Manchester — Week of 14 Sep 2026

A free day at the Salford Innovation Forum on AI in the workplace — skills, adoption and the regional programmes supporting it.

The Manchester Statistical Society — founded 1833 — hosts Mike Irving on running AI models locally rather than in someone else's cloud, and what that changes for cost and privacy.

Join CRESTCon UK Red Teaming Community Day for a full day of insights, collaboration, and networking with the wider cybersecurity community.

A practical, step-by-step journey from funding strategy to confident pitch delivery.

Getting inclusion wrong is one of the things people worry about most - and one of the things we talk about least. Which means when it does happen, most of us are working it out on the spot. Do we say something? Apologise? Escalate it? Leave it and hope it settles? Handled well, trust deepens. Handled badly, or not at all, it can quietly cost an organisation for years.

We're bringing together twenty selected technology startups from across the North with public sector agencies and corporates working in defence, national security and cyber, for an afternoon focused on where the opportunities are and how to access them. It's the fringe day before MD Future, our conference on 17 September.

Architecting Manchester on agentic systems from an architecture standpoint — where agents genuinely fit, where they fail, and how to design around their failure modes.

Drinks and canapes to open MD Future week, on the eve of the conference. The afternoon brings together twenty selected technology companies with public sector agencies and corporates. From 5pm it opens out, and anyone working in the region's tech sector is welcome to join us.

Another edition of the Network One recurring series, this time for security.

This September, OWASP Manchester welcomes you to the Booking Office where we will hear two talks about agentic security.

Connect with Manchester based professionals, entrepreneurs & business owners. Build real leads, referrals & partnerships over drinks.

THE networking event in Manchester! Connect with tech entrepreneurs, tech investors, startup founders, and industry innovators.

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

Join other ambitious leaders for a high-energy day of padel, purposeful connection, and some friendly competition. All levels welcome!

Manchester’s tech scene is one of the most vibrant in the UK, yet the industry-wide challenge remains: only 26% of the tech workforce are women. At Starling and Engine by Starling , we know that visibility is the key to changing this. If you can’t see it, you can’t be it.

MD Future 26 brings together the leaders shaping the future of AI, compute and frontier technology in the North. Connecting industry, academia, founders, investors and policymakers, the event will explore the infrastructure, talent and innovation needed to build the next generation of the intelligence economy.

The finale of the North of England FinTech Innovation Challenge in Spinningfields — finalist pitches and the judging, with the region's fintech investors in the room.

Discover how to harness CUDA-Q and GPU acceleration for quantum computing, hybrid algorithms, and next-generation quantum hardware. *Please Note: This event is for The University of Manchester internal staff only As the era of hybrid quantum-classical computing matures, programming these heterogeneous architectures becomes essential.

A paid commercial training day on AI tooling for HR teams.

Weekly Digital Drop-In at Failsworth Library every Thursday from 11am-1pm. Bring your device or questions for free 1-to-1 digital support.

A legal technology forum in Spinningfields for law firms and the vendors building for them — document automation, AI review and practice management.

Building a startup is thrilling but it can also be exhausting. Long hours, constant pressure and the relentless grind of raising funds, managing teams and

Great ideas don't succeed on their own - they need people to believe in them. Whether you're seeking investment, customers, collaborators, grant funding or internal buy-in, your ability to communicate your vision can make all the difference.

We believe this is a unique agenda in the networking world with your host introducing you and a guaranteed two 1-2-1s!

The Product Journey, hosted at Softwire, on building consumer fintech products — regulation as a design constraint, and what users actually adopt.

Manchester's Cloud Native and Kubernetes community at the Bonded Warehouse, with talks on production platform engineering.

Ministry of Testing Manchester on the human side of quality engineering — team structure, career paths and the craft that automation does not replace.

Moving from strong individual contributor to technical lead can be one of the biggest shifts in an engineering career. The technical skills that got you th

Applied AI for software engineers, hosted at Matillion. Two speakers on production AI engineering rather than prototypes — one of the strongest technical AI nights in the city.

This session is in partnership with Venture Cafe as part of their Thursday Gathering event. **Attendees must register via the [official event registration

**Founders Running Club** (FRC) brings founders, investors, tech, creative people and startup enthusiasts together for weekly easy runs and networking.