events

I spent an evening at The Lookout in Bishopsgate listening to Vercel's CPO, ElevenLabs, M&S, and Virgin Media O2 talk about building for the agent era. The view from the 50th floor was spectacular. The ideas were harder to shake.

At NRF 2025, Salesforce used the show to trumpet its agentic retail tools. At NRF 2026, Google's CEO unveiled the Universal Commerce Protocol on the main stage. The difference was the mood in the room: less launch-day excitement, more cross-examination of work in progress.

The Leaders Connected relaunch brought together Anna Barsby from Tessiant and Kevin Evans from Rosslyn for an evening of candid fireside conversation about data, AI, and organisational reality in the North of England. Organised by Jody Marks and Grant Spencer, it was the kind of event the Northern tech community does quietly well.

Manchester Tech Festival 2025 ran from 23 September to 2 October. The core conference was at Victoria Baths on the 24th and 25th. The dedicated AI conference followed on 1 October at DiSH MCR. A year on from the 2024 festival, the AI conversation has moved significantly. Not everywhere in the same direction.

RTS 2025 moved to ExCeL London and brought something new with it: not more AI, but better AI. More deployment stories, fewer demos, and a sharper, more honest conversation about where the value actually sits.

Pay360 2025 at ExCeL London landed one month before Mastercard's Agent Pay announcement. The payments industry already knew where it was heading. The mood was focused rather than euphoric, which felt about right.

Salesforce, Google Cloud, and half the industry arrived at the Javits Center in January 2025 with the same word: agents. Reading through what each company actually announced, the vocabulary shift is real — but the gap between pitch and production remains considerable.

Manchester Tech Festival ran from 28 October to 8 November 2024, with the main conference at Victoria Baths and a dedicated AI Conference on 31 October at Friends Meeting House. If you want to know how the Northern tech community is genuinely engaging with AI, rather than performing enthusiasm at it, it was worth attending.

eCommerce Expo 2024 at ExCeL London was dominated by AI but defined by something rarer. A room full of UK retailers willing to say, publicly, that they didn't know what to do with it yet. That candour was the most useful thing about it.

RTS 2024 brought the UK retail technology industry together at Olympia London for two days. The AI conversation dominated — but the gap between what enterprise retailers were describing on stage and what the mid-market majority could realistically deploy was the more interesting story.

Manchester Digital's Ecommerce Conference 2024 filled a room at No.1 Circle Square with Northern practitioners rather than vendors. The AI conversation that followed was more honest for it.

Pay360 2024 brought the UK payments community to ExCeL London. AI was on the agenda — but the conversation was less about transformation and more about where AI is actually earning its keep in the plumbing of financial infrastructure. Which, it turns out, is everywhere.

Reading the coverage out of New York in January 2024, one thing was clear: generative AI had stopped being a theme at retail's biggest annual gathering and had become the whole conversation.