Tech Events by Manchester AI

with Emily Price (Data Engineer, Accenture) · Raji Bhamidipati (Senior AI Product Manager, Finova) · Oluwadara Adebobola (AI Data Engineer (host), GWI)

Two practitioner talks on building with AI, hosted inside Accenture at Circle Square and co-hosted with The Syntax Social. Emily Price, a data engineer at Accenture, built her own agentic coding harness to work out what an agent actually is. She'll walk through how it works, demo it live and compare it with fuller-featured harnesses. Raji Bhamidipati, senior AI product manager at Finova, follows with why so many GenAI projects die after the proof of concept: baselines, kill criteria, evaluation, audit trails, cost per decision and who runs it at 2am. Oluwadara Adebobola of GWI hosts. Doors 5:45pm with food, talks from 6:20pm, networking until 8:30pm. Free, but it's inside Accenture's building: register with your full name as it appears on your photo ID and bring the ID, or you won't get in. Why go: one under-the-hood build and one hard look at getting AI into production, from people doing both. Best for engineers and product people shipping AI.

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.

Manchester AI is back. After a quiet few months, we're relaunching in person — hosted at Accenture's Circle Square office in the city centre.