About us
Manchester AI is the North of England's leading community for data scientists, machine learning engineers, and AI practitioners.
Founded to connect the best technical talent in the region, Manchester AI has hosted over 19 events with consistently strong attendance — bringing together engineers, researchers, and technical leaders from organisations including Accenture, BJSS, Slalom, NatWest, Manchester United, and the University of Manchester.
Now under new leadership.
I'm Keith Griggs FCA — chartered accountant, former CFO, and AI strategy consultant. I took over as organiser in early 2026 to prevent this community from closing after the previous team moved on. Manchester AI is too valuable to disappear.
My commitment: regular, high-quality technical events with fresh speakers, strong hosting partners, and a community worth belonging to.
If you've spoken at, hosted, or attended Manchester AI events before and want to stay involved — message me directly.
Keith Griggs FCA AI Strategy Consultant | entrepreneuriallab.com
Featured event
Context, Retrieval & Compromised Agents
Two hands-on talks for people building with AI: one on getting the right context into your agents, and one on what happens when an agent gets compromised. Both include live demos.
Building Better Context with Visual Intelligence & Semantic Retrieval
António Morais & Akbar Gumbira, Machine Learning Engineers, Elastic
Getting the right context to your agents helps get better results. Using smaller, more specialised models keeps the costs down. We will guide you through an example use case to transcribe, store and search thousands of scanned manuscripts. Then we will dig deeper to cover how we serve our in-house OCR, embeddings and reranker models, and how we designed our model serving service to work reliably for users across the world.
António and Akbar build and operate the inference systems behind the Jina search foundation models in Elastic’s managed cloud.
The Nine Lives of a Compromised AI Agent
Shade Obiti, Cybersecurity Analyst, Accenture
What happens when an AI agent gets hacked, and why isn’t revoking its access enough to stop it?
Through a live demonstration of a real-world attack scenario, Shade shows how poisoned memory, shared identities and escalating access can let a compromised agent keep coming back, even after security measures have been put in place. You’ll see why traditional security controls aren’t always enough, and what developers and architects can do to build more secure agentic systems.
Expect live hacking, technical depth and a fresh perspective on AI security.
Shade is a Cybersecurity Analyst at Accenture specialising in incident response and security strategy, and an advocate for social mobility in tech. She was recently shortlisted for Apprentice of the Year at the Manchester Young Talent Awards and named to the Northern Power Women Future List.
Your host for the evening: Oluwadara Adebobola, AI Data Engineer at GWI.
Agenda
5:45 Doors, food and networking
6:15 Welcome from Oluwadara
6:20 Elastic: Building Better Context (talk + Q&A)
7:05 Shade Obiti: The Nine Lives of a Compromised AI Agent (talk + Q&A)
7:45 Networking
8:30 Close
Important: registration
Accenture’s building security needs every attendee pre-registered. As well as RSVPing yes, you need to complete this form https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdxqKcaLz3fSr5XE856LBtzhjKL4holDc6UBLDpwrpW6P-nQg/viewform before end of Sunday 25th Oct. Also you will need to bring photo ID on the night. If you can no longer come, please change your RSVP so someone on the waitlist can have your place.
With thanks to Libby Stranks and Accenture for hosting us at Circle Square.
Upcoming events
1
Context, Retrieval & Compromised Agents
Accenture, No. 2 Circle Square, 1 Symphony Park, M1 7FS, 5th Floor, Manchester, GBTwo hands-on talks for people building with AI: one on getting the right context into your agents, and one on what happens when an agent gets compromised. Both include live demos.
Building Better Context with Visual Intelligence & Semantic Retrieval
António Morais & Akbar Gumbira, Machine Learning Engineers, Elastic
Getting the right context to your agents helps get better results. Using smaller, more specialised models keeps the costs down. We will guide you through an example use case to transcribe, store and search thousands of scanned manuscripts. Then we will dig deeper to cover how we serve our in-house OCR, embeddings and reranker models, and how we designed our model serving service to work reliably for users across the world.
António and Akbar build and operate the inference systems behind the Jina search foundation models in Elastic’s managed cloud.The Nine Lives of a Compromised AI Agent
Shade Obiti, Cybersecurity Analyst, Accenture
What happens when an AI agent gets hacked, and why isn’t revoking its access enough to stop it?
Through a live demonstration of a real-world attack scenario, Shade shows how poisoned memory, shared identities and escalating access can let a compromised agent keep coming back, even after security measures have been put in place. You’ll see why traditional security controls aren’t always enough, and what developers and architects can do to build more secure agentic systems.
Expect live hacking, technical depth and a fresh perspective on AI security.
Shade is a Cybersecurity Analyst at Accenture specialising in incident response and security strategy, and an advocate for social mobility in tech. She was recently shortlisted for Apprentice of the Year at the Manchester Young Talent Awards and named to the Northern Power Women Future List.Your host for the evening: Oluwadara Adebobola, AI Data Engineer at GWI.
Agenda
5:45 Doors, food and networking
6:15 Welcome from Oluwadara
6:20 Elastic: Building Better Context (talk + Q&A)
7:05 Shade Obiti: The Nine Lives of a Compromised AI Agent (talk + Q&A)
7:45 Networking
8:30 CloseImportant: registration
Accenture’s building security needs every attendee pre-registered. As well as RSVPing yes, you need to complete this form https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdxqKcaLz3fSr5XE856LBtzhjKL4holDc6UBLDpwrpW6P-nQg/viewform before end of Sunday 25th Oct. Also you will need to bring photo ID on the night. If you can no longer come, please change your RSVP so someone on the waitlist can have your place.
With thanks to Libby Stranks and Accenture for hosting us at Circle Square.90 attendees
Past events
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