A Camunda-commissioned survey found that 78% of process decision-makers at large firms said redesigning business processes was necessary to remain competitive as companies adopt artificial intelligence (AI).
Camunda’s Sept. 16 research recap reported the 78% result. In a separate Sept. 9 release, the company said 79% of organizations surveyed saw less internal resistance to adding AI to current processes than to redesigning them. That incentive to keep existing workflows may help explain why 61% of decision-makers assessed that redesign work was falling behind the pace at which their companies wanted to adopt AI.
Sapio Research conducted the online surveys in July and August 2026. The decision-maker survey covered 1,000 senior IT, operations and transformation leaders involved in AI and automation strategy and execution at companies with at least 1,000 employees in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and France. A separate survey covered 5,000 employees at similarly sized companies where AI or automation had been introduced into day-to-day work. The four-country sample does not represent business leaders worldwide and included no Middle Eastern countries.
Process problems also carried reported costs. Seventy-two percent of organizations said such problems had contributed to AI initiatives that failed, at an average reported cost of $1.55 million per business. Camunda said 82% believed their AI investments would fall short without additional spending on process redesign. In the 12 months before the survey, 40% of organizations reported an AI-related compliance or governance issue; process issues played a role in 84% of those cases.
Organizations and employees differed in their assessment of productivity: 89% of organizations said AI was improving team productivity, while 64% of employees agreed. Camunda’s release said 44% of employees had manually overridden AI outputs when the process supporting it was misconfigured, pointing to work employees may have to do when systems and workflows do not fit together.
The UAE government announced on April 23 a goal to move 50% of government sectors, services and operations to agentic AI models within two years. The initiative builds on two decades of government digital transformation, according to the announcement.
