We're back for another Practically AI Manchester! This November, we're being hosted by the team at **Bally's Interactive**, with two brilliant talks exploring how AI is moving beyond experimentation and into real-world systems operating at scale. From AI agents making payments on our behalf to personalisation systems serving hundreds of thousands of players, we'll be looking at the engineering, infrastructure and practical challenges behind making AI work in production. As always, expect practical insights, real-world examples, no sales pitches and plenty of opportunities to meet others from Manchester's growing AI and software engineering community. We'll also have our regular **AI Spotlight**, plus pizza, drinks and networking! **🎤 Talk 1: The Rise of Agentic Payments** **Luke Grayland \| Senior Software Developer\, Conferma** What happens when AI agents start spending money on our behalf? From booking travel and purchasing computing resources to managing everyday transactions, the payments industry is rapidly developing the infrastructure needed to let autonomous AI agents make purchases safely. In less than two years, we've moved from theoretical concepts to emerging payment protocols from Google, Visa and Mastercard. Luke will take us under the hood of this evolving landscape, exploring: * How AI agents change the way we think about payment authorisation, identity, consent and trust. * The different layers of the agentic payments stack. * Google's AP2, Mastercard Agent Pay and Visa Intelligent Commerce. * Why virtual cards, with their built-in spending limits and controls, are particularly well suited to autonomous agents. * The challenges still to solve, including disputes, liability and merchant verification. With standards still evolving, this talk offers a practical developer's perspective on one of the next big challenges for agentic AI. **About Luke** Luke is a Senior Software Developer at Conferma, a virtual card payments platform. He works at the inters

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