Tech events in manchester

with Dr Alexander Thompson (Workshop lead, NIHR HRC in Emergency and Acute Care) · Dr Matthew Parkes (Workshop lead, NIHR HRC in Emergency and Acute Care)

The first of a two-part workshop on building the evidence the NHS actually buys on, rather than guessing at it. Part two follows on 20 January 2027. This day is about the problem rather than the study design. Short talks and discussion work through how patients, clinicians, NHS payers and investors each define an unmet need differently, and participants apply those four lenses to their own technology. The rest covers what is already known in your area, which study your project needs at its current stage, and how to show the NHS the problem is worth paying to solve. No economic modelling background is assumed. Led by Dr Alexander Thompson and Dr Matthew Parkes. At the Core Technology Facility on Grafton Street. 100 pounds covers both workshops, lunch included. Why go: the gap between a working healthtech product and an NHS purchase order is an evidence gap, and almost nobody runs a workshop on it. Best for founders and clinical leads heading towards procurement.

The monthly meeting of NSManchester, the city's Swift, iOS and Mac developer group, held on the first Monday at Neo on Charlotte Street. The format is short talks from members followed by time in the room. Speakers for a given month are usually confirmed close to the date rather than in advance, and the group publishes the decks afterwards in its public talks repository on GitHub, which doubles as a record of what the Manchester iOS scene has been working on. Hosted by Tim and Chris B. 6pm to 8pm. Why go: it is the only standing Apple-platform developer group in Manchester and it has kept going for years, which matters more than any single month's line-up. Best for iOS and macOS developers who want local people to ask rather than a forum.

The fifth workshop in the Manchester NatWest Accelerator's 12-week Sales Accelerator, on organising and tracking business data well enough to make sales decisions from it. The session covers why a CRM matters, how to structure one so it tracks leads, customers and performance, which sales metrics are worth measuring, and real founder examples of data changing a sales strategy. It closes with an Action Lab where you set up or improve your own CRM. Coffee and networking from 09:30, intro and key concepts at 10:00, a CRM implementation case study at 10:30. Free, at the NatWest Accelerator hub in Spinningfields. Individual workshops can be taken without joining the full programme. Why go: practical CRM hygiene rather than sales theory, and the Action Lab means you leave with something actually configured. Best for early-stage founders still running sales themselves with no system behind it.

A ninety-minute workshop at the NatWest Accelerator's Spinningfields hub for business owners and leaders who know AI matters but have not worked out where it fits in their own operation. The session explains the technology in plain English, walks through ways it is already being used in ordinary businesses, and then works with attendees to identify where it could save time in theirs. It is a working session rather than a keynote, and it runs over lunch, which keeps it to a single slot in the diary. Part of the Accelerator's Catalyst Events programme, open beyond the accelerator cohort. Why go: most AI sessions in Manchester are either vendor demos or deep technical talks, and this is neither. Best for owner-managers and senior leaders at non-tech companies who want a shortlist of candidate use cases they can act on.

with Phoebe Wakeman (Co-founder, Vitmedics) · Paul Forster (Founder, Western Advocates for Health and Medtechs (WAHM))

A fireside chat on getting healthtech out of research and into the market, followed by an open social for Manchester's health and medtech community. Phoebe Wakeman, co-founder of Vitmedics, is interviewed by WAHM founder Paul Forster on turning research into a product, finding a route to market, and the lessons learned on the way. The organisers' framing is blunt: they want to show healthtech products can reach market and be honest about what that takes. The room is mixed by design, with founders and startup teams, university researchers and NHS innovators, investors and ecosystem supporters. Tickets are Roundtable Attendee or Ecosystem Supporter, some requiring host approval, and anyone holding a ticket for the afternoon founders' roundtable gets in free. The exact address is shared on registration. Why go: the one Manchester room this month putting NHS innovators, healthtech founders and investors in the same place, with a founder being specific about what her route to market actually cost. Best for anyone commercialising health research here.

with Laura Hughes (Head of Data, Softwire)

Laura Hughes, Head of Data at Softwire, on why data transformation projects fail in ways software projects do not. She spent her early career as a full-stack engineer before moving into data strategy, governance and data engineering about five years ago, and the talk comes out of noticing that data projects are run differently from the agile software teams she came from - and that the problems they hit are rarely the ones anyone planned for. She covers what good data architecture looks like in practice and what separates a business transformation that lands from one that stalls. Architecting Manchester's meetup at the Department Bonded Warehouse. Doors 17:00 with pizza and drinks, talk at 18:00, finished by 19:30. Free; tell the organiser in advance about dietary requirements. Why go: data governance talks are usually given by consultants selling a framework. This is a practitioner describing what went wrong. Best for data engineers, architects and anyone being handed a data migration to lead.

with Harry Chyshkala (CTO, IC Studio) · Valdis Strautiņš (Founder & CEO, WD Market) · Rob Pickering (Founder, Polite.ai)

A lot of what people build with AI comes down to conversations - chat, voice, messaging - and this is Twilio's Manchester builder meetup on what that looks like in practice. Three talks from people shipping it. Harry Chyshkala, CTO at IC Studio, on what a real SMS pumping fraud case taught him. Valdis Strautins, founder and CEO of WD Market, on getting AI agents to write code you would actually merge. Rob Pickering, founder of Polite.ai, on using agents to build, review and improve user-facing voice services. Doors 18:00 with food and drinks, welcome 19:15, talks 19:30 to 20:30, networking until 21:00. Free, at Colony King Street. The second ticket release requires host approval, so register well ahead. Why go: voice and messaging agents in production is a narrower and more useful conversation than the general AI-meetup circuit manages. Best for developers, tech leads and founders already building with LLMs.

A one-day conference on what schools actually do with assessment data, run by Equin as part of its Data In Schools Conference series and pitched at primary schools. James Pembroke, Director of Strategy at Insight, and Richard Selfridge, education data consultant at the same firm, lead the keynote sessions. Joshua Perry of Smartgrade and Carousel runs a step-by-step session on stripping work out of school data processes, and a Making Data Meaningful panel brings in Hilary Fine, Assessment Lead at Smartgrade, and Vicky Merrick, CEO and founder of Merrick-Ed, with further panellists still to be announced. There are slots for delegates to put their own experience in the room. 08:30 to 15:00 at The Studio on Lever Street. GBP 75 including lunch and refreshments, refundable up to seven days before. Why go: the people building the tools and the people using them in the same room, arguing about workload rather than dashboards. Best for school data leads, and for edtech builders selling into primary education.

with Drew (Rusty) Carroll (Innovation coach, Independent)

A small-group coaching session on moving an innovative idea towards an actual outcome: a new partnership, a commercial route, or a bigger funding bid. Drew (Rusty) Carroll, an external innovation coach Manchester Digital met at its Digital Environment conference, facilitates. The format is deliberately open. Attendees can listen, or put their own problem in the room and draw on the group's experience. It is the first of a planned monthly series, so expect a small, repeat-heavy room rather than a one-off audience. Two hours, free, in Room 4.204 at University Place, with capacity capped at 30. Manchester Digital asks anyone who books and then cannot attend to release their place in advance. Why go: coaching rather than content, with a cap low enough that you will actually get airtime on your own idea. Best for researchers and founders stuck between a promising idea and a route to market.

The weekly Venture Café Thursday Gathering, this edition on Focused Research Organisations and where they sit in the UK funding landscape - the model built for science that is too large for a single lab and too early for a company, and the question of what funds that work here. Venture Café evenings run as a set of sessions plus open networking across three hours rather than one talk, at SISTER on the Renold Building site. Free, with registration through the Venture Café community platform. The full session list is published closer to the date. Why go: focused research organisations and the money around them get discussed far more in London than in Manchester, and this is the city's standing room for research-heavy founders. Best for deep tech founders, university spinouts, and anyone raising against a science roadmap rather than a revenue one.

WordCamp Manchester returns as a barcamp rather than a conference: no fixed speaker programme, and the sessions are shaped by whoever turns up on the day. The format is built around structured conversations between the people who build, design and run WordPress sites, rather than talks delivered at them. It takes place in the Storehouse at Whitworth Locke on Princess Street, signposted from reception and fully accessible, with discounted overnight rooms for attendees. The Manchester WordPress User Group is the local community behind it. Timings beyond the morning start, and the ticket price, are not yet published, and the schedule page is still thin. Check both before booking. Why go: WordPress still runs a large share of Manchester's agency and client work, and a barcamp is where the unglamorous problems get discussed honestly. Best for agency developers and freelancers who want peers rather than a keynote.

with Jonathan Catton (Head of Data & Insights, Hallam)

A morning session for B2B SaaS marketers running account-based programmes, and for anyone trying to get their marketing data into a state an AI tool can do something useful with. Jonathan Catton, Head of Data & Insights at the agency Hallam, walks through how his team pulled scattered marketing data into one place and what changed once they had. Attendees then take their own questions to small tables with hosts, and the morning closes with open networking run by Silicon Mingle. Organised by Overfunded. Free, in person at Department Campfield, and no technical background is assumed. Why go: most ABM sessions stay at strategy level and skip the data plumbing that decides whether any of it works. Best for B2B marketers and growth leads at SaaS companies who own the numbers themselves.

UniCS, the University of Manchester's computer science society, runs the city's flagship student hackathon: a single-day build at the Nancy Rothwell Building, free to enter and open to undergraduates and postgraduates from any university. Check-in opens at 09:00, hacking runs 12:00 to 18:00, and judging and the closing ceremony finish around 21:30. Sponsor workshops run through the afternoon from NatWest, Reply, Tether and Neptune North. Food is provided. Over £70,000 in prizes is advertised, £3,500 of it cash across the top three. Everyone applies individually and teams form on the Discord or on the day. Hacker applications closed on 17 October. Why go: a complete idea-to-demo cycle in one day, judged, with engineers from NatWest, Arm, Codethink and Google in the building. Best for students who want something finished to show at interview rather than another coursework repo.

MISRA's public conference on where its coding guidelines go next, and what AI-assisted development means for code that has to be demonstrably safe. MISRA guidelines govern C and C++ in safety- and security-critical software: automotive, aerospace, medical devices, industrial control. The day covers the latest developments in the guidelines and gives users room to share how they are applying them in practice. The audience MISRA names is specific — developers writing to the guidelines, the internal reviewers and auditors who check that work, and managers accountable for safety-relevant projects. 08:30 to 16:15 at Delta Hotels Manchester Airport in Hale Barns. GBP 50 general admission. The agenda and speaker list are not published on the ticket page. Why go: the standards body itself in the room, which rarely happens outside the automotive supply chain. Best for embedded and safety-critical engineers, and the compliance people who sign their work off.

A one-hour fireside chat and book launch at the Portico Library asking a blunt question about AI: whose problems is it actually being built to solve. Jenny Garrett OBE and her daughter Leah-Sunshine Garrett are in conversation as part of the library's Portico Ubuntu: Queens in Print series. The pairing is the point — two generations on who gets designed for and who gets designed around as AI systems are built out. Doors 18:00, talk 18:30 to 19:30, at 57 Mosley Street. GBP 10, and suitable for ages 14 and over. Why go: a short, cheap counterweight to the build-first AI events filling the rest of the Manchester calendar, in one of the city's better rooms. Best for people shipping AI products who want the equity question put to them by someone outside tech.

A demo day run inside NatWest's Manchester Accelerator hub, where a hand-picked group of entrepreneurs pitch to a panel drawn from the Manchester ecosystem, NatWest's own team and founders who have raised before. The panel gives live feedback on each pitch: structure, delivery, the questions that get asked and the ones that trip people up. The afternoon runs 14:00 to 17:30 at the hub on Spinningfields Square, with networking during and after. Free, and open beyond the pitching cohort, so you can come to watch. Why go: watching four or five founders get picked apart kindly, in order, teaches you more about your own deck than a week of reading will. Best for pre-seed and seed founders in Greater Manchester about to start raising, and anyone who wants to see what investors in this city actually ask.

with Gareth Ford Williams (Director of Accessibility, Double FW Ltd and CAN) · Llara Geddes (Solutions Director, AND Digital) · Emily Webber (Consultant, Tacit) + 1 more

Natter Community's one-day conference on design, product and AI, at Autotrader, 3 Hawkshaw Street, on Thursday 12 November, 8:30 to 18:30. Breakfast and lunch are included. The theme is transparency in digital products. Speakers so far: Gareth Ford Williams (Double FW and CAN) on accessibility, Llara Geddes (AND Digital), Emily Webber (Tacit), Rachel Morgan-Trimmer (Firebird), design writer Rob Alderson and Carrie Tudsbury, service design lead at Autotrader. Registration is 8:30, talks start at 9:30, and the full agenda is still being filled in. General admission is 50 pounds. Why go: a full day with people who ship digital products, and a lot of it is about how AI is changing design work. Best for designers, researchers and product people; engineers and founders will get less out of it.

The November edition of Datacove's Manchester data community night, with two talks and a long networking tail. Fiona Pye, Senior Data Analyst at AutoTrader UK, talks about two years embedded in a backend development team: what moving between analytics and engineering changed about how she works, and what the developers got back in understanding of the data they produce. Jonas Almesri, co-founder of GenSight.AI, follows on AI visibility — how large language models decide which brands they see, believe, cite and recommend, and the measurement problems his team is working on as agents move from recommending to buying. Drinks and nibbles from 18:00, talks around 18:30, close at 20:00, then a nearby pub. Free, at DiSH in Heron House. Datacove runs four of these a year in Manchester. Why go: two speakers who actually do the work, on the two questions data teams are being asked right now. Best for analysts, data engineers and anyone responsible for being found by AI.

with Jitesh Gosai (Principal Tester, Mobile Group, BBC) · Ben Flannery (Principal Consultant, Transform)

Deliver Sessions is a meetup for people interested in how software teams work well together. This edition, Into the Unknown, is hosted by consultancy Transform in the Express Building on Great Ancoats Street, with refreshments provided. Two talks. Jitesh Gosai, Principal Tester in the BBC's Mobile Group, covers navigating uncertainty in complex software systems. Ben Flannery, Principal Consultant at Transform, looks at moving beyond "in or out" in team conversations about AI, using a retrospective-style approach. It runs 6 to 8:30pm and has a code of conduct. Price isn't stated on the page. Why go: delivery, testing and team practice from a named BBC practitioner, which is rarer than another AI demo night. Best for delivery managers, testers and engineering leads.

One-day event at the Lowry Hotel for ecommerce founders and brand owners on applying AI in a real online shop. Ten talks from founders running brands at £1M to £10M revenue, plus six or seven small-group roundtables. One talk is named so far: Andrew Afonin on wiring AI into Magento, HubSpot and Klaviyo rather than bolting on a chatbot (10:00). Runs 9:00 to 17:00, registration and coffee from 9:00. EcommerceCamp says there are no agency pitches on stage. The ticket price isn't published on the page; refunds are available up to 7 days before. Why go: operators talking to operators, with revenue numbers attached, is rare in ecommerce AI. Best for founders and heads of ecommerce at small and mid-size brands. Only one speaker is named, so judge it on the roundtables as much as the talks.

Manchester Data Hive is a free, volunteer-led day for data and AI people working in the Microsoft stack: Fabric, Azure SQL, Power BI and Copilot. Two rooms of 50 run parallel tracks at the Copthorne Hotel in Salford Quays, with talks from data engineers, analysts, scientists and AI practitioners. Sponsors cover the cost. Listings give 9:00 to 17:00. No agenda or speaker names are published yet, and the site's ticket link looks like a placeholder, so check it before you travel. Why go: free, small and technical, and first-timers are welcome. Best for BI analysts and data engineers who want a day of Fabric and Power BI practice without conference prices. With no agenda yet, it's a bet on the community.

IGPP's govtech show and exhibition at CorpAcq Stadium - public-sector digital and technology leaders, suppliers and case studies, explicitly not a sales-floor format.

with Mark Lyons (Investor, Puma Growth Partners) · Laura Wiggins (Investor, YFM Equity Partners) · Tom Watts (Partner, Cooper Parry)

An evening on the operational side of getting from seed to Series A: building a repeatable growth engine, picking a go-to-market motion, and the hiring calls that either compound or cost you a year. Cooper Parry works with more than 500 scaling businesses and hosts this with Exchange Accelerator. Speakers are Mark Lyons of Puma Growth Partners, Laura Wiggins of YFM Equity Partners and Tom Watts of Cooper Parry, with a founder speaker still to be confirmed. The organisers moved the start on 27 October: it now runs 17:00 to 20:30 at Campfield Studios on Liverpool Road, finishing with drinks and networking. Registration is free but approval-gated on Luma. Why go: two active Northern growth-stage investors in the room explaining what they fund, alongside advisers who see the same mistakes repeatedly. Best for founders who have raised a seed round and are eighteen months from the next one.

Simon Ellis, Head of AI Transformation and Enterprise Architecture at Pets at Home, on what happens to retail when an AI agent rather than a person does the browsing and the buying. The talk works through the shopping journey disappearing: agents that understand intent, research products, compare alternatives, negotiate trade-offs and complete transactions. Ellis covers what OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Shopify are building, and what it does to the things retailers currently compete on — site design, search rankings, advertising, merchandising, brand loyalty. The uncomfortable questions get asked directly: who owns the customer relationship when an agent decides, and are retailers selling to people or to other agents. Manchester Statistical Society hosts at Cross Street Chapel, 18:00 to 20:00, free, with coffee from 17:30. Entrance on Cross Street at Chapel Walks, opposite Pret; use the intercom. Why go: a retail AI lead being specific about his own industry's exposure rather than discussing agents in the abstract. Best for retail, ecommerce and marketing people, and anyone building agents that transact.

with Dieter Gobeyn (Speaker, ) · Jaseetha Satkurunathan (Speaker, )

Two talks on what cloud and AI work costs once it is actually running. Dieter Gobeyn asks what an agent actually costs: token economics in Microsoft Foundry, designing for cost control before you ship, and when not to build an agent at all. Jaseetha Satkurunathan covers multi-tenant Kubernetes - keeping customers isolated on a shared cluster instead of standing up one cluster per customer. Hosted by the Northern Azure User Group at Morson Edge in the Bonded Warehouse. The published agenda lists different talk titles from the speaker billing, so check the page nearer the date. Why go: both talks are about the bill and the blast radius rather than the demo, which is the part most Azure content skips. Best for platform engineers, architects and anyone who owns a cloud budget.

Dot Net North's November talk is a deep dive into acceptance testing: moving beyond step definitions to a domain specific language for test data, using the Page Object Model together with a logical functional model. The speaker also covers security and accessibility testing inside BDD suites. It's a talk, not a workshop, so no laptop needed. Free entry and refreshments at BrightHR in the Peninsula Building, close to Victoria station. RSVPs often hit a waitlist that usually clears before the night. Why go: Dot Net North is one of Manchester's longest-running developer groups, and this is a practical session for .NET and QA engineers who maintain big test suites. Skip it if you want AI or startup content.

Prolific North's annual full-day conference on where marketing and consumer behaviour are heading into 2027, held at Sister in the Renold Building. The pitch is cutting through noise: the organisers' framing is that the sector is sold a new big idea or martech solution every week and the hard part is working out which of them move brand share. Expect a day of sessions on consumer trends, technology in marketing and brand growth, drawn from the northern agency, brand and media community that Prolific North covers year-round. Nine until half four, so a full working day out. Why go: it is the one day a year the North West's agency and in-house marketing world is in one building, which makes the corridors as useful as the stage. Best for agency leaders, brand marketers and anyone selling into them.

GM Business Growth Hub and Innovaud, the innovation agency for the Canton of Vaud, bring Swiss market-entry routes to DiSH Manchester for a morning on the Greater Manchester to Lausanne corridor. The focus is practical: soft-landing and market-entry programmes, university and research collaborations with institutions including EPFL, investor and scale-up networks, and trade and export support. Partner organisations from both sides are in the room, and attendees can request 1-1 meetings with selected partners afterwards through the registration form, with introductions following by email. It runs 09:00 to 12:30 and is free. Eligible businesses need a registered trading address in Greater Manchester; investors and business support organisations are also welcome. No individual speakers are named. Why go: a short, concrete route into the Swiss deep tech, life sciences, cyber and AI ecosystem without the cost of a trade mission. Best for Manchester scale-ups already weighing European expansion, and the people who advise them.

CTO Craft's Manchester mixer at the Old Monkey, listed on the TechNW calendar - informal evening for engineering leaders.

The Manchester NatWest Accelerator's sales session at its Spinningfields hub - building a repeatable sales process, for founders past the founder-selling stage.

with Torsten Strauß (CEO, inside-sqlserver / Principal SQL Consultant, Sarpedon Quality Lab) · Mark Pryce-Maher (Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft)

Two full-length SQL and Fabric sessions from the Manchester Data Platform User Group, in person only and not recorded. Torsten Strauß, a Microsoft MVP, CEO of inside-sqlserver and principal SQL consultant at Sarpedon Quality Lab, opens at 18:00 on practical performance tuning for Azure SQL and SQL Server: dissecting slow queries, finding the real bottlenecks, and where Intelligent Query Processing helps and where it hurts in production. After pizza, Mark Pryce-Maher, Senior Program Manager on Microsoft Fabric, compares Fabric Warehouse and Lakehouse and gives a decision framework rather than a feature list. Doors and intros from 17:45 at XYZ Works on Hardman Street. Free, but register early because names go to building security. Why go: two speakers who build and consult on these products, giving ninety minutes of depth rather than a vendor overview. Best for SQL developers, data engineers and architects making Fabric platform decisions.

with Luke Grayland (Senior Software Developer, Conferma) · Alastair Jepps (VP Technology, Bally's Interactive)

Two engineering talks on AI that has left the prototype stage, hosted by Bally's Interactive in Spring Gardens. Luke Grayland, Senior Software Developer at virtual card platform Conferma, covers agentic payments: what changes about authorisation, identity, consent and trust once agents spend money, the layers of the agentic payments stack, the emerging protocols from Google, Mastercard and Visa, and the unsolved parts around disputes, liability and merchant verification. Alastair Jepps, VP Technology at Bally's Interactive, follows with behaviour-driven personalisation across 700,000 players and five casino brands: cost control, mixing classical machine learning with semantic matching, and using evaluations, error analysis, A/B tests and contextual bandits to keep improving. Doors 18:00, talks from 18:35, close at 20:00. Free, with pizza and drinks, and a short AI Spotlight segment to open. Why go: specific, numbers-attached engineering from people running AI in production, and the organisers enforce a no-sales-pitch rule. Best for engineers and tech leads shipping AI features.

with Arik Fletcher (Speaker — Data Residency Is Not Data Sovereignty: What UK Boards Get Wrong, ) · Anas Khan (Speaker — Designed to Recover. But Can It Actually Recover?, )

Cloud Native + Kubernetes Manchester's November meetup, with talks on data sovereignty and on whether recovery plans actually recover, plus lightning talks from the floor and time to meet other platform and infrastructure engineers in the city.

Mindstone's Manchester AI meetup, run with UKAI and supported by Barclays: hands-on AI demos and short talks on practical applications and what building with LLMs is actually teaching teams, then networking over pizza and drinks. Free, capped at 200 places.