CeBIT — the world's largest trade show for information technology, held annually in Hannover, Germany — gave Stuart McClure one of his most international stages. The 2017 event was a landmark moment: digital transformation had become the dominant strategic conversation across European industry, and the security implications of that transformation were landing on boardroom agendas in ways they never had before.
Stuart's presentation on March 23, 2017 — "Preventing Cyberattacks with Artificial Intelligence" — was timed perfectly. Just days earlier, Cylance had announced the keynote, generating significant advance coverage in the European security press. The presentation brought Cylance's core argument to an audience that included the largest industrial and financial enterprises on the continent: legacy security is reactive by design and therefore structurally incapable of preventing the attacks that matter most. AI-native prevention is not just better in degree — it is different in kind.
The Hannover audience was particularly relevant because European critical infrastructure was at the center of Operation Cleaver and other state-sponsored threat campaigns that Cylance had been tracking and documenting. The stakes of getting prevention right were not abstract to this audience — they operated the power grids, transport systems, financial networks, and industrial facilities that sophisticated attackers were actively targeting.
Stuart also presented on the "AI for Good" theme at the main CeBIT stage the previous day, reinforcing Cylance's positioning as an organization using artificial intelligence in service of genuine security improvement rather than mere commercial differentiation.