
A baker’s son from Bavaria found his calling in the digital crumbs companies leave behind. Fifteen years after a student project became Celonis, he is still asking the same practical question: where, exactly, does the work get stuck?

Before Celonis could map the hidden life of a global company, its CTO had to learn that computers keep better diaries than people do. His career began with a 286, a library shelf and the pleasure of making difficult things work.

A mathematics student found a way to make invisible business processes visible. Fifteen years, thousands of handwritten letters and one clapped-out Opel later, Alexander Rinke is trying to give enterprise AI the context it lacks.