Among today’s emerging technologies, only agentic AI rivals quantum computing in the hype and promises surrounding its enterprise impact. While significant research on quantum computing continues, there are opportunities to learn about and pilot quantum computing today.
It took 20 years to go from primitive virtual machines bought on credit cards to the over $900 billion cloud computing industry we see today. Experts present a similar timeline for quantum computing and suggest that more enterprises need to invest in developing skills, reviewing business opportunities, and preparing for security challenges. Bain estimates the market potential for quantum computing at between $100 billion and $250 billion, with top applications in machine learning, logistics network optimization, and drug discovery.
Quantum computing infrastructure today
You can experiment with quantum computing today on noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) hardware. These devices are noisy, with quantum computations that are error-prone, so pilot projects are often hybrid, pairing quantum and classical computation. Their scale is limited to 50–1,000 physical qubits, the basic unit of information used to encode data in quantum computing. The largest quantum computer today is 1,121 qubits.
