I think most folks are familiar with orchestration, right? So basically the capability to, um, orchestrate a complex set of tasks, a complex set of steps, um, inside a process across all humans, right? Humans can be involved systems, APIs, devices, um, to accomplish the goal of the process that is orchestration.

And, um, over the last probably five to 10 years, process orchestration has really established itself as key to any scaled automation strategy, because it is, at the end of the day, the thing that stitches together all my systems, people, devices, bots, all my other automations that focus on specific tasks I can stitch together with an end-to-end process that then orchestrates across. So that's classic process orchestration. Now, what is the gentech orchestration?

That is now basically the next step from process orchestration. It's that next, we call it evolutionary phase, where with classic process orchestration, we have a lot of deterministic control, right? So I model my flow chart saying, here's the first step, and then this happens, and then the next step happens, and then maybe two things happen in parallel.

And then if this happens, then that happens, right? So I can model my process with deterministic logic, clearly specifying the order in which things happen. So that's classic.

Now with ai, we can get more open-ended. So there is a lot of tasks where the classic deterministic approach is a good fit. Um, but there are also many tasks where the classic deterministic approach is not such a good fit.

And those are typically the more open-ended processes. So, um, managing an exception, right? Customer support, somebody calls in and oh, you need to figure out how to help them.

Um, in banking, you have things like trade, trade reconciliation, which, which can fail in, um, in, in insurance you have investigation into potential fraud around insurance, where you have more open-ended task where you, it's not easy to just predefine all the steps, but you can bring in AI to, based on a set of inputs and a goal and a set of available tools, determine what should happen next, what is the next step in the process. That is the more dynamic AI driven approach. And what now makes it a gen process orchestration is the ability to bring those two things together.

Because for each and every process inside my organization, there'll be aspects of it that I want to control, that I want to predetermine, where I wanna make sure that certain things always happen and always happen in a certain order. And then there will be aspects of it where I say, here, I want to put fewer guardrails in place because now I have a more open-ended task, and I want AI to, uh, uh, to actually decide what should happen next. And with Vient orchestration at kaunda, we enable our customers to do just that.

That's fantastic because, you know, it's, it, it makes it not an all or nothing. Do you know what I mean? Um, where it's just, okay, I'm, I'm turning over the keys to the car to the agent, and let's hope it gets home on, uh, safely in one piece, right?

And, but no, here we can, we can determine where does the human input, where does the agent go? Or does the agent run with the human input and, and back and forth. And I, I think that's a, that's a, an important piece of, of this whole as we transition and adopt more AI kind of technologies.

And, you know, 'cause a lot of times when you hear ag agent orchestration, I think a lot of people, you know, they liken it to Kubernetes mm-hmm. How Kubernetes orchestrates cloud native and, and containerized workloads. But yes, this does sort of that, but it also, it orchestrates the relationship and process between the agent and the person Exactly.

Right. Between the human and, and the agent. And that's a piece again, I think we overlook as we, you know, we talk about, oh, we're moving ai, we're moving ai, but that doesn't mean the human's outta the equation.

Yeah. I, I call it also the, um, the trust gap, right? Bridging the trust gap.

Because what we see is that yes, organizations are, enterprises are adopting agents, but they're still very reluctant to actually put them into core processes, mission critical processes, because how do I know it's not going off the rails, right? How do I know I can, I can trust it or do the right thing, um, because I'll be liable if it does the wrong thing. This is particularly the case for heavily regulated industries.

So there's sure, currently a big trust gap that we need to bridge. And the way we can bridge that is by basically providing the deterministic control and guardrails on the dynamic open-ended task execution. And then I, I have the control where I say, okay, here I need to make sure that, you know, whenever we open an account, we do the KYC, for example, right?

I can ensure that, um, in a deterministic way. But within KYC, now it's more, it's more open, open-ended, right? Um, sometimes we need to check this, sometimes we need to check that.

Sometimes we need to do a double check on the, on the income verification, for example. And here now I can leverage AI in combination with the human in the loop to, um, be more dynamic about that. It's just an example, but, but it's, yeah, to your point, it's really important we can bring those two things together and blend them to then bridge that trust gap.

Got it. Makes sense. You know what, as long as you mention Cam und decon New York, right?

com and, and click the link there. Um, how many people are you expecting? I mean, how big of an event is this?

Yeah, We had, so we, we always do one in Europe and then, and then one in, in, in North America, north America, then the alternate every six months. So we had our Europe conference in Amsterdam in May, and there we had more than a thousand people in the room. So.

Great. Let's aim for that. Yeah, sounds good.

I love Amsterdam in May. Um, actually I think it's CubeCon will be back in Amsterdam next. Uh, I, it's usually April, actually.

Yeah, March, April is, is CubeCon in Europe. Anyway, Daniel, I want to thank you for coming on here and, and really giving us a great brain dump on, on und on, on, uh, agentic orchestration, how this all works. As I said, I think this is an area where we're seeing really AI exert an influence, but it's good to hear that we haven't taken the humans outta the equation just Yet.

Thank you so much, Alan, and um, it's an honor to be here. Thank you. Thank you.

Daniel Meyer, CTO of Kaunda here on Tech Trunk tv. We're gonna take a break. We'll be back in just a moment.