Northern Azure User Group October 2026 Meetup

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.