Automation Is Top Priority, But Organizations Say There Are Challenges: Camunda

A new report from Camunda looks at the state of business process automation and how orchestration can help with specific challenges.

Business process automation is becoming a top priority for IT leaders, but successfully implementing automation comes with roadblocks, according to a new study from Camunda.

Camunda, which offers a BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation)-based workflow automation platform, on Tuesday released its State of Agentic Orchestration & Automation report.

The report based on a survey of 1,150 senior IT decision makers, business decision makers, and enterprise software architects responsible for process automation looked into business automation adoption and the challenges that come with the process.

One of the fundamental takeaways from the report is IT leaders report that automation delivers business value.

Ninety-five percent of IT leaders surveyed said that they saw business growth after implementing process automation.

For midmarket IT, many core business processes can be automated without huge investment including help desk, orders, approvals and onboarding.

Yet, the report also found challenges remain with automation, especially with introducing AI agents.

Automation In Organizations – Some Takeaways

• On average, 48 percent of business processes are automated but IT leaders believe they can achieve 64 percent
• Seventy-one percent said their organizations are using AI agents
• Only 11 percent of AI agents made it into production in 2025
• Seventy-three percent said there is a vision vs. reality gap when it comes to agentic AI

Automation Challenges

Complexity was cited as the biggest obstacle to automation.

• 81 percent said regulation was the biggest challenge in automating.
• 54 percent said contending with legacy systems impeded automation goals
• 47 percent cited issues automating multiple systems that had to interoperate
• 33 percent said homegrown software was hard to integrate with automation

While agentic AI can fuel automation, IT leaders remain wary of agents.

• 84 percent worry about the business risk of AI in day-to-day processes when IT does not have the appropriate controls in place
• 80 percent are concerned about a lack of transparency into how AI is used
• 66 percent cite compliance concerns around the use of AI agents

While Camunda offers an orchestration platform and there is an argument to be made that proposing orchestration is more self-serving of the company’s interests, the report does give weight into why orchestration could be an option especially for midmarket organizations looking to advance business transformation and automation goals. Orchestration platforms often bundle automation, AI, and governance into one manageable interface.

In October last year, MES Computing spoke with Daniel Meyer, Camunda’s chief technology officer. Meyer said that while large enterprises have been in pursuit of automation and orchestration solutions, the company was seeing more demand from the midmarket.

“We do get a lot of demand now more recently from more midmarket and smaller organizations, and that’s interesting, some of those are more tech forward,” Meyer said.

“And the challenge they all have is, how do we scale our customers or our revenue and all of that without a proportional scale in employee base?” he said.

He spoke of an instance where Camunda helped a midsized company with automation.

“[For] smaller to midmarket organizations, a good place to start is customer support. We worked with a fairly small company in the UK, and they’re a utility. They provide water to commercial clients. And they have, obviously, customer support; there’s no water, or there’s an issue with the water, or billing, or all kinds of different problems. And they have automated that with Camunda,” Meyer explained.

Kurt Peterson, senior vice president, customer success at Camunda, touched on orchestration’s role in automation in a news statement.

“Deterministic orchestration has always established structured guardrails. By blending it with dynamic orchestration patterns to leverage reasoning across AI agents, people, and systems in end-to-end processes, enterprises can build a foundation for AI agents they truly trust. This is enterprise agentic automation in practice, and it is how organizations will turn today’s AI experiments into durable, business-critical capabilities,” Peterson said.