EXTRA: Samurai & Friends 2025: conference summary

Samurai & Friends Conference is not a public event. The website and agenda exist, but access is limited to invited guests only, you won’t find them on social mediaor on our official site. It’s an invitation-only meeting, where managers, directors and C-level executives openly share what AI, automation and process improvement really look like in practice.The third edition brought together around 160 people and, as always, the focus was not on generic visions or inspirational slides, but on real projects: what works, wherebarriers appear, and how to measure actual ROI in automation.In this episode, we recap the key takeaways from both days of the conference: 🔸 Why an invitation-only formula creates a very different atmosphere🔸 Agentic automation and meta-prompting – today’s real boundaries of AI🔸 Email automation – where classical approaches end and AI begins🔸 How a simple idea can translate into dozens of FTE savings🔸 End-to-end process transformation and why “lean” can’t stop halfway🔸 Task/mining and interaction analysis – surprising insights worth paying attention to🔸 How RPA platforms are evolving and where AI fits in🔸 AI automation playbook – a phased framework for introducing AI (based on MIT & McKinsey reports) This was an exchange of experiences about what already works, what doesn’t, and what to improve before committing to new AI projects.