The Relevance of BPMN in the age of AI | by Dan Funk | SpiffWorkflow | May, 2026 | MediumSitemapOpen in appSign up<br>Sign in

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SpiffWorkflow is a process orchestration / automation platform that combines BPMN and Python.

The Relevance of BPMN in the age of AI

Dan Funk

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Linus Pauling and his chalkboard. “It becomes clear very quickly that the man operated within a complicated web of people, places and time, necessitating some type of medium to keep lesser-known variables in order.”I believe intelligence is something that happens between people. It isn’t like liquor. You can’t distill it or bottle it. It is more like electricity. It doesn’t exist, unless it is moving. For this reason, what you read below is all hand written. I’m not using AI for anything beyond some basic copy editing. it’s better that these thoughts reach you unfiltered. I might unknowingly say something novel and intelligent, and AI might filter it out before someone recognizes it.<br>BPMN, if you aren’t familiar with it, stands for Business Process Model and Notation. It’s a 15-year-old standard (with 50-year-old roots) for building flow charts. That doesn’t sound great at first blush, does it? Who wants to follow a rule book for drawing pictures on a white board? But it has something a quick sketch doesn’t have. It has electricity. You can run a BPMN diagram, in the same way you can run an app on your phone. It is “executable”.<br>We all speak different languages. There are some who harbor the unstable notion that there are two kinds of people in the world: “Technical and Non-Technical”. This is a very dated divide born out of the early days of the information age, and evaporating under the rising heat of AI (everyone is writing code these days). I despise the term “non-technical”. I could just as well admit that I am “non-medical”, or “non-physicist”, or “non-real-estate”. A thousand labels to identify what I do not know is senseless. But there is a divide here that I’ve spent my whole career as a software engineer trying to bridge. How do experts in two different fields communicate?<br>You might say AI can solve the problem. I’ll have the AI review these medical procedures that were recommended and explain them to me. I’ll have the AI write the code I need to build my website. To be honest, I definitely do these things. And worse. It’s great to have access to a tool that can do a good job as a stand in for a real expert. But something critical was lost. I didn’t go back and talk to my doctor — so I’m not building that relationship with her — the deep rapport that manifests over years and someday saves my life. And that website you built also lacks an expert who cares about it. In short order, we will fail to build the complex interdependent business relationships that are the fabric of our economy (and society). Not to mention the explosion of projects that people depend on, but do not have the capacity to care for. There will be a massive shortage of “give a damn”, that could spell disaster for those that don’t find a better way.<br>I believe we must have a common ground in which to directly communicate with each other. If we were at an international scientific conference, odds are, everyone would be speaking English. Not because it’s a great language that everyone loves (hell, it is all I can speak, and I don’t love it), but because it creates a common ground for sharing intelligence. BPMN is the same. It’s not the most comfortable language for expressing everything, but it allows everyone to understand. I can’t easily collaborate with an attorney by sharing my code repository with him. And he can’t convey the requirements by sending me a complex list of legal precedents and case law. We’ve been doing that sort of nonsense for my whole career, and it just creates a lot of frustration and misunderstanding. We need to foster languages and tools that allow us to communicate with each other. That may be the greatest differentiator of our time: those that care about direct communication.<br>BPMN is a common ground that allows you to describe a business process as a set of steps, rules, and conditions — which you can connect directly to running software. It’s not just a diagram. It’s a living part of the infrastructure. This is another weak point for AI at present. It doesn’t have memory of your decisions over long periods of time. AI is great at burying complex decisions into software that you don’t understand. And it can take a stab at pulling these rules back out to you for the cost of a few million tokens. Going around in circles like this is a recipe for disaster.<br>I love a good novel, like For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway. You have to read the whole book. You have to be sitting there next to Robert Jordan lying in the bushes with his broken leg in the final pages to really feel what Hemingway was...