The Validation You’ve Been Waiting For
If you’ve spent the last eighteen months arguing to your board, your CFO, and your peers in the C-suite that AI needs process clarity before it needs budget, here’s some news that will make your next conversation easier.
The analysts now agree with you.
In its Q3 2025 Wave, Forrester did something the market had been circling for a while: it formally tied process intelligence to AI readiness. Not as a “nice to have.” Not as a parallel workstream. As the foundation.
This matters because the category has quietly repositioned. Process intelligence used to be sold as generic operational visibility: dashboards, process maps, the occasional efficiency win. That’s no longer the pitch. Forrester now frames it as AI cost containment and governance infrastructure: the layer that decides whether your AI investment compounds or quietly burns budget.
You’ve been making this argument on conviction. Now you can make it with a citation.
What Forrester Actually Said
Let’s be precise, because precision is what makes this useful in a board deck.
Forrester evaluated 15 process intelligence vendors in the Wave. Three were named Leaders: Celonis, ARIS, and iGrafx.
What’s more telling than the names is the criteria. The evaluation lens shifted toward AI-era use cases (cost containment, governance, and supply chain resilience) rather than the legacy framing of “show me my processes.” The analyst category moved to where the spend is going: making AI investments safe, traceable, and economically defensible.
And it isn’t just Forrester saying this. Even the market leaders frame it the same way. Carsten Thoma, President and Board Director at Celonis, a direct competitor to the platform IGX360 is built on, put it plainly in Celonis’s response to the Wave:
“Enterprise AI is set to reinvent operations, but to deliver on its full potential, AI needs to understand how each business runs and how to make it run better.”
When the analyst category and the largest vendor in it are both telling you the same thing, it stops being one company’s opinion and starts being market consensus. The thesis that process intelligence is the prerequisite for AI is no longer a contrarian position. It’s the established one.
Worth noting where iGrafx specifically landed: Forrester highlighted its differentiation on BPM lifecycle management and process discovery. That’s an important distinction. It isn’t just mining the past. It’s governing the future. Discovering how processes actually run, then managing them as living models that AI can be safely built on top of.
Why This Is a Board-Grade Procurement Argument
Here’s the practical shift for you as a Transformation Leader.
Until now, the “process first” argument has been yours to win on conviction. You knew it was right. You’d seen the failed pilots: the AI projects that demoed beautifully and collapsed in production because nobody could articulate the underlying process the model was supposed to improve. But conviction is hard to put in a procurement justification. Boards don’t fund hunches.
That’s changed. An independent analyst category now backs the thesis. The argument is no longer “I believe AI needs process clarity.” It’s “Forrester’s Q3 2025 Wave classifies process intelligence as AI-readiness infrastructure, and three named Leaders validate the category.” One of those sentences gets you a polite nod. The other gets you a line item.
This is the citation you put in the board deck. It converts a strategic instinct into a defensible procurement decision, the kind that survives scrutiny from a skeptical CFO or a risk-averse audit committee.
For the Process Owners and CoE leads in the room, there’s a deeper point too. iGrafx’s strength in BPM lifecycle management means you’re not buying a one-time mapping exercise. You’re buying a way to keep processes governed as they change, which is exactly the discipline that makes AI deployment repeatable rather than a series of one-off gambles. That governance discipline is the backbone of our method.
IGX360 Is Built on a Forrester Leader
Now the connective tissue. We want to be exact about this, because the distinction matters.
IGX360 runs on iGrafx Process360 Live: the platform Forrester just named a Leader in the Q3 2025 Wave.
To be clear about what that does and doesn’t mean: IGX360 itself isn’t the entity Forrester rated. iGrafx is. What IGX360 gives you is analyst-validated foundations (the Leader-rated platform underneath) plus a managed, opinionated layer on top. We’ve taken the engine Forrester endorsed and built a delivery model around it: configured for AI readiness, governed by a clear method, and run as a managed service rather than a tool you have to staff and operate yourself.
The thesis we’ve held from day one, that process intelligence is the AI prerequisite rather than an optional companion to it, is now externally validated. We didn’t move toward the market. The market moved toward us. The foundation we chose to build on is now the foundation the analysts are pointing the rest of the industry toward. You can evaluate exactly what that looks like on the BPM platform.
The Market Caught Up. Now What?
Process clarity is the foundation for AI that actually works in production. We’ve said it. Forrester now classifies the category that way. Celonis’s own president frames it the same way.
So the question on the table has changed. It’s no longer whether you need process intelligence before you scale AI. That argument is settled. It’s how fast you can put that foundation in place before the next board cycle asks why the AI budget hasn’t returned anything yet.
You have the citation now. You have the analyst-validated platform. The only variable left is your timeline.
Talk to Gareth: see the analyst-validated foundation IGX360 is built on.