What Enterprise Leaders Should Be Thinking About in Quantum Over the Next 12 Months

For enterprise leaders, the next 12 months should be less about trying to predict exactly when quantum technologies will mature and more about building the capabilities needed to evaluate, adopt and respond to them intelligently.

That is the message emerging from leaders I recently spoke with  across industry, academia and government. 

While their priorities differ, there is broad agreement around several themes: focus on real problems, benchmark technologies properly, build internal expertise, develop strong research partnerships and treat post-quantum security as an immediate concern rather than a distant one.

For Krzysztof Gofryk, Directorate Fellow at Idaho National Laboratory, the starting point is realism.

“Enterprise leaders should be realistic and specific about the problems they want quantum technologies to solve. They should identify meaningful benchmarks, build relationships with research organizations, and invest in the people needed to evaluate these technologies properly.”

His view is that enterprises should resist treating quantum as synonymous with quantum computing alone.
“They should also look beyond quantum computing. Quantum sensing, quantum materials, and hybrid quantum/classical approaches may provide important opportunities on a shorter timescale.”

That broader perspective is important. Enterprise adoption is unlikely to follow a single path, and different quantum technologies may reach commercial relevance on very different timelines.

For Yancho Gerdjikov, Manager, Emerging Technology at Nestlé, there are three priorities that should shape enterprise thinking over the coming year.
The first is cybersecurity.

“First accelerate post-quantum cryptography readiness. Unlike many quantum computing applications, quantum-safe security is not a future issue.”

Gerdjikov argues that organizations should begin by understanding their current exposure.

“Organizations need to understand their cryptographic landscape, improve crypto agility, and begin planning migration paths for critical systems and long-lived data.”
His second priority is to become much more selective about quantum use cases.

“Identify high-value problem areas rather than chasing technology trends.”

Rather than experimenting for the sake of experimenting, Gerdjikov believes enterprises should focus on areas where the underlying problem is sufficiently difficult — and sufficiently valuable — to justify exploring new approaches.

“Organizations should concentrate on optimization, decision intelligence, and scientific modeling challenges that are difficult and economically meaningful enough to justify exploration with quantum-inspired and hybrid approaches.”

His third priority is organizational capability.

“Invest in people and ecosystems. The companies most likely to benefit from future breakthroughs will be the ones that start building internal expertise today.”

For Gerdjikov, skills and organizational structures could become just as important as access to technology itself.

“Skills, governance models, external partnerships, and experimentation frameworks are becoming strategic assets in their own right.”

His broader message is therefore not that enterprises should make enormous bets on quantum today, but that they should begin positioning themselves for a technology landscape that could look very different several years from now.

“Leaders should prepare for quantum as a long-term capability, not as a short-term bet. The organizations that learn now will have far more options later.”
The importance of independent validation. Determining whether a particular quantum application is genuinely valuable will also require enterprises to become more sophisticated buyers of emerging technology.

Rick Mukherjee, Director of the UTC Quantum Center at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga, believes closer collaboration with universities could play an important role.
“Depending on the use case of interest, enterprises should consider partnering with universities to conduct independent research and validation.”

Mukherjee argues that independent academic research can provide an important counterweight to purely commercial assessments of emerging technologies.
“Investing in university-led R&D can provide an objective and realistic benchmark for evaluating quantum applications, helping enterprises distinguish genuine potential from the technology pitches of quantum companies that have a commercial interest in selling their solutions.”

That does not mean dismissing vendor innovation. Rather, it means developing an independent framework for judging whether a proposed solution actually solves a meaningful enterprise problem.

As Mukherjee puts it: “These partnerships can also provide a more rigorous foundation for assessing the feasibility, performance, and long-term value of emerging quantum technologies.”

Build a roadmap, not just a pilot. While individual pilots remain important, Susan Gregurick, Associate Director for Data Science at the National Institutes of Health, believes organizations should also take a longer-term strategic view.

“I believe that enterprise leaders should be developing a QIS roadmap for the next 3 years.”

For Gregurick, quantum information science should increasingly be considered alongside other strategic technologies rather than being isolated as a specialist research topic.
“This is a technology that appears to be reachable to many different use cases and planning for QIS as part of a larger scientific strategy is something leaders should consider.”
A roadmap does not require organisations to predict precisely when quantum advantage will arrive. Instead, it can help determine which capabilities should be monitored, which skills need to be developed and where experiments or partnerships could create useful knowledge.

One area cannot wait

If much of enterprise quantum strategy is about preparation and experimentation, Karnika Yashwant, Founder and CEO of KEY Difference, sees one area as substantially more urgent.

“One thing, and it has a deadline: cryptographic inventory and crypto-agility.”
The concern is the long-term security of data being collected today.
“Harvest-now-decrypt-later means the data being exfiltrated today is already exposed to a machine that does not exist yet, so the migration clock started before the hardware did.”

For many enterprises, however, moving towards post-quantum security begins with a much more fundamental challenge: simply understanding where cryptography exists across complex technology estates.

“Most enterprises cannot currently answer the basic question of which systems use which algorithms and who owns them — that answer is a twelve-month project in itself, before any post-quantum migration begins.”

Yashwant's conclusion is unequivocal: “Everything else can wait; this cannot.”

Outside security, however, she advocates a much more measured approach to enterprise experimentation.
“Pick one workload — and run a small, honest pilot with a clear kill criterion, rather than a broad ‘quantum strategy’ that commits to nothing.”
He also argues that enterprise technology buyers need to become more critical of the metrics used to describe progress in quantum computing.

“Stop buying qubit counts as a proxy for progress; ask about error rates, coherence and logical qubits, and treat raw physical qubit numbers as marketing until proven otherwise.”
His view is that enterprises should treat quantum computing investment today primarily as a way of creating future strategic options rather than expecting an immediate return.
“Fault tolerance is realistically a 2029-2035 story, and budgets should be sized as a call option, not as a line item expecting near-term return.”

From quantum ambition to quantum readiness
Taken together, these perspectives point towards a shift in how enterprise leaders should think about quantum.
The emphasis is increasingly moving away from broad declarations of intent and towards specific organizational capabilities.
For some organizations, that means beginning post-quantum cryptography programmes now. For others, it means identifying a difficult optimisation or scientific modelling problem that warrants experimentation. It may mean creating university partnerships, establishing technical benchmarks or developing a three-year quantum information science roadmap.

And across all of those areas, the recurring message from these leaders is that organizations need people capable of separating genuine technological progress from hype.
The next 12 months may therefore be less about asking “When will quantum arrive?”
The more useful questions are likely to be: Where could it genuinely matter to our organization? How would we know if it works? What capabilities do we need to assess it? And what should we start doing now?