Busting process ghosts - how to keep enterprise AI from seeing processes that don't exist

Enterprises pushing toward agentic AI risk automating “ghost” processes—workflows that exist on paper but not in current operational reality—which can quietly erode return on AI investment and create conflicting or compliance-heavy outcomes. The article argues that CIOs need real-time context models built from systems, application, user, and business-rule data to give AI a deterministic view of how operations actually work, enabling more reliable automation, better decisions, and a dynamic digital twin of the business. For IT organizations, this shifts the priority from simply deploying agents to instrumenting processes, improving observability, and grounding automation in live operational intelligence.