Refreshed 2026-07-04. Focus: active or recently active AI, ML and data meetups within roughly an hour of BS36, plus a few one-off events worth tracking. Public event pages change quickly, so check the linked source before travelling.
• Data Bristol — strong general data community, currently about 2,720 members. Broad remit: data engineering, BI, advanced analytics, AI/ML, cloud and platforms. Next listed event: Wed 8 Jul 2026, 18:00, iO Associates, St Bartholomew's House, Bristol BS1 2NH; SQL Server 2025 AI/vector search plus relational algebra.
• Bristol AI Automations — new monthly practical AI/no-code automation group, about 141 members. Good fit for hands-on AI workflow demos. Next listed event: Wed 8 Jul 2026, 18:00, DeskLodge House; “From prompts to visuals”, AI image/video generation.
• Bristol AI Ethics — active monthly in-person group, about 191 members, at Torchbox, 15 Colston Street. Focus is AI ethics, governance and responsible use, with talks pitched beyond pure technologists. Next listed events: Thu 23 Jul 2026 and Tue 22 Sep 2026.
• Bristol: Data Intelligence Network — quarterly-ish data community hosted by Datacove, about 671 members, at DeskLodge House. Covers R, Python, SQL, BI, modern AI tooling and practical data work. Next listed events: Wed 22 Jul 2026 and Wed 2 Dec 2026.
• South West Data — long-running informal Bristol data social, about 1,696 members. Monthly second-Tuesday social at Watershed, useful for networking more than formal technical talks. Upcoming socials include Tue 14 Jul, Tue 11 Aug and Tue 8 Sep 2026.
• Databricks Bristol Meetup — specialist Databricks/Lakehouse group, about 205 members, backed by Advancing Analytics and iO Associates. Recent events were Feb, Apr and Thu 2 Jul 2026 at iO Associates; check for the next quarterly listing.
• Mindstone Bristol AI Meetup — practical AI group, about 186 members. Page still describes monthly sessions; recent listed events ran Mar–Jun 2026 at Origin Workspace, 40 Berkeley Square, but no future Bristol event was visible at refresh time.
• PyData Bristol — established Bristol chapter of the international PyData community, now about 1,330 members. Good technical/data-science fit, but the only visible upcoming item at refresh was a network event for PyData & PyCon Yerevan 2026 rather than a local Bristol meetup.
• Bristol Machine Learning Meetup — pure technical ML focus, about 893 members. Looks quiet: no future local event visible at refresh; recent visible past local event was Bristol Machine Learning #18 on Tue 27 Jan 2026. Keep as a watch-list item rather than a current first choice.
• Tue 7 Jul 2026, 10:00–15:00 — Turn your AI vision into reality, Bristol and Bath Science Park, Emersons Green. One-off AI adoption workshop with Copilot and AI agents demos; not a recurring meetup.
• Wed 8 Jul 2026, 18:00 — Bristol AI Automations, DeskLodge House: practical AI image/video generation from prompts.
• Wed 8 Jul 2026, 18:00 — Data Bristol, iO Associates: SQL Server 2025 AI/vector search and relational algebra.
• Tue 14 Jul 2026, 19:00 — South West Data Social, Watershed. Informal second-Tuesday data networking.
• Wed 22 Jul 2026, 18:00 — Bristol Data Intelligence Network, DeskLodge House. Listed talk: “Is gymflation real? Investigating with R and LLMs”.
• Thu 23 Jul 2026, 18:00 — Bristol AI Ethics, Torchbox. Talk by Dan Charles on AI, cognitive offloading and what should not be left behind.
• Thu 24 Sep 2026 — AI SW Live! — Future Space Bristol, hosted by TechSouthWest. Directory listing describes practical AI implementation, lightning talks, demos and networking; verify details on the registration page.
• Bristol Data Week 2026, Jean Golding Institute / University of Bristol — ran 1–5 Jun 2026 as a free week-long festival of data science, AI, workshops, talks and training. Page says recordings from some sessions are expected; 2025 recordings are already linked.
• Jean Golding Institute events and training, University of Bristol — useful institutional source for data science and AI training, annual Data Week, Data Ethics Club and related data-hazards/research-software events. I did not re-find a current “Turing Seminar Series” page, so I have replaced that line with this broader events source.
• Create With conference, Brighton — AI builders / no-code / agents conference. The 2026 conference was Thu 25 Jun 2026 at Brighton Centre, so it is now a past annual event rather than a current Bristol meetup.
• BathML / Bath Machine Learning — previously listed with bathml.org and meetup.com/BathML, but I could not verify a current public page or upcoming event during the 2026-07-04 refresh. Keep only as a manual search lead.
• “Create With: Bristol AI Meetup” — no current recurring Bristol group page found on Create With. Replaced with the specific AI SW Live! and Bristol AI Automations entries above.
Member counts and upcoming event dates were checked against public Meetup/Create With/University of Bristol pages on 2026-07-04. Meetup pages sometimes show stale “upcoming” labels around event dates; compare the event date with today before travelling.