Nintex Embeds AI in Platform to Accelerate Process Management and Workflow Automation
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Key Takeaways
⇨ Nintex Process Platform introduces AI-powered enhancements that significantly expedite the documentation, management, and automation of business processes, helping teams manage complexity and boost productivity.
⇨ The platform features several automation tools, including Process Capture and Workflow Generator, which leverage AI and machine learning to simplify the creation of dynamic process maps and workflows without requiring extensive manual documentation.
⇨ There is a growing trend towards valuing process automation among companies, with research indicating an increase in the perceived importance of process automation from 40% in 2023 to 54% in 2024, reflecting the need for improved efficiency and productivity in business operations.
SAP partner, Nintex, provider of process intelligence and automation solutions, announced in mid-2024 AI-powered improvements across the Nintex Process Platform that significantly reduce the time required to document, manage, and automate business processes. The new features add to the growing portfolio of AI capabilities across the Nintex Process Platform.
“Business leaders are grappling with complex processes that connect a multitude of technology systems and manage enormous amounts of data, so much so that their productivity is hampered rather than helped. For many businesses, the hardest step in getting started with streamlining how work gets done is understanding, documenting and managing this complexity,” said Niranjan Vijayaragavan, Chief Product Officer at Nintex. “The new AI-enabled capabilities we’ve introduced allow teams to easily capture the process complexity within their organizations to build and expand an automation program that helps increase productivity across their teams.”
Intelligent process automation refers to a blend of advanced technologies—Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and sometimes Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Optical Character Recognition (OCR)—to automate complex business processes. Unlike traditional automation, which handles only rule-based, repetitive tasks, intelligent process automation can analyze data, recognize patterns, and make decisions in real-time, leading to a more dynamic and adaptive automation system.
Recent SAPinsider research shows that companies are placing greater importance on process automation. The research report Process Productivity and Efficiency Through Process Automation and Intelligence 2024 uncovered that the perception of process automation as “Extremely Important” has notably increased, jumping from 40% in 2023 to 54% in 2024. This is in keeping with related research that shows companies striving for greater productivity, better expense control, fewer manual touchpoints, and improved profitability in an increasingly global marketplace.
Historically, getting started with process mapping required businesses to manually document processes. The newest process intelligence features of the Nintex Process Platform allow businesses to automate an often cumbersome first step in the process automation process by integrating and automating the creation and tooling of process maps. New capabilities include:
- Process Capture: Automate the creation of process maps leveraging the output of AI-powered text prompts and activity recordings captured from end users. This feature within Nintex Process Manager removes the need to manually document processes, while aligning processes across roles and enabling designers and automation builders to follow best practices.
- Import from Microsoft Visio: Import static process diagrams from Microsoft Visio with the help of machine learning and AI to generate dynamic BPMN models, which can then be converted to Nintex process maps, helping businesses save time and make processes easily consumable by both business and IT users.
The workflow capabilities of the Nintex Process Platform leverage generative AI and native data storage to generate workflow automation. Businesses no longer require custom design to get started, but instead can simply use natural language to describe what is needed or use process maps to have Nintex automatically generate a workflow to get them started. New capabilities include:
- Workflow Generator: Easily create workflows using simple text descriptions. Powered by generative AI, the Nintex Workflow Generator capability relies on best practices from thousands of workflows to create and suggest workflow patterns to streamline complex work.
- Data Tables: Improve reliability, reduce complexity, and deliver automation faster with a native repository for storing, managing and connecting process-related data.
One of Nintex’s customers is Australia-based SAP customer, iNova Pharmaceuticals, a company focused on automating business processes for scale and agility while freeing staff to maximize the value they bring to the company. The company manages data migration and consulting on SAP SD (Sales and Distribution), MM (Materials Management), and CS (Customer Service) modules. To support its process automation objectives, iNova considered several workflow solutions. It chose Nintex for its intuitive interface, higher functionality, and greater potential to add value to the company’s processes.
Among the first processes iNova targeted for automation was vendor onboarding, to replace a decentralized, ad hoc process based on email threads and a variety of SharePoint folders. iNova worked with Nintex partner Antares, part of the Cloud Collective, to automate vendor onboarding. The new vendor request workflow, based on Nintex Workflow Cloud and Nintex Forms, starts with an iNova employee completing a form that is routed automatically, as appropriate, to reviewers in the finance, legal, accounts payable, and procurement departments. As a result, the vendor onboarding process is approximately 30% faster than the previous process.
With Nintex, iNova can spin up complex workflows in just a couple of days and go into production a few weeks later. Onboarding vendors is just the first of many business processes the company plans to automate and scale.
“The longer our business uses Nintex workflows, the more business-critical they become in helping us to achieve our goals,” said Sam Cumming, Senior Project Manager, at iNova Pharmaceuticals.
As part of this latest set of platform improvements, Nintex introduced some enhancements to its chatbot functionality. Chatbots enable businesses to personalize the customer experience, save costs of customer engagements, and more. The new chatbot development feature of the Nintex Process Platform allows users to leverage their own generative AI models to build chatbots across a variety of use cases.
- Chatbot Builder: Easily create chatbots for your applications leveraging your own OpenAI models using Nintex’s no-code chatbot component. This feature allows businesses to improve personalization and productivity of customer facing interfaces for a wide range of use cases like customer support, service, status requests, and sales inquiries.
These latest workflow and application development features build upon other AI-powered features previously released by Nintex, including Form Generator, Form Translator and Nintex Assistant.
What this means for SAPinsiders
Share your experiences with intelligent process automation. SAPinsider will be publishing its next research report on Process Automation and Intelligence in July 2025. SAPinsiders have consistently indicated in research conducted recently that leveraging process automation and process Intelligence platforms will enable them to digitalize, discover, understand, and manage business process execution more effectively. While many of them may already have built a foundation in terms of process automation, Intelligent process automation capabilities will allow them to leverage advanced algorithms to model specific events across their processes, visualize these model to identify deviations, find process bottlenecks and perform root cause analyses of process failures. If you are interested in participating in this important research initiative, please email mark.vigoroso@wispubs.com.
Nintex integration with SAP is very good but could be better: Nintex can automate routine, repetitive tasks such as approvals, data entry, and document processing within SAP. For example, using Nintex K2 connect for SAP, companies can transform manual workflows (like purchase order approvals or employee onboarding) into automated processes. That said, developing more extensive native connectors for SAP modules (e.g., S/4HANA, SAP IBP, SAP Ariba) would enable broader, smoother automation for SAP-specific processes like supply chain management and procurement. By integrating with SAP’s key APIs and exposing more SAP BAPIs as SmartObjects, Nintex could allow for deeper automation across complex SAP workflows
Explore low-code/no-code accessibility with Nintex. SAP customers often need customizations specific to their workflows. By enhancing its low-code/no-code capabilities with more SAP-specific features, Nintex can empower business users without coding skills to tailor workflows according to unique SAP requirements, improving adoption and satisfaction. Also, SAP customers often involve various departments in process management. By making Nintex’s interface even more user-friendly, it would enable business users from all backgrounds to engage with and benefit from automation, driving greater adoption across the customer organization.
