BPM 2026 Digital Conference Program

The Marriage of Process and AI

Tom Davenport

Tom Davenport is the President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management and Faculty Director of the Metropoulos Institute for Technology and Entrepreneurship at Babson College, and a Fellow at both the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. He’s been named as one of the top 25 consultants, one of the 100 most important people in the tech industry, and one of the top 50 business school professors in the world. He has written 27 books, more than 300 articles for Harvard Business Review, and hundreds of other articles and blog posts. His most recent co-authored books are The New Science of Customer Relationships and Agentic Artificial Intelligence.

Business Process Intelligence in Congestion-Driven Systems: From Event Logs to Real-Time Digital Twins

Opher Baron

Opher Baron is a University of Toronto Distinguished Professor of Operations Management at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto and a cofounder and CEO of SiMLQ.

On the teaching front, Opher is especially proud of the modeling and analytics courses he introduced and teaches at Rotman. He has given numerous invited keynote lectures and seminars, chaired several conferences, clusters, and sessions, and is currently serving on the advisory board and editorial boards of several leading journals, including Operations Research, and Manufacturing & Service Operations Management.  

From Digital Traces to Process Understanding: Rethinking Organizational Work and Change

Emmanuelle Vaast

Emmanuelle Vaast is the Desautels Chair in Digital Technology Management, Professor of Information Systems, and Associate Dean of Research at the Desautels Faculty of Management of McGill University.  

Emma's research examines how social practices emerge and change with the implementation and use of new technologies and how these new practices are associated with changing organizational processes.  

Emma is interested in methodological issues. She has become increasingly fascinated by the opportunities and challenges of combining methods in the analysis of electronically-collected data, especially to theorize processes. 

Keynote 1: Do Machines Speak BPMN? The Engineering Behind AI You Can Trust

Soren Frederiksen

Soren Frederiksen is the CTO and Co-founder of mindzie, a process intelligence company whose platform helps organizations discover, understand, and improve how their processes actually run. He has spent his career building software at the meeting point of data and operations, with two successful company exits along the way. Based in the Toronto area, he works hands-on across process mining, BPMN, and applied AI, and is currently focused on how AI can help people author process models they can trust.

Keynote 2: Stochastic Process Mining in Practice

Prof. Dr. Sander Leemans

Sander Leemans is a professor at RWTH Aachen University, Germany. His research interests include process mining, process discovery, conformance checking, stochastic process mining, and robotic process automation. In particular, he specialises in making solid academic techniques available to end-users, analysts and industry partners. He teaches business process management, business process modelling and business process improvement.

Keynote: Reflections on the value(s) of a Green BPM Research Programme

Finn Klessascheck

Finn Klessascheck is a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Information Systems and Business Process Management at the University of Münster and an associate researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin. His research explores the integration of normative aspects, specifically environmental sustainability and employee-centredness, into the discipline of business process management, especially into data-driven methods such as process mining and conformance checking. He is particularly interested in how organizations can design their business processes to be more efficient whilst also being more socially and environmentally sustainable. Before joining the University of Münster, he conducted his PhD research at the Technical University of Munich, Campus Heilbronn.

Keynote: Framing AI-augmented processes

Marco Montali

Marco Montali is Professor of Computer Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering of the Free University of Bozen–Bolzano, Italy, where he coordinates the BSc programme in Informatics and Management of Digital Business. He has made pioneering contributions at the intersection of artificial intelligence, process science and information systems engineering, with a particular focus on the modelling, analysis and mining of multi-perspective processes and multi-agent systems. A unifying theme of his research is the combination of model-driven and data-driven techniques to engineer safe and controllable information systems and agents, with particular attention to their evolving behaviour. He has authored or co-authored more than 300 publications and received ten best-paper awards and two test-of-time awards.

Keynote: Auditing, Monitoring, and Intervention for Compliance of Agentic AI Systems

Sheila McIlraith

Sheila McIlraith is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, a Canada CIFAR AI Chair (Vector Institute), and an Associate Director and Research Lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. McIlraith’s research is in the area of AI sequential decision making, broadly construed, with a focus on human-compatible AI and AI Safety.  McIlraith is a Fellow of the ACM and AAAI, a Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Senior Fellow, and is currently serving as a member of the Canadian AI Safety Institute (CAISI) Research Council. McIlraith has received a number of honours and recognitions for scholarly work and innovation in teaching.