Organizations: University of Oxford, United Kingdom · Peng Cheng Laboratory, Shenzhen, China · University of Glasgow, United Kingdom · Fudan University, China · Squirrel Ai Learning, United States
Process mining has long turned event logs into process knowledge: discovered models, conformance evidence, bottleneck diagnoses, and runtime predictions. Agentic AI changes the target. Process-aware agents will not only ask what happened. They will ask whether a proposed action should be taken, given the available evidence, privacy budget, organizational authority, and downstream risk. This BlueSky paper proposes event-to-action process mining: a process-mining agenda for transforming heterogeneous operational event data into governed action. The goal is not another dashboard, a generic enterprise simulator, or a language interface over logs. We argue that the community needs four mineable artifacts: event-object representations, action evidence packages, governance contracts, and benchmarks where act, defer, ask, and refuse are all valid outputs. This agenda is timely because agentic business process management (BPM), LLM-assisted process mining, object-centric event standards, causal process monitoring, and privacy-preserving learning are maturing separately. Bringing them together defines a data-mining target inside process mining: mining logged organizational behavior for accountable action, not only retrospective insight.
As organizations increasingly deploy generative AI agents to automate business processes, they face a governance dilemma: although these agents can increase operational flexibility, their non-deterministic nature challenges the control and standardization that Business Process Management seeks to enforce. This paper addresses this \emph{invisible autonomy risk} by introducing \emph{Agent Behavior Mining}, a governance capability that enables the application of process mining techniques to render generative AI agent decision-making observable and traceable. We (1) improve the understanding of generative AI agent behavior through an event data model that translates granular agent activities -- including reasoning traces, tool usage, and token costs -- into standardized process logs; (2) instantiate the data model in a multi-agent order-to-cash implementation, demonstrating how process managers can leverage agent logs to detect policy deviations and quantify operational variability; and (3) evaluate the perceived practical utility of the approach in an exploratory study with 18 industry practitioners. The results indicate that practitioners view behavioral transparency as a prerequisite for trust and consider the ability to examine agent reasoning as an important governance requirement for the next generation of AI-driven business processes.
Agentic AI opens new opportunities for automating Business Process (BP), enabling autonomous decision-making and dynamic adaptation. However, realising this potential requires BP entities and their interactions to be defined with formal precision. This paper presents a formal framework for Agentic BP analysis through the AGO methodology. AGO captures the modelling perspective in terms of who is acting (Agents), why it is carried out (Goals), and what the relevant entities are (Objects). Grounded in set theory and mathematical logic, we formally define the AGO entity types and their interactions, organising all definitions into a BP Knowledge Base (BPKB). The resulting BPKB supports structured querying, incremental updates, and automatic generation of BP workflows, while ensuring soundness and completeness of the derived paths.
Mohammad Azarijafari, Luisa Mich, Michele Missikoff
Process mining (PM) provides a powerful framework for discovering and optimizing operational processes from event data. However, the efficacy of PM techniques is strictly predicated on the availability of structured event logs. Thus far, event logs have often been laboriously created by domain and process mining experts. This costly effort causes large portions of organizational knowledge, including incident tickets, manuals, and textual reports, to remain underutilized. We address this bottleneck by investigating the efficacy of Large Language Models (LLMs) as automated data translators. We propose a scalable framework that leverages LLMs as data translators to bridge the gap between unstructured textual resources and structured event data. We finetune LLMs on a newly created text-to-log dataset, demonstrating that the resulting models can extract high-fidelity event logs from unstructured resources. Our results show that this finetuning approach outperforms few-shot or zero-shot prompting by a large amount, highlighting finetuning as a necessary pre-condition for generating reliable event data. We conclude that our method provides a promising pipeline for making previously unused data available to process mining ecosystems, effectively expanding the possibilities of using PM to further investigate organizational workflows.
Maximilian Seeth, Gabriel Marques Tavares, Daniel Schuster