Manchester, 16–17 June 2026
Global AI Cities, co-hosted with the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, was about how cities can use AI to become more responsible, resilient and responsive. It brought together city and public service leaders from around the world to look at how AI is already changing the way services are designed and delivered, and what it will take to do that well.
The programme ran over two days. The summit on 16 June was a series of invitation-only roundtables for senior digital leaders. The conference on 17 June opened up to public servants more widely, with keynotes, case studies and panels on the themes that ran through the event: responsible deployment, skills and capability, data, cybersecurity, citizen trust, procurement and service design.
I hosted one of the roundtables, on scaling AI for neighbourhood health: lessons from Manchester and beyond. Manchester has gone further than most in joining up health and care around neighbourhoods, which made it a useful place to ask what it actually takes to move AI from a promising pilot to something running at scale across a system. We heard plenty of evidence that the technology works. The consensus, though, was that the answer lies not in the technology but in the leadership, capability and trust around it, and in the work underneath: data quality, process and addressing technical debt.
Our contributors, in both clinical and technical leadership roles, made the same point: the question is less “where to use AI” than how to solve the problems we actually have. In that sense the challenge is no different from the digital change the health system has already been tackling. We also made the case for a realistic time horizon. This kind of investment pays back over years, not months, so while the prize could be significant, neither the funding nor the expectations should bank on a return inside this financial year.