Process Awareness

The assurance that agents' inner workings conform to organisational processes and adhere to their operational constraints, regulations, and goals (sources/2026-calvanese-agentic-bpm-manifesto). A defining property of APM agents.

An APM system is, conceptually, a system that explicitly realises process awareness in some concrete manner. Without process-awareness, an agentic system is merely a collection of interoperating agents (a generic socio-technical system) but not an APM.

How process awareness is realised

Through the framing mechanism — see concepts/framed-autonomy. Frames may be enforced via:

Assigning collective responsibility to one or more agents
Orchestration
Shared memory (e.g., part of the frame) enabling progress along a mutual plan

Degrees of process awareness

Different agents within the same APM may possess varying degrees of process awareness and autonomy. An APM may even include agents that are not process-aware (e.g., a dedicated legal agent ensuring contract diligence without knowing the operational process).

concepts/agentic-bpm · concepts/framed-autonomy · concepts/perceive-reason-act