For years, process mining was pitched as X-ray vision for your operations. The 2025 numbers say the X-ray phase is over — and that's the best news your transformation program will get all year.
Deloitte's 2025 Global Process Mining Study found active adoption fell to 51%, down from 63% in 2021. Management buy-in as a barrier jumped from 26% to 41%. On the surface: a tool in retreat. Read closer and it's a shakeout — the dashboard tourists are leaving, the operators are staying. The organizations that stayed are pairing process mining with AI and automation — 25% already do, 74% plan to — and 21% now report savings above €5 million.
The mistake was selling sight, not change
Most stalled pilots died as beautiful spaghetti diagrams nobody was accountable for acting on. That's the 12-point drop. It isn't a verdict on process mining; it's a verdict on visibility for its own sake.
The playbook
- Start with a dollar, not a diagram. Every initiative needs a named owner and a target number before the first log is pulled. No owner, no project.
- Mine to automate, not to observe. Treat process mining as the discovery layer for RPA and agentic workflows. The 25% pairing it with AI are the ones monetizing it.
- Fix the handoff, not the tool. The 41% buy-in problem is usually a "so what" problem. Convert every finding into a dated, measurable process change — not another deck.
- Fund a center of excellence, not a license. Enterprise-wide adopters sustain value through a CoE that owns standards, data quality, and reuse — not by buying more seats.
Process mining isn't declining. The hobbyist phase is. The winning loop is mine → assign → automate → measure — and the teams running that loop are the ones booking the seven-figure savings everyone else is still pitching.