Most events about artificial intelligence are organised around the demo. Founders Mind is organised around the founder, which turns out to be a very different thing.
What Founders Mind actually is
Founders Mind is a Polish conference built for people who already run companies. It is not a pitch competition and not a startup showcase. The audience is founders, owners and C-level operators who already have revenue, teams, and the specific problems that come with both.
The organisers describe it as practical knowledge for scaling an organisation, making sound decisions and building stable processes. What makes the programme unusual is the second half of that promise: it deals openly with the psychology of the people running the companies, not only with strategy and tools.
The speaker list gives you the flavour. The May edition put people from Allegro, Wirtualna Polska, EUVIC, Spyrosoft, Autenti, inStreamly and Forbes on the same bill as founders of much smaller companies. Nobody is there to be discovered. Everyone is there because the problems are recognisable.
Why it matters that this happens in Poland
Our read on the room, after a day in it: this is a market where operational companies tend to scale before they raise, if they raise at all. A large share of the businesses represented export across the EU, run physical production or logistics, and keep their teams at home.
That shapes the conversation. The default question in the corridors is not what could be built. It is what can be run on Monday, with the people already on payroll. For a company like ours, which operates physical studios and a software platform at the same time, that is a far more useful room than a conference full of prototypes.
The edition, and where we sat on the schedule
The eleventh edition of Founders Mind ran on 28 May 2026 at Kinoteka, the cinema inside the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw. Talks were split across several stages. Ours was stage 9, AI and Tech, at 14:30.
Two people on stage, on purpose
gopackshot was represented by Kamil Czaja, founder and CEO, and Klaudia Kosmala, COO.
That pairing was the whole point. Most AI adoption stories get told by the person who decided to adopt. The more interesting half belongs to the person who then has to make it work across shifts, briefs, quality gates, and people who did not ask for any of this.
AI in business: between the founder’s vision and the team’s reality
The premise of the talk was uncomfortable and familiar. You announce to the company that you are adopting AI. You expect momentum. Then you find out that half the team is quietly afraid for their job and a quarter cannot see the point.
That gap is not a communication problem you fix with one all-hands meeting. That gap is the project.
Kamil took the founder’s side. He writes AI tooling for the studio himself, which is unusual for a CEO and creates a trap of its own: when the person holding the vision can also build the thing, it becomes very easy to mistake a working prototype for a working process.
Klaudia took the operational side. What actually changes on a production floor when a model enters the workflow. Which roles get anxious first, and in what order. Where quality control has to move. Why an honest answer to "will this replace me" matters more than the roadmap does.
The talk included the failures, not only the outcome. That was deliberate. The version of AI adoption told from a stage is usually the cleaned-up one, and it is not much use to anyone sitting in the audience halfway through a rollout that is going sideways.
The operation behind the talk
For context, the numbers we put on screen: 2,500 m² of studio space, more than a million images produced per year, four countries, and brands including Zalando, OTTO, CCC and HalfPrice.
That scale is exactly why the people question is unavoidable. AI inside a two person agency is a tooling decision. AI across production floors, stylists, retouchers and quality reviewers is an organisational one, and organisations do not read release notes.
Kamil Czaja, founder and CEO, and Klaudia Kosmala, COO, opening the session.
The question we took home
The organisers left the room with a question that works better than most strategy exercises: if you could automate exactly one thing in your company, what would it be?
Most people answer with a task. In our experience the useful answers describe a bottleneck instead, and those are the ones worth building for.
