Practically AI: Applied AI for Software Engineers Manchester – August Meetup

Description

Explore production-ready AI engineering, agent orchestration and the agentic web at this practical software meetup in Manchester on 20 August 2026.Taking place from **18:30–21:00 at Bonded Warehouse**, this August edition of Practically AI brings together three perspectives on a pressing engineering question: how do you build useful, durable AI systems when foundation-model capabilities are changing every few months? Expect experience-led technical talks, Q&A, an AI spotlight, informal networking and pizza rather than product pitches.## Talks and takeaways**Building on Borrowed Ground: What I Learned Letting Anthropic Absorb My Work**Dylan Lake, Engineer at Crown Gas & Power, will share lessons from creating multi-agent systems modelled on real workplace structures. He’ll examine what happens when capabilities that once required custom orchestration become native platform features, and why the engineering knowledge gained still matters. Topics include choosing between custom AI workflows and built-in model capabilities, the evolution of agent orchestration, frontier-model advantages and a practical framework for selecting the right tool.**Beyond the Pilot: Claude for the Other 90%**Dmitrijs Jurins, Technology Director at Crown Gas & Power, will explain how a mid-sized UK energy supplier moved beyond experimentation and rolled [Claude](https://www.createwith.com/tool/claude) out to non-engineers. The session covers its tiered adoption model, governance designed to keep the board comfortable and the ROI that helped company-wide adoption stick.**The Intent Graph: Rebuilding Web Identity for the Agentic Internet**Daramola Benjamin, Founder of Levered, will consider how identity, authentication and authorisation must evolve when autonomous agents research, negotiate and complete tasks for users. From a software engineering perspective, he’ll explore why behavioural tracking breaks down in agent-mediated workflows, distinctions between user, agent and task identity, OAuth-style scoped delegation, evolving event schemas and architecture for AI-native products.## Who it’s for…[Register for this event](https://www.meetup.com/practically-ai-applied-ai-for-software-engineers-manchester)