Manchester — Week of 12 Oct 2026

with Dr Vanessa Vallely OBE (Keynote speaker, )

A lunchtime keynote and panel on how AI and data are changing careers, skills and the shape of work, held during Women in Tech Week. Hosted by Nimble Approach with WeAreTechWomen. Dr Vanessa Vallely OBE gives the keynote at 12:30, followed at 12:50 by a panel that includes Amma Ainsley of Databricks. Arrival, lunch and networking from 12:00, a welcome from Nimble Approach at 12:20, and final networking from 13:40 until 14:00. Free, with lunch provided; send dietary requirements to the organiser in advance. Bring photographic ID: the venue requires it for entry. Why go: two hours, lunch included, and a keynote-plus-panel format that leaves real time to talk. Best for women in data and engineering roles thinking about where their skills go next, and for managers building teams around AI.

A two-day data and AI conference and exhibition at Manchester Central, built around implementation: how organisations are actually delivering data and AI projects at scale. Five theatres cover leadership and strategy; AI, analytics and intelligence; data governance, risk and compliance; architecture, platforms and infrastructure; and data engineering, integration and automation. Around 40 vendors and start-ups exhibit, and community meetups, including PyData Manchester and the Fabric & Power BI user group, take over theatres on the Tuesday evening. Tuesday 13 October runs 09:00 to 17:30, Wednesday 14 October 09:00 to 16:45. Visitor registration is free and covers the theatres, exhibition, meetups and the Tuesday afterparty at Junction, 17:30 to 20:30. Hands-on workshops are ticketed separately. Why go: around 3,000 data and AI practitioners under one roof for free, with an evening of community meetups attached. Best for data leaders, engineers and analysts who want to compare delivery notes with peers.

A hands-on morning workshop for SME owners and their teams on setting up Claude and putting Cowork to work on real business tasks. Practical rather than theoretical - attendees work through their own use cases during the session. Held in The Boardroom at Lower Campfield.

AI made building easier. It didn't remove the work that used to sit between an idea and something safe to rely on. It just moved that work later, and made it easier to skip. That's the trap. Someone in your organisation has already vibe-coded something. It works, or it looks like it does.

A short online session from The Curve on what comes after an AI-assisted prototype: the engineering, governance and operational work needed to take something vibe-coded and make it production ready. Aimed at teams who have already shipped something with AI tooling and now need it to hold up.

A lunchtime book launch at the University of Manchester Main Library setting out a strategic proposal for how higher education should respond to generative AI - assessment, academic integrity, curriculum design and institutional policy. Of most use to people working in or selling into the education sector, and to anyone interested in how large institutions are formalising their AI positions.

A free afternoon for women working in ecommerce, run as a fringe event to Mage Camp, the Magento and Adobe Commerce conference the following day. Three parts, from 14:00 to 17:30: a panel shaped by questions attendees submit in advance, anonymously if they like, on careers, confidence, leadership, mistakes and hard decisions; lightning talks of five to eight minutes from women with something to share; then roundtables of six to eight people on a single topic. Lightning-talk speakers are offered a free 30-minute session with a Hello Moxie mentor. At The Terrace, Dakota Hotel, 29 Ducie Street, M1 2JL. Free, booked separately from the main Mage Camp ticket. Why go: built for honest conversation rather than polished talks, and the roundtables mean you leave having actually spoken to people. Open to anyone in or around ecommerce, whatever the role or experience.

Lightning talks from PyData Manchester, the local chapter of the international PyData community, which welcomes all open-source data tooling, not only Python. Hosted by Bola A. and Yash Y. on the Data Engineering, Integration and Automation Theatre stage at Manchester Central, 17:30 to 19:30, at the end of day one of Data Decoded MCR. Community members give short talks, with or without slides; the line-up had not been announced at the time of writing. The group follows the NumFOCUS code of conduct. Free, but you need a free Data Decoded ticket, and capacity is 50. The conference afterparty at Junction follows, also booked through Data Decoded. Why go: short, unpolished talks from people doing the work, with the whole of Data Decoded's audience a corridor away. Best for data scientists and engineers who want to meet Manchester's open-source data crowd, or try a first talk.

Two practitioner talks on Microsoft Fabric and Power BI, held as the user group's evening session at the end of day one of Data Decoded MCR. Rob Sewell explains what fabric-toolbox is and why you should care, touring Microsoft's open-source Fabric tools: FUAM for tenant monitoring, FCA for cost analysis, DAX performance testing, semantic model auditing and the MicrosoftFabricMgmt PowerShell module. Duncan Boyne, a Power BI and Fabric consultant at Tugger, shows how AI can build a whole three-page report, from data model to Figma wireframe to finished pages, including where it goes wrong. 17:30 to 19:30 in the Data Governance, Risk & Compliance Theatre, then the conference afterparty. Free, but you need a free Data Decoded ticket as well as the Meetup RSVP. Why go: hands-on Fabric tooling and an honest look at AI-built reports in one sitting. Best for Power BI developers and data platform owners.

Two sessions on building with AI on Microsoft's stack: one on Azure AI Foundry, one on making enterprise file data usable by agents without copying it. Shubhangi Goyal, Microsoft MVP and data and AI lead, covers building, customising and deploying AI applications in Foundry: prompt engineering, context management, evaluation and deployment, with an architecture walkthrough of a contextual copilot. Kirk Ryan, founder of KDBL and formerly a global principal technologist at NetApp, argues for a context lake over a data lake: zero-copy indexing across SMB, NFS, S3 and Microsoft 365, permissions enforced at query time, hybrid retrieval and MCP, plus a list of what didn't work. Doors at 18:00 at Morson Edge, Bonded Warehouse, 18 Lower Byrom Street; talks at 18:30 and 19:45, with food in between. Free. Why go: two technically dense talks, one of them candid about its failures. Best for Azure engineers and architects wiring AI into enterprise data.

A merchant-first conference for Magento and Adobe Commerce: a full day of practical talks on traffic, conversion, retention, average order value and operations, across two tracks, with the organisers promising substance over vendor pitches. Speakers include John Hughes, VP of Product at Hyvä, alongside Adam Hindle, Karlijn Löwik, Katie Gallagher OBE, Hilary Stephenson and David Edmundson-Bird. Co-organised by On Tap, PushOn, Gene, Foundation Commerce and Monsoon Consulting, with Hypernode and Stripe as headline sponsors. At Sister, Renold Building, 32a Altrincham Street, M1 7JR. Free for verified merchants; agencies, vendors and freelancers pay £75. Tickets include the recordings. The After Dark social follows from 18:00 at Salón Madre, free for ticket holders. Why go: unusually for ecommerce events, it is built around the people who run the stores. Best for in-house ecommerce leads and Magento developers.

Join us in Manchester for our next Talent Leaders Manchester Workshop 15th October 2026

A demo afternoon for UK Cyber Spine, the Barclays Eagle Labs programme at the Greater Manchester Digital Security Hub (DiSH), where its cyber security start-ups present to a room that includes investors and corporate security buyers. It starts at 13:30 at DiSH, Heron House, 47 Lloyd Street, M2 5LE, and leads into the same venue's evening session from 17:30: a keynote and a panel of investors, sector experts and founders who have raised, on how UK cyber funding looks from both sides of the pitch. Free; register through Barclays Eagle Labs. Why go: the North West's newest cyber start-ups in one room, with the funding panel straight after. Best for security buyers scouting suppliers, investors looking at the sector, and founders weighing a similar programme.

A panel on how UK cyber security start-ups raise money, with investors, sector experts and founders who have already raised, taking the question from both sides of the pitch. Part of Barclays Eagle Labs' UK Cyber Spine series, at the Greater Manchester Digital Security Hub (DiSH), 47 Lloyd Street. Doors at 17:30, a keynote at 17:50, the panel from 18:00, then an hour of networking over refreshments from 19:00. It follows the programme's demo day at the same venue that afternoon. Free; register on Eventbrite. Why go: a straight read on where UK cyber capital is going, from people on both sides of the cheque. Best for cyber founders preparing a raise and investors weighing the sector.

Supernova Labs runs an open-space format meetup at the Students' Union - the room sets the agenda on the night, for people working in and around Manchester tech.

Connect with AI founders, machine learning engineers, data scientists, and innovators building the future in Manchester.

The Manchester Network's mixed business and startup networking evening at Banyan Bar & Kitchen in the Corn Exchange.

Evening networking at Banyan in the Corn Exchange for startup founders, tech entrepreneurs and investors across Greater Manchester. Open conversation format, no presentations.

A relaxed and friendly networking event in Manchester for entrepreneurs, freelancers, and business builders to connect.

Empact Ventures brings healthtech and medtech founders, clinicians, corporates and investors together at No.1 Circle Square for a morning of panels, pitches, an expo and structured 'Super Connect' networking. The organiser's own calendar invite gives the runtime as 08:30 to 13:00, half an hour later than the end time shown here. Free 15-minute support clinics run alongside the programme with Novidian and CTO in Your Pocket, EBS, and Accelerate Associates. Free, registered through Eventbrite. Attendees have actions due by 18:00 on Monday 12 October: accept the calendar invite, and optionally submit the Super Connect form or send a photo for the Super Connect Wall. As of 9 October the organiser reported about a quarter of clinic places left, plus one pitch slot and three expo slots. Why go: one of the few Manchester rooms that deliberately matches clinicians, health founders and investors into scheduled conversations rather than leaving the networking to chance. Best for healthtech founders raising, or hunting a first NHS route in.

Explore the latest advances in proteomics, spatial biology and bioinformatics at Manchester Meets the Proteome 2026.

A leadership-level ecommerce conference at Shoosmiths in the XYZ Building — retail media, marketplace strategy and the operational side of scaling online retail.

with Graham Wilkinson (Speaker, Trustpilot) · Hannah Johnson (Speaker, Shopify) · Jonathan Lundy (Speaker, Fluencers Group / Gymfluencers) + 2 more

The fourth Successify, Manchester's Shopify meetup, back at Social Refuge in Ancoats - merchants, agencies and developers on what is actually working in ecommerce right now. Five talks this edition, spanning Shopify and ecommerce growth, AI, 3D product technology and customer trust: Graham Wilkinson of Trustpilot, Hannah Johnson of Shopify, Jonathan Lundy of Fluencers Group and Gymfluencers, Ben McKay of Voxelo.ai and Alex Duthie of PushON. Run by Pixel Kicks with PushON. Free. Doors from 1pm, so arrive early for a drink before the talks start, with time to meet other ecommerce people around the programme. The organisers' latest mail gives the finish as 5pm while the Eventbrite listing still says 4pm; check the listing before you plan the end of your afternoon. Tickets have been going fast. Why go: a direct line to the people running Shopify stores in the North West, with a Shopify and a Trustpilot speaker in the room rather than on a webinar. Best for merchants, ecommerce leads and the agencies serving them.

A careers and creative-technology afternoon at Manchester Art Gallery.

with Mehrsa Golestaneh (Speaker, Microsoft) · Emily Lisa (Speaker, Microsoft)

Manchester Data Platform User Group hosts a Microsoft community-run session with updates direct from the SQL engineering team. This edition covers building agentic applications with Microsoft Fabric and Power BI agentic development, presented by Mehrsa Golestaneh and Emily Lisa. Online, free, and aimed at the Azure data community.

Structured evening networking run by Colony, the Manchester coworking and tech community operator, at the Manchester Tennis & Racquets Club. The format guarantees each attendee an introduction by the host and two one-to-one conversations, rather than leaving the room to sort itself out.

Venture Cafe Manchester's Thursday Gathering on making the business case for purpose-driven tech - ROI, social impact and what it does for hiring and retention.

October 2026: Part of WIT Week — a Manchester tech community event. See the registration page for the full programme.

with Nick Choudhry (Senior Software Craftsperson, Codurance)

Software Crafters Manchester runs an interactive architecture session: teams redesign a fictional company's architecture while the constraints change every ten minutes, trading off scalability, reliability, cost and team autonomy. Teams then present and defend their most controversial decisions in an open debate.

The North West Ruby User Group's monthly meeting, listed on the TechNW calendar - talks and discussion for Ruby developers across the region.

Ten teams, one per Greater Manchester borough, spend a day building a prototype against a real local-government challenge handed over on the morning by someone who works on it. Each team pairs a borough council representative with a tech mentor, a business mentor and three mentees, and every team pitches to a panel of VCs, council leaders and ecosystem figures. The challenges are the unglamorous kind: services swamped by repetitive enquiries, adults wanting to retrain with nowhere to start, employers unable to find local talent. Solutions should be tech or AI-enabled but need not be purely technical. Supported by Barclays Eagle Labs and Silicon Mingle; 09:00 to 17:00 at the Renold Building. Note what this ticket is: the mentee place, 60 across ten teams. Mentors, council representatives and judges register separately. Why go: a rare hackathon where the problem owner sits with the team all day and the prototype has a plausible route into use. Best for early-career builders who want public-sector problems and senior mentors more than a prize.

The Stockport digital community at Stockroom on building a tech business that survives a downturn. Note: the public listing sets no eligibility condition, but the organiser's own registration questions state the event is for Stockport digital businesses — check with Stockport Council before travelling if your business is registered elsewhere.

**The Startup Roundtable** Building together. Learning together. Growing together. **About this event** Building a startup is isolating.