“If you’re in pharma or chemical industry, they’re using it already,” says Constellation’s Mueller. “You have to look into it,” Mueller warns.
And quantum computers are already playing an important role in protein folding, he says. “Quantum qubits are taking over traditional architectures for protein folding and mapping,” he says. “There, you must do something in 2025.”
According to a Boston Consulting Group projection from July of 2024 – from before the latest round of quantum computing breakthroughs – the technology will create between $450 and $850 billion of economic value globally by 2024.
Other experts are even more optimistic. A September report from The Quantum Insider, a market intelligence firm, forecasts that quantum computing will contribute $1 trillion in value creation by 2035. Finance, defense, life sciences, telecommunications, and manufacturing are expected to benefit the most from quantum technologies.
And when looking for opportunities, companies should do more than just think about the calculations that a quantum computer can do faster than a classical one, says Sridhar Tayur, professor of operations management at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business.
“A quantum computer is not simply a faster classical computer, just like a plane is not just a faster car,” he says. “With a plane you can fly over the ocean. What are you going to do if you have flying abilities?”
The earliest use cases, according to Infeqtion’s Gokhale, lie in simulating physical processes.
Today, when a company needs to work with a physical process – say, developing a new kind of rubber for sneakers, or a new chemical or a new drug – a lot of time-consuming laboratory work is required. That’s because classical computers are limited in what kinds of physical processes they can simulate, and in how accurate they can be.
“All of that can shift to being computational,” Gokhale says. This has the potential to be very disruptive, he adds. “Any real-world process that can be simulated, will be simulated.” Drug discovery timelines can be dramatically compressed, he says, subject to government regulation.
Another use case for simulating physical processes is to generate training data for AI systems. This is already being done to a limited extent with classical computers. For example, robotics companies are doing early-stage training for the robots in virtual environments before finishing up the training in the real world. This use case can expand dramatically with quantum computing.
“A lot of tasks are bottlenecked by a shortage of training data,” Gokhale says.
6. Consider using classical computers to simulate quantum machines
Even for use cases where quantum computers aren’t yet ready for prime time, there might be value in simulating their capabilities, says Tayur. “You don’t have to keep waiting for the real machine,” he says. “You might be able to get something going now.”
There are two ways this can work. First, there are quantum-inspired algorithms, where the principles of quantum computing inspire novel approaches to hard problems. “We’re going to solve it with classical computers, but not the way we’d normally solve it,” he says.
Another is using classical computers to simulate quantum machines, running the same algorithms a company would run on quantum hardware. “Then, when a real quantum computer comes along, you just swap out the simulator for the real machine,” he says.
He recently worked with one hedge fund looking to solve an optimization problem, where the simulated quantum computer actually gave them better answers than what they were getting before.
7. Don’t forget quantum sensors
Speaking of quantum technologies that can already be put to work, quantum sensors are real and are being deployed. The same things that make quantum computers so unreliable, such as their sensitivity to heat, vibrations, and environmental noise of all kinds, makes them perfect for industrial sensors.
“Position, navigation and timing are common applications,” Eric Ostby, chief product officer at Aliro Quantum Technologies. “The US government has made proposals to increase the sensitivity and ability of navigational sensors to operate without GPS.”
This can be useful where GPS doesn’t work or isn’t reliable, he says – or in areas where GPS signals are being actively jammed, such as war zones. There are also biomedical applications of quantum sensors, he says, “for example, for imaging of the heart.”
8. Build quantum expertise
Companies that want to be early adopters should start developing quantum talent today, if they haven’t already.
“If you’re in financial services, defense, or logistics, or you have problems where you’re currently using Monte Carlo simulations or high performance computing, it’s probably worth your time to take some people and have them learn about quantum computing,” says Gartner’s Horvath. “Having someone on your staff who knows that they’re capable of doing and being able to identify a problem where a quantum computer can be useful is a big deal.”
But, except for the most cutting-edge companies, being able to actually run a quantum computer locally isn’t going to be necessary. “Most quantum companies have quantum computing as a service,” says Horvath. “With IBM, for example, you can go and just use one of their computers online.”
In addition, the big hyperscalers all offer cloud-based quantum computing access, partnering with multiple quantum hardware manufacturers so that enterprises can easily try out different quantum computers.
9. Build partnerships
The last step that enterprises can take today is to build partnerships with key players in the quantum computing space. That could be quantum computing manufacturing themselves and platform providers like hyperscalers. Pharma companies, for example, are hedging their bets, says Constellation’s Mueller, working with both hyperscale providers and individual quantum startups like Rigetti and D-Wave.
And then there are universities and other research firms, as well as consultants and other experts.
“Quantum technologies have the potential to transform nearly every industry, but harnessing that potential requires a breadth and depth of talent that is challenging to recruit and retain,” says Jordan Kenyon, chief scientist at Booz Allen Hamilton’s quantum practice.
Strategic partners can fill that gap, he says, and help companies adopt quantum technologies until they reach sufficient internal capacity themselves.
