How can Quantum Computing help your business?

Richard Polifka

Manager Technology & Data, PwC Switzerland

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While the world is still swept by the Generative Artificial Intelligence wave, there is a new disruptive technology already on the horizon. While still relatively juvenile, Quantum Computing holds promises to transform many business domains. You may have heard about the promises of exponentially faster runtime or breaking the cryptography as we know it, but Quantum Computing has also a potential in the ESG domain in terms of reducing the amount of energy we need for running already existing most complex calculations. In order to understand the business benefits of Quantum Computing let’s start with its principles.

"Quantum Computing holds promise not only for faster runtimes and breaking cryptography, but also for reducing energy consumption in complex calculations."

Mykhailo SaienkoSenior Manager, Analytics and AI, PwC Switzerland

Classical Computing operates with bits – units of information which can be either 1 or 0 at a time. On the other hand, Quantum Computing uses the concept of qubits as building blocks. Those are objects obeying the laws of Quantum Mechanics and can be characterized not only by zeros and ones but also by any combination of those two simultaneously. That is the effect of so-called quantum superposition which together with quantum interference (imagine the combination of two waves which can either negate or amplify the final effect) and entanglement (a state of a quantum system which cannot be decomposed into individual qubits) allows the quantum computer to investigate all solutions at once, as it were, rather than having to go over each possible state as is usual for the classical computers.

Quantum Computing's promising impact on diverse options

The main domains where significant improvements are expected are those where a significant number of different options or pathways need to be iterated over, such as:

Simulations

Several industrial domains are simulating interactions of systems at molecular level using substantial amounts of classical computing power. For example, recent breakthroughs in protein folding were thanks to AI algorithms using vast amounts of power. Research of new drugs in pharmaceutical sector is increasingly using computers to simulate effects of new medicine and makes the process of bringing new cures to the market more efficient. The energy sector is constantly looking for new materials to build more resistant reactors for nuclear fusion and fission and together with the automotive industry invests heavily into development of new types of batteries. Improvements in understanding of chemical processes such as ammonia production for fertilizers bear the potential for large energy and carbon emissions savings. Quantum Simulation offers the opportunity to simulate these processes on quantum systems bringing improvements in speed, prediction accuracy and possibly energy efficiency.

Optimisation

The organizations and systems we are using are getting larger and more complex (imagine an international logistics corporation) and optimizing them classically is becoming in many cases impossible in a reasonable time. The areas where Quantum Computing could be used to find a faster or more efficient solution are any type of logistics (supply chain or manufacturing optimization, traffic optimization and fleet routing) or financial modelling or portfolio optimization. The other way QC can be used similarly is in a hybrid classical-quantum machine learning (QML) where the quantum optimization of the classical ML algorithm hyperparameters can be inserted into the otherwise classical ML computation. A particularly suitable candidate to potentially see some benefits of the hybrid machine learning is the area of autonomous driving. One of the success stories is the improvement of portfolio performance, lowering its risk exposure and speed up of the calculations at a major bank performed with a Quantum Annealer.

Communications and Cryptography

Even though a fault tolerant quantum computer capable of breaking the RSA algorithm is not around the corner, many companies are already investing into post-quantum encryption. The reason is that sensitive business data that has future value can be stored already now and decrypted later. Therefore, post-quantum encryption is an area of intense investment and development.

Should your business invest in an own Quantum Computer? (Spoiler: No)

The times when Quantum Computing was a domain of only academic institutions have passed. Nowadays the hardware progress is led by several private companies, even though in many countries there are national programs supporting research in this domain. Progress in the latest years has a snowballing effect on the whole field and what used to be science-fiction a decade ago is today already a part of solid scaling strategies. The best example is the Quantum Roadmap from a major player in the field which started with a 5-qubit prototype in 2016 and this year a 1000+ qubit system should be demonstrated. With such milestones in sight, the focus of the quantum hardware manufacturers is now shifting toward achieving greater hardware reliability (expressed through gate fidelity), higher flexibility (expressed through qubit connectivity), and greater capacity to solve complex problems (expressed through coherence times).

Originally, hardware companies focused only on the construction of devices. However, with the progress and need for error mitigation, these companies widened their reach also to middle ware as well as full stack software offerings including for example python-based programming environments. Other companies are focusing only on Quantum Algorithms and Software. Several large companies also implement cloud-based solutions and QaaS (Quantum as a Service). Azure and AWS already use Quantum Computers as part of their offerings.

QURECA: Overview of Quantum Initiatives Worldwide 2023

Global quantum efforts $42b

Estimation by Quereca Ltd. 2024

In Switzerland, the largest Quantum Computing oriented center is emerging in Basel connecting academic and business stakeholders. In December 2024, the most advanced trapped ion computer with 36 qubits was installed, complementing thus the existing offerings of access to superconducting Quantum Computers.

The global industrial and national interest is also reflected in the size and the dynamics of investments in this technology. The development and outlook for the North American QC market – representing 44% of the global market in 2023. Government investments in QC vary from country to country and are displayed above.

North America Quantum Computing Market Size, 2019-2032 (USD Million)

The North American QC market prediction (Fortune Business Insight: Quantum Computing Market (2023))

Should your business start exploring Quantum? (Spoiler: Yes)

When exploring QC within your business, begin by identifying a problem that’s well-suited for this advanced technology – typically in areas like simulation, optimisation, communication and cybersecurity. Once a target issue has been selected, preparation of your data sample is critical. QC operates differently to traditional computing, so ensuring your data is appropriately formatted and ready for quantum processing is essential. Next, you need to subscribe to a quantum cloud service like Azure Quantum, which provides access to QC resources without having to invest in an expensive quantum infrastructure. These platforms offer high-level frameworks that abstract the complexities of direct qubit manipulation, making it easier for businesses without in-house quantum expertise to begin experimenting with quantum solutions.

However, having a trusted quantum expert by your side will accelerate your quantum initiatives by helping you to pick the right problem, prepare the data, and develop and lead your first proof of concepts (PoCs). If you’re looking for guidance or need expertise, get in touch with us.

FAQ about Quantum Computing

At the beginning of the 1980s, Richard Feynman, an American theoretical physicist, presented the possible advantages of computing based on the laws of quantum mechanics in his famous lectures. To quote him: “Nature isn’t classical, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical, and it’s a wonderful problem, because it doesn’t look so easy.” Indeed, the problem turned out to be extraordinarily challenging.

With Peter Shor’s development in 1994 of an algorithm that can efficiently find the factors of (very) large numbers, the interest in QC rose. Shor’s algorithm, once performed on sufficiently advanced hardware, promises to break the most complex cryptographic algorithms that are based on prime factorisation and thus endanger many of our activities in daily life (such as banking).

It took more than 20 years before the team of scientists in 2019 could claim the ‘quantum supremacy’ of their Quantum Computer, which performs certain operations in seconds while the same calculations would take a classic supercomputer 10,000 years. As the race to build such a machine involves fierce competition, claiming the supremacy title was immediately attacked by other players in the field. Nevertheless, it showed that commercially produced quantum computers are far beyond their conceptual phase and the once unreachable fault-tolerant universal quantum computer capable of breaking RSA encryption might not be so far in the future.

QC is built around the concept of a qubit – a quantum analogue of a classical computational bit. While a classical bit can have only one of the two values at any time – namely 0 or 1 – the qubit, obeying the laws of quantum mechanics, can benefit from the effect of superposition – a situation where it is a mixture of both states of 0 and 1. Superposition, together with entanglement and interference, fundamentally changes the way calculation is performed, leading to exponential acceleration of the speed at which certain problems are solved. Similar to classical computation, the desired result is obtained by developing and executing algorithms. In the quantum case, this involves defining the initial state of the system and performing operations (applying ‘gates’) to bring the system to the desired configuration when it can be measured. The key performance indicators of such a process are then driven by the number of qubits, the time a system can stay in a certain configuration (called coherence) and the quality of the gates (called gate fidelity).

One of the specifics of the quantum industry is the fact that potentially many roads lead to the same destination. This fact is stimulating healthy competition between different conceptual approaches and quantum technologies. Here are the most advanced ones:

Superconducting QC. The qubits are realised by electrical circuits cooled down to almost absolute zero (<0.015 Kelvin) where currents flow without almost any resistance. Such a configuration then exhibits quantum behaviour and these qubits are then modified by using electromagnetic pulses in the radio-frequency spectrum. The advantage of this technology is the overall advancement and the speed of the gates.
Trapped ions. Qubits consist of ions (atoms with electron(s) missing from their orbitals) that are electrically charged and therefore can be trapped and manipulated by electromagnetic fields. The advantage is the high connectivity of individual qubits and a long de-coherence time.
Photonics. Qubits in photonics are the photons themselves with beam splitters acting as gates. The advantage of this technology is that it can operate at room temperature.
Neutral atoms. The qubits are atoms suspended in an ultra-high vacuum manipulated by tightly focused laser beams called optical tweezers. Thanks to the neutral nature of the qubits, this technology is less sensitive to electric fields which could affect the system.
Topological QC. Topological qubits are based on quasiparticles, that means the building blocks are not individual particles, but rather collective characteristics of carefully fabricated quantum systems. They are realized with semiconductor nanowires with presence of so-called “Majorana zero modes” – a state of matter which is supposed to make the qubits significantly more resistant to noise. Recently such quantum chip was introduced and a roadmap up to commercially viable computers with millions of qubits presented.

All the technologies described above are still relatively young and can’t deliver to the user a sufficiently high number of logical qubits that would allow for industry applications to demonstrate commercial quantum advantage. This would be achieved when a quantum computer manages to solve a real-life business problem that currently can’t be solved with classical computers. One example could be a large-scale real-time portfolio optimisation or a travelling salesman problem (TSP) with thousands of cities to visit. Progress is partially slowed down by the fact that, as the quantum systems grow (number of qubits), it’s less and less easy to keep them together in the desired state. Even a small amount of noise can negatively affect the performance of the algorithms. A highly active field of study is the topic of quantum error correction where several ways to mitigate noise are being implemented. It means that more than one physical qubit must be used to create an algorithmic or logical qubit, which are the building blocks of a functioning algorithm. The implication is a large overhead of physical qubits that need to be built, for the most complex systems up to a factor of 1,000, labelling this stage of QC development as the noisy intermediate state quantum (NISQ) era. This indicates that a fault-tolerant quantum computer (FTQC) is still at least a decade away. Even though the FTQC still isn’t there yet, there’s a lot of research in the QC application domain demonstrating that even NISQ quantum computers can potentially bring some benefits.

A special class on their own are quantum annealers. While the above technologies provide us with ‘digital’ QC, quantum annealers are the ‘analogue’ quantum computers. They’re based on superconducting technology and use the adiabatic theorem. This states that a quantum system can stay in its state if a change which is acting upon the system is sufficiently slow and the energy necessary to cause a transition into an excited state is sufficiently large. In such a case, the system can be prepared in a well-defined state and allowed to evolve into the final state which characterises the problem that needs to be solved.