Applying AI Events in Leeds

Navigating the New AI Operating Model: How Data, Context, and Culture Must Evolve Together.

As part of Leeds Digital Festival, join Nimble, alongside industry partners and guest speakers, for an interactive breakfast session exploring what it really takes to move from AI experimentation to meaningful business adoption.

We’ve moved past the initial hype of Generative AI. Now, businesses face the real challenge: how do you actually integrate AI into your organisation to create a cohesive, collaborative workforce?

This session looks beyond the hype to explore what a Human-Digital Workforce could look like in practice, and why success depends on far more than choosing the right AI tools.
Together, we'll discuss why organisations need to rethink not only their technology, but also the way they manage data, design workflows and prepare their people for a new way of working.

What we'll cover

• Data Foundations: Evolving your infrastructure with semantic layers and ontologies to make your data truly agent-ready.
• Engineered Context: The missing layer in most AI strategies—giving your digital agents the specific business context required to execute tasks safely and accurately.
• Cultural Adaptation: Redesigning workflows and preparing your human teams to seamlessly interface with, manage, and trust their new digital colleagues.

Whether you are a technology leader, a strategist, or a transformation professional, this talk will provide you with a practical, systems-level blueprint to stop simply "prompting" and start building a functioning Human-Digital workforce.

Who should attend?

This event is aimed at:

• CIOs & CTOs
• Heads of Data & AI
• Digital & Technology Leaders
• Engineering Leaders
• Enterprise Architects
• Transformation & Change Leaders
• Product & Delivery Leaders
• Innovation Leaders
• Business leaders exploring AI adoption

About Leeds Digital Festival

This event forms part of Leeds Digital Festival, the UK's largest open platform celebrating digital culture, innovation and technology. As a Festival Sponsor, Nimble is proud to support the region's thriving technology community by bringing together business leaders, practitioners and partners to share ideas, experiences and practical insights.

Whether you're an experienced software developer or just starting your coding journey, this interactive coding dojo is an opportunity to sharpen your skills, solve problems collaboratively and explore how core software engineering practices remain essential in the age of AI. Meet other developers from across Leeds while tackling real coding challenges together.

Hosted by senior technology leaders at Codurance and Lhasa Limited, the session is inspired by real software engineering challenges drawn from scientific software development.

You'll work through practical coding exercises while exploring the techniques that underpin high-quality software and sustainable development practices.

Expect an evening of collaborative problem solving, discussion and learning alongside developers who enjoy improving their craft. Work individually, pair up with another developer or join a small group, whatever suits your preferred way of working.

During the evening you'll:

• Take part in a collaborative coding dojo.
• Code individually, in pairs or small groups.
• Use your preferred programming language.
• Practise Test-Driven Development (TDD).
• Explore pair programming techniques.
• Break complex problems into manageable steps.
• Apply domain modelling techniques.
• Work with string tokenisation and parsing.
• Discuss how software craftsmanship practices support effective AI-assisted development.
• Meet and learn from developers across the Leeds tech community.

Who should attend?

• Software developers of all experience levels.
• Students and early-career developers.
• Anyone interested in software craftsmanship.
• Developers looking to improve their technical skills.
• Anyone curious about solving real-world software engineering problems.

Whether it's your first coding dojo or your fiftieth, you're welcome to contribute at your own pace and learn from others in a supportive environment.

No previous Software Crafters Leeds experience is required. Bring your laptop if you'd like to code along.

Refreshments will be provided, including vegetarian and vegan options.
Whether you're looking to refresh your coding skills,
explore software craftsmanship techniques or simply connect with fellow developers, we'd love to see you there.

This meetup is an exciting opportunity for us here at LDPaC - we are hosting an event in conjunction with Leeds Digital Festival! We have two really exciting talks from some well versed speakers, focussing on Agentic AI and AI Red Teaming and security vulnerabilities.

Sign up here to attend this exciting event!

*In Person Only MeetUp, Free To Attend*

Thank you to Accenture for sponsoring and hosting this event.

Join us for a In-Person User Group Meeting (LDPaC), where you can network, learn, ask a question, and meet other likeminded folks. These events are a really great opportunity to socialise in an informal learning setting.

Remember to tell your friends and the people you work with; make sure you register as soon as you can. We will need to provide a list of names to Accenture before the event, so to ensure there are no issues with access on the day please make sure you have registered.

18:00 - 18:30 Network🤝/ Drinks / Pizza 🍕

18:30 - 18:40 Intro🎙️

18:40 - 19:30 Talk 1:
Shubhangi Goyal - Context driven AI agents

In this session, I will explore how agents are built and use dynamic context to execute complex tasks and deliver real value. This also includes using context engineering to move beyond single prompt based interactions. The key takeaways would be :

- Context engineering, manage memory tools, and tasks for adaptive behaviour
- Agent architecture, LLMs and feedback loops
- Prompt engineering into the larger system
- Real world use case and common pitfalls when deploying AI agents

19:30 - 19:35 5-min Break 🥤

19:35 - 20:25 Talk 2:
James Bentley - Red Team Redemption: Finding AI Weaknesses Before Attackers Do

Generative AI is rapidly becoming part of enterprise applications, but how do you know if your AI behaves safely when faced with malicious, unexpected, or simply creative users?

In this session, we'll explore the world of AI red teaming: the practice of thinking like an attacker to uncover vulnerabilities before they reach production. We'll look at common attack techniques and adversarial behaviours which can cause AI systems to act in ways their creators never intended.

Using real world engagements as inspiration, you'll see how open source security tools such as Garak, PyRIT, and more can be combined into a repeatable testing framework, and how these findings map to industry standards to make sure you know where your gaps are, and what that even means!

Of course we'll also discuss the practical mitigations you can implement, and the growing security capabilities available within Databricks to safeguard your deployments.

So whether you're deploying your first chatbot, or operating AI at enterprise scale, this session will help you understand how attackers think, how AI systems fail, and how to ensure your first red team engagement isn't conducted by your users.

20:25 : 20:30 Wrap Up & Thank you's

Come and join the Leeds Data Community and start learning and networking! All are welcome!

An evening of celebration, pizza, and presentations in partnership with with Leeds Digital Festival

This is the launch of something special;
the popular Practically AI event is coming to Leeds from Manchester.

This event is the first event of many of this new group, which will continue to have regular events for the foreseeable future.
The evening will consist of a typical meetup format with doors opening at 17:30 for arrival and a bit of socialising and food, and then at 18:30 an AI spotlight followed by 2 talks; and we're expecting to finish around 20:00.

Talk One:
Prompt > Context > Harness > Loop > Graph: The Evolution of Agentic Software Engineering

• Phil Whittaker

Loop and graph engineering are the phrases of the moment, but getting started can feel like learning to run before you can walk.
In this talk, we'll work through the stages most engineering teams experience as they move from simple prompting, to managing context, building effective agent harnesses, and finally creating reliable autonomous development loops.
Along the way, we'll also examine the traditional software engineering practices that make these systems work.
This talk will show that software engineering is not being replaced. The tools are changing, the feedback loops are becoming faster, and automation levels are increasing - but designing, validating and operating reliable systems still requires engineering discipline.
This is not the end of software engineering.
This is software engineering.

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Talk Two:
The Gap between AI Capability and Governance

• Avu Harvey

AI can now do more than ever but our ability to control, trust and govern what they do hasn't kept pace. This talk focuses on the less glamorous, more critical layer underneath: Governance.
I'll start discussion with a recent example: OpenAI disclosed that one of its test AI agents broke out of a controlled testing environment and autonomously hacked into the infrastructure of another AI company without any human instruction - this signals that AI capability is now outpacing our ability to govern it safely.
Highlight how governance (focused on access, oversight and accountability) is the real bottleneck for trustworthy AI.
I will then unpack what "governance" needs to become in a world of autonomous AI agents beyond policies - the recommended practical controls and oversight that keeps up with what AI systems are now capable of doing.
Finally, sharing resources for those interested in delving deeper into AI governance.