Northern Azure User Group October 2026 Meetup

The NAUG rolls into October with two sessions covering AI agent tooling and enterprise data/AI infrastructure. Bring your laptop, bring your skepticism, we'll sort the rest.
This month we are pleased to welcome Joe and Kirk.

Session 1
Joe Hodkinson - Foundry IQ and the Journey to Agentic Search

The AI conversation has moved from chatbots to agents almost overnight. But while organisations are investing heavily in AI, many still have little visibility into the vast amounts of unstructured information spread across businesses.

Lets explore how Foundry IQ transforms disconnected content into discoverable knowledge, providing the foundation for Agentic Search and the next generation of AI experiences. We'll discuss why retrieval, grounding and knowledge discovery are rapidly becoming more important than simply choosing a model.

Session 2
Kirk Ryan - Stop building data lakes for AI. Build a context lake instead.

Kirk Ryan is the founder of KDBL and a former Global Principal Technologist at NetApp. Most enterprise AI strategies assume the interesting data lives in a warehouse — it doesn't, it lives in 20 years of file shares, SharePoint sites, and OneDrive folders no copilot can reach. Kirk will cover what it actually takes to make that estate usable by AI agents without copying it anywhere: zero-copy indexing over SMB, NFS, S3 and Microsoft 365, enforcing source permissions at query time, hybrid retrieval (BM25 + vectors + graph), and exposing it all through MCP. Expect demos, architecture diagrams, and a candid list of things that didn't work.

Meetup location what3words:///daisy.coffee.awards

Agenda:
6:00 - 6:30 - Welcome & networking
6:30 - 7:15 - Foundry IQ and the Journey to Agentic Search
7:15 - 7:45 - Food, drinks and general chatter
7:45 - 8:30 - Stop building data lakes for AI. Build a context lake instead.

Location Details
what3words:///daisy.coffee.awards
Address: 18 Lower Byrom St, Manchester M3 4AP.
Morson Edge are based in a renovated space called the Bonded Warehouse which sits on the same site as the Old-Granada studio tour.
The entrance to the bonded warehouse can be reached from Lower Byrom street just next to the Museum of Science and Industry, the building entrance is on the right hand side across from the crystal maze. Google and apple maps may attempt to direct you to the rear of the building, if in doubt use the what3words location and look for the Crystal Maze too.

what3words:///daisy.coffee.awards