I’ve spent more than twenty years sitting across the table from people whose businesses are their life’s work — founders, families, operators who built something real with their own hands. So when a new technology headline promises to “break the internet” or “cure every disease,” and then a week later a quieter piece explains why neither is close to true, I understand exactly why so many of the people I work with just tune it out. You have a business to run. You don’t have time for hype cycles.
But I want to be honest with you about quantum computing, the way I’d want someone to be honest with me. Not because you need a quantum computer this year — you almost certainly don’t — but because there’s one part of this story that touches your business today, quietly, whether you’re paying attention to it or not. I’d rather you hear it from me, plainly, than discover it too late.
What quantum computing actually is, in plain terms
Classical computers store information as bits — a 0 or a 1. Quantum computers use qubits, which can hold a combination of states at once and link together in ways that let certain calculations scale far faster than anything classical hardware can do. That’s the whole idea. The hard part is that qubits are fragile almost beyond belief — today’s leading systems from IBM, Google, and others need to be cooled colder than deep space, and they still make errors at any meaningful scale. Researchers in the field call this the “noisy intermediate-scale quantum” era. I’ll translate that: it’s real, it’s serious, and it is not yet ready to change your business directly.
Where it’s genuinely working today
I don’t like dealing in speculation, so let me show you where the real, funded, revenue-generating work is happening right now.
1. Optimization problems with enormous variable counts
Logistics routing, portfolio construction, supply chain scheduling — all of these mean searching an almost unimaginable number of possible combinations for a near-optimal answer. Airlines, shipping companies, and a handful of banks are already running quantum and quantum-inspired algorithms alongside their classical systems, not because quantum has won outright, but because what they’re learning from the comparison is already valuable.
2. Materials science and drug discovery
Simulating molecules is a natural home for quantum systems, because molecules themselves behave quantum-mechanically. It’s no accident that pharmaceutical and materials companies are among the most consistent quantum spenders outside of the big technology firms and governments.
3. Cryptography — the one I need you to actually hear
This is the part that matters to nearly every business I know, not just laboratories. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer would be able to break the encryption — RSA and elliptic-curve — that currently protects almost all financial transactions, contracts, and data rooms in the world. Nobody has built that machine yet. Credible estimates put a cryptographically-relevant quantum computer somewhere between several years and a decade or more away. But here is the part that keeps me up at night on behalf of the people I advise: encrypted data stolen today can simply be held and decrypted later, once that capability exists. Security researchers call this “harvest now, decrypt later.” NIST finalized the first post-quantum cryptography standards in 2024, and financial regulators around the world have already started asking institutions for migration timelines.
Why this deserves a place on your agenda this year
If you run a business that holds sensitive, long-lived data — M&A due diligence materials, IP filings, financial records, patient records, anything with a shelf life measured in decades rather than months — the “harvest now, decrypt later” risk is real for you today, even though the decryption capability isn’t here yet. That’s an unusual, uncomfortable kind of urgency: the moment to act is now, but the threat itself arrives later. I know that’s a hard thing to ask a business to prioritize. I’m asking anyway, because I’ve seen what happens when we don’t.
In more than two decades of turnaround and M&A work, the businesses I’ve seen get hurt by a technology shift were almost never the ones who ignored it outright. They were the ones who quietly assumed someone would tell them when it was time to act. Quantum computing will follow the same curve as cloud computing, and more recently generative AI: a long, quiet runway, then a compressed window where being early is a real advantage and being late is a real cost. Nobody rings a bell when that window opens. I wish they did. I’d tell you the moment I heard it.
What I’d actually ask you to do this year
Three steps. Proportionate, not alarmist, in the order I’d take them myself.
1. Ask your IT or security partner one direct question: “What is our post-quantum cryptography migration plan?” If the honest answer is “we don’t have one,” that’s useful to know — not a five-alarm fire, but a gap worth closing over the next 12 to 18 months, not the next 12 to 18 days.
2. Please don’t buy quantum hardware or commission a bespoke quantum pilot unless you’re in pharmaceuticals, materials science, or running a logistics network at a scale where a 2 to 3 percent routing improvement is worth tens of millions of dollars. For almost everyone reading this, that spend would be premature, and I’d tell you that even if it cost me the engagement.
3. Watch your own industry, not the general headlines. Quantum’s near-term impact is arriving unevenly — finance, logistics, and materials science first, most other sectors considerably later. Knowing which group you’re in tells you whether this is a 2027 conversation or a 2032 one.
This is the same discipline I try to bring to every strategic decision I’m trusted with: separate the real signal from the noise, size the actual exposure honestly, and act in proportion to it — never to the headline. If you’d like a second, candid opinion on where quantum, or any emerging technology, actually sits on your risk-and-opportunity map, I’d genuinely welcome that conversation, before it becomes urgent rather than after. You can read more about how I think about technology strategy for growth-stage and family-owned businesses, or simply request a consultation and let’s talk through your specific exposure.
This is also the kind of technology-risk work my team at Interactive Intel, our dedicated AI and emerging-technology practice, tracks for clients every day — not just AI adoption, but the broader shifts that quietly redefine what “secure” and “competitive” mean for your industry.
