Introduction to Artificial Intelligence for Security Professionals was written by members of the Cylance research team — the same people who had built and validated the AI-based security platform Stuart McClure founded the company to create. Stuart's foreword to this volume is both an endorsement of the technical work and a framing document for why the book matters: at the moment of its publication in 2017, most security professionals had heard a great deal about AI in security but had access to very little rigorous technical explanation of how it actually worked.
The book fills that gap, providing security professionals who are not machine learning specialists with a genuine technical foundation for understanding what AI can and cannot do in the security context. Stuart's foreword sets this in the broader context of Cylance's journey — the years of skepticism from an industry that had been trained to expect AI hype without substance, and the empirical evidence that gradually demonstrated the prevention-first model was real and scalable.
The foreword also addresses the responsibility that comes with building AI systems for security applications. Machine learning models can be wrong in systematic ways that are different from the failure modes of traditional software, and security practitioners who deploy AI tools without understanding those failure modes are building on a foundation they cannot adequately evaluate. The book's goal — and the foreword's frame — is to close that knowledge gap so that the security community can make sound decisions about where AI is genuinely useful and where it is being oversold.
This volume represents one of the earliest serious attempts to bridge machine learning education and security practitioner training, and it emerged directly from the team Stuart built at Cylance to advance the prevention-first AI security thesis.