According to Technavio, the global Quantum Computing (QC) market size is estimated to grow by USD 9,013.68 million from 2022 to 2027. The market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 18.84% during the forecast period. Moreover, the growth momentum will accelerate hence the rising need to understand QC more in-depth and in a holistic manner, from its current use cases, adoption to future applications.

So what – The Asia Edition?

With unprecedented use cases from drug discovery to how data is secured, Quantum Computing (QC) will transform the future of science and technology. Still in the early stages in Asia, Japan has made key advancements in the quantum computer race, India has developed its own strategy for the technology, and debates are simmering over whether China has surpassed the U.S. on some fronts.

In this exclusive interview, we speak to Muni Vinay Kamisetty, Senior Vice President - Regional head of Data and Automation - Corporate Data, Lazada, who gives a comprehensive coverage about QC adoption and ecosystem integration and sheds light on common misbeliefs on QC plus debunks them!

1. On enterprises getting started with quantum computing adoption - What are the initial steps to help plan your quantum innovation journey and how to find ecosystem partners to accelerate it?

Even before starting your quantum computing journey, you need to assess the fundamental business advantage and how this niche technology can create value for your enterprise. If you operate in a highly innovative environment, then leaders should definitely think about the early adoption of quantum computing. Even though it’s an emerging technology and in nascent stages, it early can create the first movers advantage for your business, help optimise your investment strategies and help discover new products. With the steep learning curve and the excessive technical investment associated with quantum computing, it might help your firm to stay competitive and relevant in the market.

Once we understand the objectives of using the technology, most of the organisations start small with a “proof of concept” (POC). Typically involving a Quantum computing evangelist and small group of project team, trying to leverage quantum computing as a service (Qcaas) from major cloud providers and experiment its first use case (business problem cannot be resolved using a traditional computing power). Most of the firms also leverage the quantum computing solution providers and collaborate with the industry experts to push its POC. But the big tech companies are having the highest advantage, as they can push their own inhouse solutions for the wider adoption.

2. As it is now, a quantum ecosystem appears to be emerging with growing funding, advancing software and hardware, and cloud-based services. Why is this important and how can it be leveraged for your first industry use case?

Absolutely, growth in quantum computing eco system has been exponential in past few years. For example, most of the quantum computers in 2018-19 can only be used for specific use cases for example to generate random numbers and used for lot of simulative based use cases. With the advancement in the research, growing funding and even increased support from the government organisations, especially around the stability of qubits and reduction in noise (fundamental units of quantum computing circuits), some of the firms started to implement the solution for the practical use cases. For examples financial institutions like Moody’s, JPMorgan and BBVA have been successfully simulating the financial business cases like credit modelling and risk scoring using quantum computing. There has been good development in the quantum software frameworks and cloud based simulation platforms, that can enable developers with basic coding to develop and simulate quantum solutions. Alibaba Cloud Quantum Development Platform (ACQDP) (source: Damo labs website) and IBM Qiskit are few examples. On top of that, these solutions are easily accessible (but at a cost) in all the major cloud based providers. Unless, you are a big tech investing and researching on quantum solutions, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel and we should tap this eco system and collaborate for your first use case.

3. How can organisations successfully break out of the PoC cycle?

I have seen firms stuck at the POC level and struggle to adopt the quantum computing at a wider scale. Most of the times, they don’t have an alignment and buy in from the leadership/ c-suite to take it forward. Generally, having a concrete roadmap with large number of quantum computing use cases with the priority of implementation (high value and low complexity) can help with the necessary sponsorship. Also driving this from a central team and highly knowledgeable team, can help evangelise the solution across the enterprise. Furthermore, quantum computing is a niche technology, with lot of limitations and trying to experiment use cases with out proper quantum computing knowledge or even wrong selection of use cases are often other reasons. Hence partnering with a quantum computing company that can help analyse your business case and help build the solution, especially POC stage is very important.

4. It is important that end-users can see the potential as they are the influencer to adopt new tech such as quantum technology – how can we promote this?

Unlike other technologies like automation, AI, the quantum computing cannot be used for the ground level, day to day business use cases, but applied to a specific business problems, that a traditional computer cannot resolve. This requires a virtual team of highly knowledgeable resources, subject matter expertise in various scientific concepts and more over the implementation is extremely time consuming. Hence wider adoption of this technology and influencing other business operations are still years away. But what enterprises can do is to create the awareness of the technology, help key business leaders familiarised with the high level understanding of Quantum computing. They can at least help identify appropriate use cases for the roadmap. Companies like Alibaba, publishes lots of research and white papers not just for the benefit of the business, but also to share the key studies with quantum computing community (source: DAMO labs website).

5. What is the implication of using AI to accelerate quantum computing and quantum computing to accelerate AI?

Quantum computing and Artificial Intelligence go hand in hand. Quantum AI, nothing but use of quantum computing for computation of machine learning (ML) algorithms has been increasing. Fundamental problem with the ML/AI, is the intensive data sets that are required to label and train a supervised ML model. Recent blockbuster chatgpt 3 is built based on 175 billion parameters. Imagine the computational power needed by a traditional computer to train such a large language model. Even if you have heavy GPU’s, and most advanced training frameworks, it will take months to train and validate the model. Using Quantum AI, we can model an optimised data sets – “quantum data” and the same time use quantum neural networks (in combination with classical ML) to train models faster and better. This is still conceptual though, no one practically proved it. Except there are frameworks from Google like TensorFlow Quantum (TFQ) for rapid proto typing and simulation of quantum + AI use cases.

On the other side of the coin, quantum computing outputs contains lots of noise and decoherence. Researchers are working best to address the problem, but at the current state, firms and researchers are leveraging AI to denoise and reduce the coherence, thus improving the accuracy of a quantum computer.

6. Can you share some common myths about quantum computing and debunk them for us?

Most of the common misconception about Quantum computers are that they will replace the traditional computers. But in realty, we need the best of both in combined architecture to put the practical use of the technology. While the role of qubits (fundamental blocks of quantum computer) is to unlock the exponential computing power and produce the optimised output. We still need our regular computers to convert the data generated by qubits into a language that we understand and use.

Quantum computers solve all the types of business problem. Due to the exponential computational properties, they are best at solving optimisation problems, secure your data using better cryptographic techniques (quantum key distribution) and finally it can be used to model nature for e.g. drug discovery, to discover and model new chemical properties etc.,

Last but not the least – We have a working quantum computer now. At the moment, functional quantum computers exist and are even capable of doing some work, but we are at least 10 years away in using the most accurate, error prone and a stable quantum computer. At the current state all we have is quantum simulators, hybrid computers and that too they generate a lot of noise. hence, I can say we are still in early stages of “quantum advantage” and a long way to go to achieve quantum supremacy (stage where quantum computing can solve a business problem in its area of scope and cannot be done using a traditional computer”) for day to day use cases

7. What are some exciting upcoming applications that quantum can be used for?

I have seen a latest research papers to break the 2048 bit - RSA encryption (a benchmark for current asymmetric encryption across the world). However, there are lot of arguments about the paper, that there is no empirical proof claiming to break the shors algorithm. However, in the near future it can potentially do that. Hence as part of cyber security, companies should think about “quantum safe cryptography” Other interesting use cases are around solving the climate change problems, faster drug discovery and acceleration of vaccines development during pandemics. Also firms like Hyundai is leveraging quantum computing for developing better lithium ion air batteries and advanced fuel cell technologies, that can prolong the life in electric vehicles significantly.

8. Why is Quantum.Tech Asia an event not to be missed?

I have been vocal around, how collaborations with quantum computing subject matter expertise, various vendors and researchers can boost up individuals quantum knowledge. Especially when you are venturing into the niche and nascent tech, you need to share and observe the best practices from industry experts. I believe, Quantum Tech will be able provide that platform and opportunity to interact and learn from like minded people.

Thank you for sharing your opinions with us Muni! Be sure to catch him during Day 1 of Quantum Tech 2023 during the Fireside Chat: Quantum Standards & Certification – How can the industry set a global benchmark and why is it needed to provide end user confidence and quality assurance/accountability?

Download Quantum.Tech APAC 2023 Full Agenda