The UN has declared 2025 as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, and the organization’s decision should not come as a surprise, since in the medium term, industries such as finance, pharmaceuticals and logistics will benefit the most from these solutions.
While the idea of using this technology for computing is not new — it dates back to 1980 when IBM, Microsoft and Intel began a race to be the first to declare «quantum superiority» — today we are seeing significant advances that encourage us to believe that what was once science fiction can become part of our daily lives.
Along these lines, the path to the creation of quantum computers is taking place in public and private spheres, where the future projection is promising. In this regard, a report by the Boston Consulting Group indicates that, between the next three and five years, investments of more than 10 billion dollars are expected in this field.
While all industries will benefit from the development of this technology, those that will have the greatest positive impact are the financial, pharmaceutical and logistics industries.
In the case of banks and insurers, these organizations will not only be able to improve fraud detection models, but also optimize investment portfolios, automate processes such as clearing and settlement, or identify patterns and make correlations in large amounts of data.
The pharmaceutical sector, for its part, will be able to simulate the behavior of molecules to better understand them and learn about chemical structures in the creation of new drugs, activities that can be challenging with current technology.
Logistics is also another industry that will benefit in the medium and long term, as it will be able to create different fictitious scenarios with the aim of being prepared to resolve setbacks efficiently.
The other side of quantum computing
Although the future we are beginning to see is promising, the reality is that we must be cautious. To achieve a level of accessibility and appropriation similar to that of Artificial Intelligence (AI), specialized companies must find answers to the lack of their own languages when designing solutions. Likewise, they must find alternatives so that information is not destroyed in a short period of time, which occurs because qubits (the minimum unit of information) are not yet of a high quality and, finally, they must promote the development of tools that allow more logical operations to be carried out with these devices.
Although these three barriers can be major impediments, there are researchers and experts (with whom I agree) who maintain that, if the pace of progress and the level of investment in the discipline continue, in approximately five years we will have better quantum computers than those that exist today.
I would like to close this space by recommending to those who are reading me to closely follow the developments in Quantum Computing and, as soon as it is available, invest in this technology to enjoy the benefits and boost competitiveness in their industries.
