Frends User Day 2025: Ideas, ingenuity and the first-ever AI automation hackathon

This year’s Frends User Day had a special type of energy from the moment doors opened. The community meetup brought together teams from across industries to test how far they could push automation creativity using AI capabilities.

What unfolded over the next several was a blend of focused problem-solving, unexpected breakthroughs and a fair amount of laughter from the side activities corner. By the time the prize ceremony began, it was clear: this first edition of the AI Hackathon set a new bar for what an User Day can be.

The challenge: Untangling Santa’s great purchase order crisis

Guided by a story that walked participants into Santa’s Manufacturing Company (yes, that Santa), teams were dropped into a very real-world-in-disguise scenario:
a messy Purchase Order intake process flooded with PDFs, photos, screenshots, and unpredictable formatting.

Their mission:

Design a clean, scalable, and intelligent workflow that turns all this chaos into structured, ready-to-process data—powered by the Frends Intelligent AI Connector.

Teams had full access to the platform and were evaluated against five criteria:

• Innovation & Creativity
• AI & Frends Utilization
• Technical Implementation
• Business Impact & Feasibility
• Presentation & Demo

It sounds straightforward, but the inconsistencies of the PO documents—mirroring real customer cases—forced teams to make smart calls about prompting, orchestration, exception handling, credit use, and fallback logic.

How teams cracked the challenge

Across the room, different strategies began emerging while the teams tried to figure out how to read files like pdf in the most efficienty way. Most importantly, teams quickly learned that the winning formula wasn’t just technical strength. Turning unpredictable inputs into predictable outputs meant combining AI reasoning with human-centered guardrails.

Here are some highlights from the top 3 teams.

🥇 1st Place – Netum

In a real-world setting, achieving results and business impact is the most important thing. Netum was able to complete almost 90% of files, quite an achievement in this challenge. Behind it was their ability to use critical things, look at the problem in front of them and ask the right questions. Recognizing mistakes and rerouting their plan also played a part in securing the 1st in the Frends User Day AI Hackathon.

🥈 2nd Place – NullPointerBros

With a structured presentation and clarity into their processes, NullPointerBros were able to confidently convey how they tackled this challenge. Business impact needs to be at the center of automation, and they achieved that by referring to critical elements like anomalies and proactively identifying issues with large orders.

🥉 3rd Place – Otava

Otava was able to have an effective presentation and follow best practices in how to convey a strong and clear message — “impressive”, some would say. Their overall results in the AI Hackathon also were quite positive, as was their ability to handle errors and exceptions.

Beyond the hackathon: The side activities people talked about

User Day wasn’t all head-down low-coding workflows. Two activities pulled steady crowds and a good amount of cheering:

The G2 buzzer challenge

Hitting the button at exactly 10.00 seconds looked deceptively easy—until people tried it.
A few lucky winners managed to hit the target dead-on, earning plenty of applause (and bragging rights).

The AI photobooth

From futuristic avatars to holiday-themed images, the photobooth produced a stream of hilarious, creative, and occasionally bizarre results. Many were shared instantly in the new Frends Community, which saw a spike in sign-ups throughout the day.

A community that builds together

What made this first AI Hackathon special wasn’t just the workflows, the competition, or even the challenge itself—it was the collaborative atmosphere.
Teams mixed skill sets, made last-minute pivots, debugged side-by-side, and celebrated each other's breakthroughs.

By the end of the evening, one thing was clear: the people building on Frends are as inventive as the platform itself.

The Frends Community has been officially launched. Join it today!

Looking ahead

This year’s Frends User Day introduced a new way of connecting users and automation, one that we’ll continue shaping together. The enthusiasm, creativity, and shared problem-solving on display showed how much potential there is when the community comes together.

And judging by the energy in the room, the AI Hackathon will be back, bigger, smarter and with even more ways to challenge how we think about automation.