Tech Events at Alliance Manchester Business School, Manchester

with Damian Grimshaw (Professor of Employment Studies, King's College London)

The Work and Equalities Institute's annual lecture at Alliance Manchester Business School, this year on how AI is changing jobs, built on new evidence from the UK video games industry. Damian Grimshaw, Professor of Employment Studies at King's College London and former research director at the International Labour Organisation, sets out four lenses: whether AI automates or augments work, how employers use it to reshape control, how professional roles shift around it, and how AI firms capture value from established organisations. His games-industry data shows what he calls bypassing practices, where some workers' AI use overlaps with or cuts out other technical groups, and work moves to specialist AI firms. He closes on what unions, employers and government should do about it. Lecture 15:00 to 16:30, then drinks until 17:00. Free. Why go: one of the few Manchester rooms looking at AI adoption from the workforce side with real data rather than vendor case studies. Best for people leaders, engineering managers and anyone in games or creative tech.

with Professor Sir Bashir M. Al-Hashimi (CBE FRS FREng, King's College London)

The first Manchester Turing Lecture, a new series from Digital Futures bringing internationally recognised research and technology leaders to the city, held in room G.003 at Alliance Manchester Business School. The inaugural speaker is Professor Sir Bashir M. Al-Hashimi CBE FRS FREng, Senior Vice President for Research and Special Initiatives at King's College London, known for work on computer engineering and energy-efficient computing that sits inside billions of devices. His talk is The Future of Scientific Research: Intentionally Designed Human-AI Collaboration, on how AI is reshaping every stage of the research workflow, from literature review and hypothesis generation through experimentation, analysis and publication. Two and a half hours on the Booth Street West campus. Why go: a first edition with a speaker of this standing sets the tone for the whole series, and the subject matter matters well beyond academia. Best for researchers, R and D leads and deeptech founders.

Alliance Manchester Business School hosts the latest instalment of its Scale Up Series, focused on how scaling companies are actually embedding AI across their org — not the vendor story, the operator story. Part of Manchester Tech Week's fringe programme.