At a time when AI was still considered a niche technical curiosity by most of the business world, Stuart McClure was giving keynote presentations with the title "Artificial Intelligence, A.K.A. The Future of Everything." The boldness of that framing was not marketing hyperbole — it was a serious claim about the nature of the technological moment, grounded in the actual performance of AI systems that Cylance was deploying at enterprise scale.
The presentation made the case that artificial intelligence was not one technology among many competing for attention and investment. It was a general-purpose capability that would reorganize the entire landscape of what was computationally possible — and therefore what was organizationally possible, economically possible, and strategically possible. Security was the domain Stuart knew best, and he used it as a demonstration environment: here is a problem that has resisted conventional solutions for decades, here is what happens when you apply machine learning properly, and here is what that implies for every other hard problem your organization faces.
The keynote was particularly focused on helping business leaders — not just security professionals — understand what AI meant for their industries. The argument was that competitive advantage in the coming decade would increasingly come from who could identify and effectively deploy AI capabilities first, and that organizations waiting for AI to "mature" were already behind the organizations investing in understanding and deploying it now.
This was Stuart at his most ambitious as a public communicator: arguing not just for Cylance's approach to security, but for a comprehensive reorientation of how every organization should think about its most important strategic asset — the intelligence it can bring to bear on its hardest problems.