As part of Boston Tech Week, 7AI brought together more than 500 cybersecurity professionals, founders, and builders for a night of high-octane racing, sharp conversation, and a keynote that resonated with every Bostonian building something hard.
The evening delivered two standout moments: a keynote from three-time Super Bowl champion and Super Bowl LIII MVP Julian Edelman on resilience and performing under pressure, and an expert panel on what it really takes to build and secure AI in production. But the throughline of the night was connection: a room full of people doing hard, high-stakes work, swapping ideas in a setting built for a little friendly competition.
Boston's Moment Has Arrived
For too long, Boston has been likened to the lesser Silicon Valley or New York. But at the inaugural Boston Tech Week, we proved that Boston is not only the place to build tech, but also the place to build in AI and cybersecurity.
7AI is a Boston-native company. We are committed to building out our team here. Our founders recognized not only the immense amount of talent here with some of the best universities in the world (Harvard, MIT, Northeastern), but they also recognized the incredible amount of grit this city has. Boston is a city of underdogs, but this has only made us work harder to prove that the next generation of innovators is right here.
Finally, the industry sees what we see. The inaugural Boston Tech Week is an overdue recognition that this city has earned a seat at the table. For years, the talent, the research, and the breakthroughs have been here; what we've lacked is the spotlight and the space to come together. Tech Week gives us both. It's a chance for Boston's builders to stop working in parallel and start working in the same room — to meet, to compare notes, and to realize just how much momentum is already gathering right here.
“The Boston cyber community was due for a flagship event, and we delivered,” says Anna Suslova, 7AI’s Head of Growth Marketing. We decided to host this event at the F1 Arcade. Not only is it a great activity, but it aligns closely with what Boston is building in tech: we are building incredible products at a racing speed, with the most talented people.
The community agreed with us. We had over 500 attendees, from security practitioners to CISOs. The crowd reflected the energy of Boston's cybersecurity scene right now — practitioners from across the region's leading companies, all passionate about where AI, security, and innovation are headed.
Julian Edelman: THE Boston Underdog
Julian Edelman is a football player every Bostonian knows and resonates with. He came into the league as a seventh-round draft pick, 232nd overall, a converted college quarterback from Kent State who was too small, too slow, and playing the wrong position. He was underestimated. The underdog. By every conventional measure, he wasn't supposed to make the roster, let alone make history.
But he retired as a three-time Super Bowl champion, Super Bowl LIII MVP, and the player who made the impossible juggling catch that sparked the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history. None of that happened by accident. Edelman's story is a masterclass in the themes he spoke to that night: resilience when the odds say quit, preparation that turns into instinct when the pressure peaks, and the unglamorous discipline of doing the work behind the work — long after the cameras are off and the crowd has gone home.
That message landed in a room full of Boston's cybersecurity community, because we know that game too. The work is relentless, the stakes are high, and nobody hands you the win. You earn it through preparation, you survive it through resilience, and you show up the next day to do it all over again. Edelman understands what it means to be counted out and prove everyone wrong — and so does this city.
On the Panel: AI Security in Production
If Julian's keynote was about performing when the pressure is highest, the evening's panel made it concrete. Titled "Why Boston, Why Now: AI Security in Production," the conversation tackled a shift every security leader in the room is feeling: AI is moving from concept to critical infrastructure, and Boston is fast becoming the place where that work gets done.
The panel brought together four people building at exactly that frontier: Benjamin Dulieu, CISO & CIO of Duck Creek Technologies; Joel Miller, Principal Software Engineer at DraftKings; Debashis Das, Principal in the Office of the CISO at AWS; and Jeremy George, Principal Security Advisor, GuidePoint Security. Between them, they represent the full arc of the problem — setting security strategy from the top, shipping it in production, and shaping how it scales across the industry.
The discussion centered on the hard part: not whether to use AI, but how to deploy it responsibly in systems where the stakes are real. The time to adopt AI is now, but that doesn’t mean AI runs our SOC. Humans are still a crucial part of the equation. AI needs a manager, and the SOC needs strategic decision makers. The key to implementing AI is equipping team members with everything they need to ensure that AI enhances their skills and makes them more efficient at their jobs. We are learning about AI as it is coming on the market; these leaders reminded us that a key piece of this equation is learning from the community around us.
What tied it together was the "why Boston, why now" thread. Boston has the talent. Boston has unbelievable grit. And Boston has built some of the biggest companies in the country: WHOOP, Klaviyo, and HubSpot. But we are just getting started. Boston is uniquely positioned to jump to the lead in the AI space, and these leaders are building teams to do just that.
We're Just Getting Started
Thank you to our sponsors, AWS, Cogent, Cyera, GuidePoint Security, Linx, Realm Security, and Upwind. We couldn’t have put on this event without your support.
Thank you to the F1 Arcade for helping us put on the event that left people asking for more.
Thank you to Julian, Ben, Joel, Jeremy, and Debashis for sharing their journeys and their vision for how Boston will grow into the best city.
Thank you to the community who showed up and showed out.
Since this event, we have been asked countless times when we are doing the next one. You raised the bar, Boston. We aren’t done yet. 7AI is building at hyper-speed, so stay tuned to see where we will be next, bigger and better.