Just as you have your head around AI, quantum computing wants to have a pop at you as well.
Our resident expert in quantum computing, Jonathan Loretto, schools us in what we need to know as CEOs…
You know that feeling when someone explains something so genuinely world-altering that you almost want to laugh?
Like the first time someone tried to describe the internet to a room full of people in 1993 and half of them thought it was a fad? That is where we are with quantum computing right now, and the people laughing are going to regret it.
Most coverage treats quantum computing as a future problem, something for the next decade, something you can safely ignore until it becomes someone else's headache. That framing is dangerously wrong.
Quantum computing is a fundamentally different way of processing information, one that could crack in seconds problems that would take today's best supercomputers longer than the age of the universe to solve.
Companies are already using it, governments are racing for it and criminals are already exploiting the gap between where quantum computing is and where most people think it is.
The £47,000 that vanished
Imagine this...
John, a former IT project manager from Swindon, had been accumulating Bitcoin since 2017. By 2023 his wallet held just under £47,000 and he had done everything right: hardware wallet, long password, seed phrase backed up in a fireproof box.
In early 2024, it was gone. Hackers had stolen it.
His wallet used an older encryption standard now considered vulnerable to early-stage quantum attack techniques, with a publicly visible public key that under normal classical cryptography should be computationally impossible to reverse-engineer into a private key.
With sufficient quantum computing power, that impossibility disappears and becomes what the security community calls a tractable problem.
John's story is currently fictional, but it points to something far bigger than one person's lost savings. Most of the encryption protecting your bank account, your company's emails and your customers' data was designed for a world where quantum computers did not exist, and that world is ending faster than most people realise.
"We didn't lose his money to a hacker in a basement. We lost it to a machine that doesn't think like any machine we've built before."
How it works
Think of a classical computer as a methodical explorer in a giant maze, trying one path at a time, hitting dead ends, backing up and trying another.
A quantum computer is more like a search party that fans out and explores every possible path simultaneously before reporting back the answer. For certain kinds of problems, that difference represents an entirely different category of capability.
That capability comes from two principles of quantum physics.
The first is superposition: a normal computer bit is a 0 or a 1, while a quantum bit (a qubit) can be both simultaneously until the moment you observe it.
The second is entanglement, which Einstein called "spooky action at a distance," where the state of one qubit instantly influences another regardless of distance, allowing quantum computers to coordinate massively parallel calculations in ways classical machines cannot replicate.
For optimisation, cryptography, molecular simulation and pattern recognition in vast datasets, quantum computers operate in a fundamentally different league. They are not a replacement for your existing infrastructure but a specialised accelerator that works alongside what you already have, accessed via the cloud and brought in for specific workloads where it excels.
Where things stand today
The current era is known as NISQ (Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum), which you can think of as the technology's awkward teenage years. The machines exist and they work, but qubits are extraordinarily fragile, needing to be cooled to temperatures colder than deep space and protected from vibrations, electromagnetic interference and stray cosmic rays.
That noisiness is an engineering problem, and engineering problems get solved.
In the last twelve months alone, Silicon Quantum Computing demonstrated an 11-qubit processor with single-qubit fidelities reaching 99.99 per cent. IBM unveiled its 1,000-plus qubit Condor processor and has publicly committed to achieving "quantum advantage" by end of 2026 and a fully fault-tolerant machine by 2029.
Microsoft's topological qubit programme hit a critical milestone with the first real-time readout of a Majorana qubit, which is inherently more robust to noise. In 2024, NIST finalised its first post-quantum cryptography standards.
Meanwhile, real businesses are running real pilots.
HSBC reported the first empirical evidence of quantum value in live algorithmic bond trading. E.ON is using quantum optimisation for energy pricing and grid efficiency.
These are industry incumbents with serious commercial stakes building internal quantum expertise now, before the hardware is perfect, because the learning curve has value in itself.
The threat you are already facing
On the dark web and in the infrastructure of several nation-states, a strategy called "Harvest Now, Decrypt Later" is already underway.
Bad actors are intercepting and stockpiling encrypted communications today, on the basis that within two to five years quantum computing will make decrypting them trivial. Your M&A plans, your customer data, your intellectual property and your legal correspondence could already be sitting in someone's archive, waiting for the moment the decryption key arrives.
Every digital system most organisations rely on, from TLS encryption and VPNs to payment rails and identity management, rests on cryptographic standards that large-scale quantum computers will eventually break. The question is when, and whether you will be ready.
"The threat is not theoretical. It is a planning problem. Sensitive data stolen today could be decrypted in the future. Your CISO needs a quantum-cryptography risk roadmap now."
Who is making money?
IBM, Google and IonQ lead on hardware, with IBM particularly aggressive in commercialising cloud-based access. Defence and intelligence agencies across the US, UK, China and Europe are pouring billions into quantum for cryptography and secure communications.
JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and HSBC are running active programmes in portfolio optimisation, risk aggregation and fraud detection. In pharmaceuticals, Roche and AstraZeneca are exploring how quantum simulation could compress drug development from decades to years.
The four inflection points in the next five years
- First, post-quantum cryptography becomes mandatory as NIST's 2024 standards trigger one of the most expensive IT transitions in history for every organisation handling sensitive data.
- Second, quantum cloud goes mainstream as Amazon Braket, IBM Quantum and Azure Quantum commoditise access.
- Third, the first killer app arrives, most likely a pharmaceutical breakthrough or a demonstration of quantum supremacy in financial modelling.
- Fourth, investor and regulatory scrutiny intensifies, with the Bank of England already citing quantum alongside AI as transformative, and boards that cannot articulate a credible position on quantum readiness facing the same uncomfortable questions that unprepared leadership faced on AI three years ago.
As a CEO, what should you do?
You do not need a quantum lab or a physics degree, just a minimal and credible starting position. Run a quantum impact scan to identify which parts of your business involve heavy optimisation, simulation or cryptography workloads.
Assign an internal champion, typically sitting in data or technology, to build relationships with one or two quantum cloud providers and scope a clearly defined pilot.
Get your CISO moving on a formal assessment of quantum-related cryptographic exposure and a migration roadmap aligned to NIST guidance, because if your encryption relies on RSA or ECC without post-quantum alternatives in sight, that conversation needs to happen this quarter.
And put quantum on the technology roadmap alongside AI and automation, not as a budget item today but as an acknowledged horizon that shapes your hiring, partnerships and architecture choices over the next three to five years.
John lost £47,000 not because he was careless but because the technological ground shifted beneath him and nobody warned him in time. The quantum revolution is already underway, partial and sometimes messy but accelerating. The organisations that moved early on cloud in 2005 built advantages that took competitors a decade to close, and the same opportunity exists today.
The window for moving early is narrowing.
Jonathan works with quantum companies on growth, organisation and advising their clients on transformation.