India to lead in process Intelligence and AI: Sarangadhar Sahani, Celonis

Global Capability Centres (GCCs) in India have moved from cost centres to strategic innovation hubs, orchestrating domain expertise, product feedback and localised implementation at scale. At the heart of this shift is an appetite for process intelligence and intelligent automation: companies want software that not only maps how work flows, but that predicts outcomes and triggers automated remediation.

Celonis, the process-mining pioneer, is expanding its India footprint to tap that momentum. In an in-depth conversation with DQ Channels, Sarangadhar Sahani, Senior Director of Engineering, Celonis, lays out how Celonis is building a self-reliant engineering hub, strengthening partner enablement, and harnessing AI and automation through its academy efforts.

Building an engineering presence: a personal and company journey

Sarangadhar begins, describing a career shaped by business process management. On joining Celonis five years ago, he says his remit has been clear: “My primary responsibility is to establish and grow the engineering presence in India.”

He draws on earlier experience: “Before coming to Celonis, I was working at Automation Anywhere as the Director of Engineering for business process management, and we grew that centre from zero to 300, and that experience enabled me to take this role at Celonis.”

Celonis in India: from services and GCC support to a standalone engineering hub

“Celonis in India is not a new entity. We have been existing here for four years,” he notes, but the company is now scaling its ambitions. “We have penetrated into building a good ecosystem for our partners, our service integrators, etc.”

On the company’s lab-style innovation work, Sarangadhar explains: “You must have also heard about Celonis garage that was set up earlier this year, which is basically a co creation initiative where, in a team of engineers and researchers, are working together with customers to build something which is going to help them realise the value of process mining and process intelligence.”

Importantly, India is being set up as a self-reliant engineering hub: “We have also ventured into our journey of creating an independent, self-reliant engineering hub in India, which is going to further expand next year. And we will be working on technology like AI, cloud, building an enterprise to be SaaS products from India.”

Go-to-market and partner ecosystem: GCCs, services partners and co-creation

Celonis’ GTM in India blends product, services and partner enablement. “Our go-to-market strategy is strong,” he says, “we are trying to strengthen our ecosystem teams who are able to partner well with the customers and their back offices. We are also able to strengthen our services team, who can help our customers and partners.”

He emphasises the two-way value with partners: “Sometimes they help us to grab the market, and sometimes we help them to grab the market. It's a win-win for both of us to stay in that ecosystem wherein we sell the product license and they sell the services.”

When asked about partner scale, he is candid: “I don't have the exact number, but what I know is that 150 GC partners that obviously, we have an advocate to grow that.”

Talent, academy and university linkages

Talent is central to Celonis’ India plans. “Our academy is helping to train more and more students who are getting work-ready to work on process intelligence technology such as Celonis,” Sarangadhar explains. “We are integrated with a lot of universities. We are also funding projects that students will be able to co-create with Celonis employees.”

He underlines hiring for AI, data and cloud skills: “We are looking for talent who are comfortable in artificial intelligence, data management, data integration, who can build great SaaS services, cloud technologies.”

From process mining to orchestration: the full intelligence stack

Celonis’ product story is one of evolution. “Process mining is basically having the ability to understand your process, giving a visual representation to your process,” he says. That visibility then moves into prediction and remediation: “We transition from there to intelligence, wherein we can actually tell how it is going to impact your future.”

Sarangadhar stresses orchestration’s role: “We are not only a process intelligence product, but we also have an orchestration and automation dimension, using which customers can build the applications that suit them. That we are able to identify for them.”

Intelligent automation: addressing millions of process variations

On the value of automation, he is pragmatic: “Once you have identified it. So, how are you going to basically address those inefficiencies? You are not going to be always manual. In a large company, there are lots of processes, and once you see the variation that the processes take. Moreover, they sometimes run into millions. In those scenarios, your Intelligent Automation platform helps you to address those insights.”

This approach reframes automation as an operational necessity rather than a novelty, a tool to cut exceptions, reduce rework and drive measurable business outcomes.

AI in engineering: governance, productivity and safeguards

On AI-driven development, Sarangadhar emphasises governance: “We have the right kind of due diligence in place that ensures that everything is reviewed properly and compliant to our guidelines.” He lists the checks that matter: “We have proper architectural guidelines, we have proper platform and SRE guidelines, we have security guidelines, we have quality guidelines, and all those checks have to be passed.”

He frames AI as augmentative: “We invest a lot in the right kind of tools and processes and licenses that can make the life of an engineer easy. Use AI-driven development and other facilitation that can happen with your SDLC, which can make engineers more productive and make the product better.”

GCCs as innovation hubs: feedback loops and domain expertise

Sarangadhar highlights the symbiosis between GCCs and engineering teams: “GCCs are working on various domains; they know the customer pain points. So, with their help, we improve our product and we make things that will enable their customer adoption by taking the feedback seriously and incorporating it into our product.”

This grounded feedback loop, GCCs telling engineers what customers need and engineers delivering productised solutions, is the mechanism Celonis expects to scale across India.

Conclusion: India as a self-reliant engineering and innovation node

Celonis’ India play is deliberate: build local engineering capacity, deepen partner and GCC collaboration, train talent through academies and co-creation, and expand the product from visibility to closed-loop automation. As Sarangadhar puts it, “We are going to work in the field of data and intelligence. We are going to work in the field of infrastructure and platform.”

The result is an India that not only consumes process intelligence but creates it. A market where GCCs, services partners and local engineering hubs coalesce to deliver AI-driven operational resilience and continuous value. As Celonis scales its Garage, academy and engineering footprint, the company is betting India will do more than host talent; it will innovate, ship and lead in process intelligence for the world.

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