Quantum Computing Will Change Your Business

If your firm deals with weather, finance, or other fields, your future is quantum

Recently, we asked six futurists to predict tech developments that will change business. The technology that they mentioned most often was quantum computing.

Quantum computing is a quantum leap beyond today’s technology. Scientists at Google announced in October 2019, “ Our Sycamore [quantum-computing] processor takes about 200 seconds to sample one instance of a quantum circuit a million times. … The equivalent task for a state-of-the-art classical supercomputer would take approximately 10,000 years.”

Eleven months later, a team of Chinese university scientists performed a calculation “which had been mathematically proven to be practically impossible on normal computers,” according to the journal Nature. “The team achieved within a few minutes what would take half the age of Earth on the best existing supercomputers.”

Here are some industries and activities that quantum computing will supercharge.

Drug discovery and development

“At present, the development lead time for new drugs is measured in many years,” says a report from the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. “It is nearly impossible to accurately model these complex interactions using conventional computers. Researchers are therefore forced to undertake repeated optimization cycles that are expensive and time-consuming.” But, says engineer and futurist Thomas Frey, “quantum simulations could dramatically reduce the costs of development and help bring drugs to the market substantially faster.”

Finance

“There are many computationally intensive problems involving … asset management, investment banking, and retail and corporate banking,” says a summary from IBM. “Quantum computing in finance has the potential to show advantage over classical approaches in solving these computationally challenging problems.”  Sara Boem, director of technology strategy at the test-and-measurement firm Tektronix and an authority on quantum computers, says that quantum computing can help financial professionals “predict prices for securities [and] ... predict whether I should give you a loan or not.”

Artificial intelligence

“One of the problems currently facing artificial intelligence is the limited computational capacity of computers,” says a report by the business-tech consultancy Dynatom. “The quantum computer should make it possible to reduce the so-called ‘learning’ time and the processing time of applications while improving reasoning.” The result, says the tech site Analytics Steps, may be “better predictions and judgments (think facial recognition or fraud detection).”

Weather forecasting

“Weather modeling has a limit on the number of inputs that get handled by traditional computation,” says the tech-content site Knowledge Nile. “If you include too many variables, the simulation will take longer to complete than the actual weather.” But as the tech news site Express Computer says, “Quantum computers with faster processing speeds are downright more capable to consider all possible outcomes and predict forecasts.”

Chemicals

“Chemistry simulations may be the application where quantum computers have the most effect,” says an assessment from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). The Harvard Business Review agrees: “Programmable quantum computers have already demonstrated successful simulations of simple chemical reactions, paving the way for increasingly complex chemistry simulations in the near future.” The GAO expects that these developments “could lead to improvements in batteries [and] fertilizers.”

Cryptography

Cryptography “is the most prevalent use of quantum computing,” says Analytics Insight, a site that explores data and artificial intelligence. The art of writing and unlocking codes has applications in fields ranging from computer security to national defense, and quantum computing can improve virtually all of them. A report from Microsoft explains, “Classical cryptography relies on the intractability of problems such as integer factorization or discrete logarithms, many of which can be solved more efficiently using quantum computers.”

And more

Experts predict that quantum computing will speed up the development of everything from self-driving cars to the battle against climate change. And they’re not just speculating about the future: Giants such as Microsoft, IBM, and Google offer quantum computer services right now. So do smaller firms such as D-Wave Systems and Rigetti Computing.

The future is quantum. Are you ready?