Manchester AI

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. Same as always: real talks from people building real things, proper time to talk to each other afterwards, and no livestream. If you want to be in the room, you'll need to be in the room.

This is a community for data scientists, ML engineers, data leaders and the people actually shipping AI into production — not slideware, not hype. Two talks, Q&A, and networking over food and drink.

The talks

Raji Bhamidipati — Senior AI Product Manager, Finova
The POC That Never Ships: Baselines, Stop Criteria, and What Production Actually Costs

Half of GenAI projects are abandoned after the proof-of-concept. The problem is rarely the technology. Raji looks at what teams get wrong before they write a line of code — measuring a baseline, agreeing what would make you kill the project — and what production actually demands once the demo is over: evaluation, audit trails, cost per decision, and the handover to whoever runs it at 2am. Drawn from real work in a regulated environment.

Tomisin Alex-Aina — AI/LLM Solutions Architect, Accenture Centre for Advanced AI
When the Agent Clicks the Wrong Thing: A Practical Framework for Debugging, Testing and Designing LLM Agent Decisions

Agents are non-deterministic, which makes them hard to test, hard to debug, and hard to trust in production. Tomisin works on making enterprise agent systems observable, testable and production-ready, and shares a practical framework for understanding why an agent did what it did — and how to design so it does the right thing more often.

The evening

• 5:45pm — Doors, food, drink and networking
• 6:15pm — Welcome
• 6:20pm — First talk + Q&A
• 7:05pm — Second talk + Q&A
• 7:50pm — Open networking
• 8:30pm — Close

Please read before you RSVP
This event is hosted inside Accenture's office, so entry is controlled by building security. A few things to know now, so nothing catches you out:

• RSVP here to reserve your place. You'll need to complete it with your first and last name to get on the security list. https://forms.gle/sGWRipWiowVomvXi6
• Everyone attending must register individually. If you're bringing someone, they need to RSVP and complete the form in their own name too — we can't add "+1" guests to the security list, so anyone not individually registered won't be let in.
• On the night you'll need photo ID (a work ID is fine) matching the name you register with. Anyone not on the security list, or without matching ID, can't be admitted — that's Accenture's rule, not ours.
• This is an over-18s event.
• The registration form will also ask about any dietary or accessibility needs — please flag anything there so we can sort it in advance.
• Places are limited and we expect this to fill, so RSVP early. If your plans change, please update your RSVP so someone else can take the spot.
• It will be hosted by Oluwadara Adebobola

Doors are at 5:45 — come straight from work, grab food, and settle in.
See you there.