Procurement
UK AI Council holds inaugural event in Manchester
UK AI Council held its inaugural event in Manchester, bringing together practitioners, industry leaders, academics and governance professionals from across the UK. Sessions covered the Council's mission, the professional pathway from Foundation to Chartered, agentic AI risk, and where UK AI goes next.
Manchester, 15 September 2026. UK AI Council held its inaugural event yesterday at the GM Digital Security Hub in Manchester, bringing together practitioners, industry leaders, academics and people working in AI governance from across the UK.
Chief Executive Philip Blake opened the afternoon by setting out the Council's mission and structure, and the case for an independent body that the UK's AI ecosystem can gather around rather than another organisation pulling in its own direction.
Thomas Sinclair, Chief of Professional Standards, followed with the professional pathway. His argument was that using AI and being competent with AI are not the same thing, so the question is not which certificate comes next but what someone should have to demonstrate next. The pathway runs Foundation, Associate, Professional and, in time, Chartered recognition, with each level calling for a different form of evidence rather than a harder exam.
Max Corbridge, CEO and Founder of SecureAgentics, spoke on agentic AI: agents that pick their own steps, run for days, and create structural risks that most governance frameworks were never written for. It is the reason security sits on the Council's agenda from the start rather than being added later.
A panel titled Representing AI: Industry, Government and Academia on What Comes Next was chaired by Chief Operating Officer Amelia Hewitt, with Professor Keeley Crockett of Manchester Metropolitan University, Lindsay Thorburn of Deloitte and Jonny Williams of Red Hat. The discussion turned on where UK AI is heading and, more usefully, on the gaps nobody has filled yet.
Hewitt closed by looking ahead to 2026, drawing on real cases where deployments outran the frameworks meant to govern them, and invited attendees to bring the Council the challenges they are facing.
The recurring theme across the afternoon was how many different concerns were raised, and how few of them sit neatly with any single organisation. That open forum is what the Council intends to keep building.
Further events will be announced in the coming months. Membership is open at Individual Membership page.