Academics discuss major BPM trends, challenges & opportunities

Business process management (BPM) academics will gather this week to discuss major trends, challenges and opportunities shaping the field.

The International Conference on Business Process Management, hosted in Seville, Spain, brings together a raft of BPM scholars and practitioners to present and dissect research on a range of topics within the process management sphere.

This year, the conference received a total of 142 submissions, of which 132 entered the review phase. Following a rigorous double-blind peer-review process, including at least three reviews per paper and meta-reviews by members of the Senior Program Committee, 30 full research papers were accepted.

It comes as BPM continues to play a major role in modern process excellence and business transformation. The PEX Report 2025/26, based on a recent survey of more than 200 professionals, found that BPM is the most common technology organizations use to support business transformation, cited by 53 percent of respondents. What’s more, 39 percent of businesses are looking to invest in BPM in the next 12 months, up from 22 percent last year.

BPM trends, challenges & opportunities

The accepted research contributions to the International Conference on Business Process Management cover a broad range of enduring and emerging topics in BPM. Dominant themes included predictive process monitoring, conformance checking, anomaly detection, process discovery, object-centric and declarative process mining, simulation and optimization. 

Several contributions focused on human-centric and ethical dimensions in BPM, including technostress, benevolent process design and fairness in machine learning–enabled processes. Emerging themes that stood out this year include the integration of large language models (LLMs), temporal graph representations, fairness-aware monitoring and cognitive frameworks for understanding deviations and ambiguity in processes. These topics reflect the field’s expanding intersection with artificial intelligence (AI).

Join us at All Access: BPM Business Process Management 2025!

The evolving BPM market

The BPM market is set to be worth more than US$37 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 13.52 percent. That’s according to research from Maximize Market Research Pvt. Ltd.

North America currently leads BPM adoption, with the US BPM market growing at around 20 percent CAGR through 2030. Asia Pacific (APAC) is the fastest-growing region, with BPM revenues rising to $8.4 billion by 2033 at around 11percent CAGR.

Meanwhile, traditional BPM must evolve to align with agentic AI. That’s a key finding from a new research paper exploring the emergence of agentic AI and its impact on business processes. 

The study, based on interviews with 22 BPM practitioners, highlights a clear message: organizations need robust governance to ensure AI agents deliver value responsibly. Key recommendations include defining clear goals, setting legal and ethical guardrails, enabling human–agent collaboration and ensuring safe integration with fallback mechanisms.

“Agentic AI introduces new dynamics – autonomy, adaptability and self-learning – that challenge traditional BPM principles centered on structure, control and standardization,” the researchers stated. To align these approaches, organizations should take strategic steps.

PEX Report 2025/26: Global state of business transformation

The PEX Report 2025/26 examines the results of our annual survey of more than 200 professionals with insights from more than a dozen industry business and thought leaders from across the globe. Contributors include leaders from Mars, Navy Federal Credit Union, Pacific International Lines, Sodexo, SAP and Nintex!

Explore why true business transformation is not a singular project but an ongoing journey, one that requires visionary leadership, cross-functional collaboration, technological prowess and an unrelenting commitment to agility and innovation. Those that embrace this evolution holistically are not just surviving the future, they are shaping it!

Download Now