Greater Manchester recognised as Top Digital Tech City

Manchester has been named the UK’s Top Digital Tech City as a result of a deep dive study into digital businesses using artificial intelligence, the first of its kind.

Manchester scored ahead of London in the AI survey, due its lower business rates, as well as the city-region’s scale of digital business activity.  Manchester has almost 19,000 digital businesses, and hosted over 1750 related digital events in 2019, so while London boasted a far greater number of businesses and more events, the increased cost of doing business in the capital suggests Manchester makes for the more attractive city for technological innovation.

Data science and software company, The Data City, built a bespoke AI engine to analyse web, open and licensed data to provide real-time insights into the UK’s digital and tech industry. It crawled more than four million UK business websites and 100,000 event listings.

UK’s Top Digital Tech Cities – 2020 ranks 10 UK cities using indices including digital businesses, events, and costs during 2019 to produce the following leaderboard:

1. Manchester
2. London
3. Birmingham
4. Bristol
5. Milton Keynes
6. Leeds
7. Edinburgh
8. Brighton
9. Reading
10. Glasgow

The recognition as a leading city in the UK supports Greater Manchester’s ambitions as world-leader in the digital sector, as set out in the GMCA’s Digital Blueprint.

Speaking about the blueprint launch earlier this year, Cllr Elise Wilson, Leader of Stockport Council and GMCA Digital Portfolio Lead, said:

Our Digital Blueprint is a new era for digital in Greater Manchester that will help us become a top five European city-region recognised globally for our digital innovation.

“We want to make life easier, faster, more connected, more efficient, safer and more sustainable for everyone who lives, works and visits here – and digital is central to that. That’s why we are doing digital differently, delivering for the people of Greater Manchester and realising the city region’s potential through our infrastructure, skills and culture.”