In the shadow of AI, Quantum Computing is quietly progressing

Back in 2017, I wrote a LinkedIn article attempting to explain Quantum Computing for the general businessperson.? At the time there were a lot of people getting quite excited about the potential of this technology and I was keen to understand the likely impact.? My conclusion at that time was that it was indeed fascinating, potentially important, but unlikely to be a factor in enterprise IT any time soon.

Fast forward nearly seven years and many billions of dollars/euros/yuan later and the picture has moved on considerably. ?We have uncovered many exciting use cases that harness this technology’s ability to accurately simulate highly complex scenarios with a quantum element, such as molecular interactions at atomic scales.? While this sounds esoteric, it includes important areas such as agriculture, predicting and improving crop yields, the creation of new materials for medical or manufacturing innovations and biological research into the behaviour and progression of hitherto incurable diseases.

However, the progress in developing useable computing technologies has been bumping up against various limiting factors.? One of these is called Quantum Decoherence. Quantum computers rely on the delicate state of qubits being in superposition and entanglement. However, qubits are extremely sensitive to their surroundings. Even minor interactions with the environment can cause them to lose their quantum properties—a phenomenon known as decoherence. This makes maintaining stable quantum states a significant challenge.? Another issue that has held this tech back is the sheer number of errors created. Quantum calculations are prone to errors due to the fragile nature of qubit operations and environmental interference. Current quantum systems have relatively high error rates compared to classical computers.

Of course, there are efforts under way to address these problems, such as the approach from quantum innovators Alice & Bob and their fault-tolerant architectures, but progress remains slow with regard to genuine enterprise impact.

We’ll continue to keep an eye on this research, and we can’t wait to build our first project with quantum computing embedded into the tech stack – but it probably won’t be in 2024!