On March 28, 2025, I landed in Shijiazhuang, China, for what turned out to be far more than just another tech summit. Hosted at the Hebei Offshore Talent Innovation Base, the event brought together brilliant minds from around the world—researchers from Sweden, New Zealand, the U.S., Spain—all showcasing technologies that feel like glimpses into the future.

From AI-driven surgery to clean energy breakthroughs and real-time pathogen detection, the message was clear: the future is now, and it's arriving fast. But as I sat there, inspired by the possibilities, one thought kept surfacing: Who's protecting all of this?

Why I Was There: The Quantum Threat Is Real

I didn't come to the summit with a new piece of hardware or a flashy AI demo. I came with a warning. As founder of QuReady, my mission is to help the world prepare for a quiet revolution already underway: quantum computing's ability to break the encryption that protects everything from national secrets to life-saving innovations.

Cyber adversaries are already using Harvest Now, Decrypt Later tactics—stealing encrypted data today, planning to crack it once quantum computers become powerful enough. That includes health data, intellectual property, and critical infrastructure. This isn't a future problem. It's a now problem.

How We're Fighting Back at QuReady

At QuReady, we're not sitting around waiting. We're building proactive defenses for a quantum world:

• Quantum-Secure VPNs powered by NIST-approved ML-KEM algorithms, rotating encryption keys to make stolen data worthless—even years from now.
• AI model shielding, encrypting training, inference, and deployment phases to secure sensitive algorithms and data pipelines from quantum attacks.

At the summit, I saw just how deeply this message resonated. Researchers, founders, and policymakers came up afterward to say, "We hadn't realized it was this urgent. What can we do today?"

That kind of response is why I do this.

What This Summit Meant to Me

Being at the summit reminded me that innovation isn't just about building the future—it's about protecting it. The technologies I saw were inspiring. But they'll only change the world if they remain secure from those who'd misuse them. Post-quantum cryptography isn't a luxury. It's a necessity.

And the clock is ticking.

Final Thoughts

If there's one thing I took home from Shijiazhuang, it's this:
Quantum threats are no longer theoretical. They're inevitable. To the builders, researchers, and dreamers reading this—don't wait to protect what you're creating. Encrypt now, or risk crying later.