Manchester — Week of 26 Oct 2026

Join us for an interactive workshop designed to help discover the key financial metrics that make your business fundable.

Join us this Half Term to explore our campus, chat with the team, and discover how our T Level curriculum can kickstart your digital career!

We containerised because Docker gave us clean, consistent shipping and deployment without drama. But we drew a hard line between containerisation as a deployment tool and orchestration as a scaling strategy. That distinction matters more than most teams realise before they have already committed to the heavier path. This talk walks through how we scaled a production .NET financial system and its API layer without over-provisioning or container orchestration, using what the .NET ecosystem already gives you before reaching for anything exotic. We will cover how we identified where the real bottl

A presentation exploring the link between wellbeing pressures and project success.

Open Data Manchester's annual Halloween session, run with PyData Manchester: a room of data people telling each other about the times data went badly wrong. The format is short community talks - bad statistics, nonsense correlations, data mangled badly enough to cause real damage. The organisers cite an air traffic control mix-up that cost millions and a Google Maps error that led to the wrong house being demolished. Anyone can claim a slot by emailing the organisers beforehand, submit a story anonymously to be read out, or take one of the quick-fire slots held back for the night itself. Doors 18:00, talks 18:30, close 20:30, at Altogether Otherwise on Hanover Street opposite the NCP Shudehill car park. Ticketed, and a code of conduct applies. Why go: failure post-mortems told by the people who lived them teach more than another best-practice talk, and this is the one night a year Manchester's data community does it deliberately. Best for analysts, data engineers and anyone who owns a pipeline.

FUEL Manchester's breakfast panel at No.1 Circle Square, sponsored by GM Business Growth Hub and Nybble with support from Bruntwood SciTech, built around founders giving growth advice rather than a keynote. The confirmed line-up includes Sam White, founder and chief executive of Stella Insurance, Thomas Keighley, co-founder and chief executive of urfuture, Sid Sethi of Specscart, Fergal O'Connor of Buymedia, Phil McCabe of Hybrid Solutions Group, Hannah Smith of Red Rock, Gabriel Erinle of GAME FM, Janine Smith of GM Business Growth Hub and Ram Gupta of Nybble, alongside former England rugby league head coach Shaun Wane. The panel is free and open; a second part puts 25 selected businesses into masterclass pods with experts, by separate application. Why go: nine operating founders on one morning panel, free, before work. Best for early-stage founders in Greater Manchester weighing a growth push.

A practical session for care providers on why DSPT matters, what DUAA 2025 changes mean, and what you need to do next.

The Business & IP Centre at Manchester Central Library shows how to get industry and market data out of IBISWorld - useful for anyone writing a market section or sizing an opportunity.

A practical session on how modern scams actually work, built around the point that the old tells have stopped working. Attackers now use genuine login pages, real tooling and the target's own actions, so spotting a fake by looking for spelling mistakes or a dodgy URL no longer gets you very far. Driscop run it as a walk-through of real examples rather than a lecture, followed by a quick-fire challenge to test what people picked up, a guest speaker, and an hour of networking with drinks. Three hours at Campfield in the city centre, free to attend. Why go: it is pitched at everyone, not just security teams, which makes it a rare thing to send non-technical colleagues to without losing them. Best for operations, finance and founder-level staff who sign off payments.

with António Morais (Machine Learning Engineer, Elastic) · Akbar Gumbira (Machine Learning Engineer, Elastic) · Shade Obiti (Cybersecurity Analyst, Accenture)

Two talks on the unglamorous end of running AI agents: getting the right context into them, and what happens when one gets taken over. António Morais and Akbar Gumbira, both machine learning engineers at Elastic, cover building better context with visual intelligence and semantic retrieval - how to feed agents the right material and serve the models behind them reliably. Shade Obiti, a cybersecurity analyst at Accenture, follows with a live demo of a compromised AI agent that keeps coming back after the obvious security measures are in place. Hosted by Manchester AI at Accenture's Circle Square office. Registration is gated: RSVP yes, complete the organiser's form, and bring photo ID on the night. Why go: retrieval quality and agent security are where most production AI work actually goes wrong, and both talks come from people shipping it. Best for ML and platform engineers.

The Halloween edition of Silicon Mingle's last-Wednesday-of-the-month Manchester social, at the CUPRA City Garage. No panels, no pitches, no presentations - founders, investors, entrepreneurs and tech professionals in a room together. Dress-up encouraged, not compulsory. The Manchester crew includes David Levine of Manchester Angels and angel investor Vladimir Mulhem.

A monthly founders' coffee morning at Clockwise on Dickinson Street, run on the last Thursday. The format is deliberately bare: no speeches, no presentations, no selling. You turn up, get a coffee, and the hosts introduce you to someone rather than leaving you to work the room. The ticket is 17.50 pounds and includes a coworking day pass, so most people stay and work afterwards. Attendance is founders only and subject to host approval, which keeps the recruiters and agencies out. Why go: Manchester has plenty of evening networking and very little in the morning that is actually restricted to founders. The day pass makes it worth blocking out rather than dropping into for an hour. Best for early-stage founders who want conversation without a programme.

with Stephanie Ronan-Chlond (AI filmmaker and researcher, )

A full-day hands-on workshop on generative AI for people who make things - film, writing, images, music - with no technical background assumed. Stephanie Ronan-Chlond runs it. She is a documentary-trained filmmaker who spent fifteen years producing for UK broadcasters and now works with brands and creatives on AI storytelling. The day covers how generative models and LLMs actually work, ChatGPT for writing and ideation, image generation with a side-by-side look at Midjourney and Nano Banana, the current state of AI video and audio tools, and where ethics sit in a working practice. At SEESAW on Princess Street, 11am to 5pm. Places are capped at 25. Bring a laptop; a few shared ones are available, and a setup email goes out after booking. Why go: most AI-for-creatives sessions are a demo reel. Six hours, a cap of 25 and a practitioner at the front make it a workshop instead. Best for freelance creatives and small studio teams working out what to actually adopt.

with Dr Colin Williams (Principal Cyber Security and Resilience Specialist, CDS Defence and Security)

The second of nine monthly seminars in the Meat the Machine series, on the history of cybernetics and what it implies for how people and machines end up working together. This session is on the Ratio Club - the dining and discussion group that British life scientists, mathematicians, engineers and physicists formed after Norbert Wiener published Cybernetics in 1948. Alan Turing was a member, and his engagement with the club and its people fed into his later work. Dr Colin Williams leads it; he is a principal cyber security specialist at CDS Defence and Security with around three decades in UK government and public sector, and researches the history of cybernetics alongside that. Free, in person at the University of Manchester, 1pm to 3pm, run through Digital Futures. Why go: the current argument about machine intelligence keeps rediscovering questions this group was already arguing about in 1949, in this city. Best for people who want the long view rather than another model release.

The Thursday Gathering turned over to Grow AI, a 12.8 million pound partnership between Manchester Metropolitan University and the University of Manchester, funded by the Local Innovation Partnerships Fund, to build out the AI cluster across Greater Manchester. The session introduces the Challenge AI Labs, which put corporates, SMEs, community groups, academics and students together on problems in four frontier sectors. The first Lab is health, run with Health Innovation Manchester, and the challenges are shaped by the people who own the problem rather than handed down. Selected companies go on to build with NHS partners and academics; Creative and Digital, Advanced Materials and Manufacturing, and Net Zero follow. Venture Cafe's usual format applies: open doors, no ticket barrier, three hours of sessions and conversation. Why go: this is the clearest public read yet on how Grow AI money will actually be spent, and the Labs are recruiting participants in the room. Best for founders and researchers with something to put into a health AI challenge.

with Martin Brierley (Data & AI Practice Lead, ANS) · Ian Pike (Data & AI Solutions Architect, ANS)

A recap of FabCon Europe, the Microsoft Fabric and SQL community conference held in Barcelona, for people who could not get there. Martin Brierley, Data & AI Practice Lead at ANS, covers what the latest Fabric announcements mean for data engineering and enterprise AI readiness, drawing on seventeen years of enterprise architecture. Ian Pike, Data & AI Solutions Architect at ANS, gives live demos of the new features: tenant settings, Git integration and Direct Lake improvements, plus what the platform changes do to local data pipelines and licensing. Hosted by the Fabric & Power BI Manchester User Group at ANS in Hulme. Doors 5:30, talks 6:00 to 7:15, then pizza, drinks and open questions. First-timers welcome. Why go: conference recaps are usually slide dumps. Two practice leads doing live demos of features they have already tried against real pipelines is more useful. Best for data engineers and analysts on the Microsoft stack.

with Jonny Muir (Designer and two-time Umbraco MVP, )

Jonny Muir - designer, computer scientist and two-time Umbraco MVP - on how service design shapes what a digital project actually becomes, and on treating Umbraco as a platform rather than a content management system. The talk covers the Wayfinder framework, Block Grid and the wider package ecosystem, Umbraco Automate for declarative workflows, and where AI fits into that way of working. Pizza and networking from 6pm, talk at 6:45. Hosted by the Manchester and North West Umbraco Meetup at CTI Digital's Peter Street office. Why go: CMS meetups usually stay on implementation detail; this one starts from how the service is designed and works back to the build. Best for developers and designers on content-heavy projects, whether or not they use Umbraco.