Conversations in the AI Era: Manchester Meetup Recap

Blog Post: Conversations in the AI Era: Manchester Meetup Recap

Twilio and Ciptex ran Conversations in the AI Era in Manchester last week on September 3rd, 2026. Three talks and more good questions than we had time for.

The room was a good mix of the local Manchester dev scene: developers, tech leads and founders, all coming at AI and communications from slightly different angles.

A few things that stuck with us:

Zero to Dial-In: Building a Pro-Grade Twitch Phone Line: Darragh O'Connor

Darragh O'Connor used a SIP trunk to connect callers straight into a livestream, reminding us to start with the problem you're trying to solve, then pick the simplest tool that gets you there. A SIP trunk probably isn't the first thing you'd expect to find in a streamer's toolkit, but it turned out to be exactly the right tool for the job.

The Architecture of an Intelligent Conversation: Matthew Duggan

Matthew Duggan of Ciptex showed AI and human agents working off the same conversation state and the same tools. One idea that stuck with me was treating the handoff from agent to person as a change of ownership, not a recovery path.

"It was great to get in a room with other builders and talk through a pitfall the industry falls into a lot: treating AI as a bolt-on channel instead of designing the whole conversation properly, humans included. Events like this are exactly why I enjoy the Manchester dev scene — people push back, ask the hard questions about state and ownership, and you leave with better answers than you came with." Matthew Duggan, Head of Product Development, Ciptex

Let AI Jesus Take the Wheel: Paul D'Ambra

Paul D'Ambra of PostHog talked about what happens when generating code becomes cheap: reviewing it becomes the bottleneck.

PostHog has seen its PR volume increase dramatically, so they built AI review agents to help deal with that scale. The interesting result wasn't only that AI could review more code, it was that it substantially dropped their revert rate.

What's next

Conversations in the AI Era is a regular meetup in Manchester and London, bringing together developers, founders and tech leads to talk about what's actually being built with AI and communications.

Subscribe to the Twilio UK events calendar for future dates and other Twilio events.

Thanks

Thanks to Ciptex for co-hosting, and to Darragh, Matthew, Paul, and everyone who came, asked questions, and stuck around after to keep talking. That's the actual point of these nights.

See you at the next one on November 4th, 2026 - register here.

Ryan Britnell is a Developer Advocate at Twilio, focused on developer community. He builds communities and developer meetups where people share knowledge and connect. Fancy getting involved? Reach out on LinkedIn