Preface to the Special Issue on Artificial Intelligence for Business Process Management 2019

We are at the beginning of a profound transformation of Business Process Management (BPM) due to advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). Indeed, the application of AI and ML is impacting many application domains where process management perspectives and techniques are relevant, including industrial engineering, IoT, and emergency response, to name a few. The use of AI and ML in BPM has been discussed as the next disruptive technology that will touch almost all the business process activities being performed by humans. In some cases, AI will dramatically simplify human interaction with processes. In other cases, it will extensively support humans in the execution of tasks, and, in yet other cases, it will enable full automation of tasks that have traditionally required manual contributions. Over time, AI may lead to entirely new paradigms for business processes and operations. For example, instead of BPM models centered on process or on case management, we anticipate models that are based fundamentally on goal achievement, as well as we anticipate models that fully enable continuous improvement and adaptation based on experiential learning. …