I’ve spent my career at the intersection of machine learning, operations research, and real-world decision-making — as a researcher at MIT, and as the founder of Ikigai, where we set out to prove that AI could do more than describe what’s happening in a business. It could tell you what’s going to happen, and what to do about it.
That’s the promise of decision intelligence. And it’s harder than it sounds.
Most enterprise AI today is retrospective. It analyzes what happened, surfaces patterns, and generates recommendations. That’s genuinely valuable, but it’s not enough.
The decisions that matter most in any organization aren’t about what happened last quarter. They’re about what happens next: whether to adjust inventory ahead of a demand shift, whether a supply chain disruption requires rerouting now or can wait, whether a pricing decision made today will hold up under three different demand scenarios.
Answering those questions requires something most AI systems don’t have: the ability to simulate. To model a business as a dynamic system, stress-test decisions against multiple futures, and recommend actions that are robust across scenarios — not just optimal for the most likely one.
This is what Ikigai was built to do. And joining Celonis is what allows us to do it at an unprecedented scale.
Why decision intelligence is the next frontier and why Celonis
Celonis built the foundation that decision intelligence needs to work.
Decision intelligence without operational context is like a flight simulator without a real aircraft model. You can run the simulation, but the outputs only matter if the underlying representation of the system is accurate. Celonis’s Context Model is the most sophisticated real-time operational model of enterprise processes that exists. It knows how work actually flows across systems, where the exceptions are, where the friction lives, and how the business behaves under different conditions.
When you combine that with Ikigai’s forecasting and simulation capabilities, something qualitatively different becomes possible. AI that doesn’t just understand your operations but can look forward into them. That can say: here are three scenarios, here’s what each costs you, here’s the decision that holds up best across all of them.
That’s not a feature. That’s a new category of capability for the enterprise. Read on to learn what this means for you.