Quantum computing has no return on investment today. That is precisely why enterprises that wait for one will already be too late.
At EBS26, Avasant convened a panel called “The Quantum Effect” to cut through the noise around a technology most feel they should understand and few actually do. Moderated by Jim Rinaldi, Distinguished Fellow at Avasant and former CIO of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the session deliberately paired voices that rarely share a stage: Nardo Manaloto, General Partner at Qubits Ventures, who invests in frontier quantum companies; David Steuerman of UCLA, who builds public-private partnerships around quantum; Florenta Teodoridis, Associate Professor of Management and Organization at USC, who studies how emerging technologies actually diffuse through the economy; and Hayk Tepanyan, Co-founder and CTO of BlueQubit, a quantum software firm.
Rinaldi opened by naming the tension in the room directly: enterprises understand AI well enough to feel its pull, but quantum remains abstract. “Why do I need quantum?” he asked the panel. The conversation that followed produced a consistent and, for many in the audience, counterintuitive answer. Quantum computing has no return on investment today and cannot yet solve most economically important problems — and that is precisely the reason to engage now rather than later. Avasant’s read of the discussion is that the case for acting early rests on economics and competitive positioning far more than on physics.
The most important framing of the session came from Teodoridis, who placed quantum in the same category economists reserve for electricity, the semiconductor, and AI itself: a general-purpose technology. She was careful to note the term is overused, but argued it genuinely applies here — quantum is the kind of technology whose value depends on co-invention from the sectors that will eventually use it. Her conclusion was blunt: waiting until quantum computers are “ready” is the wrong strategy, because not getting involved early means getting left behind.
Steuerman extended the point in a way that should reframe how executives think about their role. The scientists advancing the hardware, he noted, do not understand the specific problems facing healthcare, manufacturing, or finance — that knowledge lives inside enterprises. Companies that bring real problems to the table now are not passive buyers waiting for a finished product; as Teodoridis put it, they are the ones who get a say in which quantum applications become feasible first. Those who wait inherit whatever others choose to build.
Beneath this sits a trap the panel returned to repeatedly. Teodoridis described it as a catch-22: the field’s progress depends partly on demand and experimentation from application sectors, so if enterprises collectively hold back until the technology is unambiguously ready, that readiness arrives later — delayed precisely by their absence. The “magic moment” never quite comes for those who sit it out, because their participation was part of what would have produced it.
If the economic case argues for acting early, Steuerman made the practical case that doing so is now low-cost and low risk. He pointed out that an enterprise team can spin up a Python notebook today, frame a data or optimization problem it cares about, and submit it across multiple classes of quantum hardware — superconducting, neutral-atom, and others — through the cloud. The work won’t be optimal on any single machine, but the organization is freed from having to pick the winning technology. When one hardware approach makes a leap, Steuerman noted, the same notebook can simply be pointed at the better backend.
Tepanyan reinforced why the investment is in people, not just access. Quantum, he stressed, is not a matter of translating C++ into another language — it is a fundamentally different paradigm, and the real work is training a workforce to think in it. That is the heart of why early engagement matters: the barrier to entry is conceptual rather than financial, and conceptual barriers reward an early start and punish a late one. Teodoridis framed the implication for leaders as treating quantum investment as a separate lab of experimentation, distinct from daily operations and judged by what it teaches rather than by near-term ROI.
Steuerman closed this thread with a warning about scarcity that gives the early-mover argument real teeth. Quantum compute capacity is genuinely limited, he argued, and the moment a profitable application is found — in materials, fintech, or optimization — the company that found it can consume available compute for months, because new machines take close to a year to build and no one can produce them at scale. The firms already fluent in the technology, with a problem worth running, will be the ones positioned to seize that moment.
Manaloto pushed back on what he called the central misnomer: that quantum means quantum computing. It does not. He described quantum as a science with a full technology stack spanning sensing, communication, and cryptography, several layers of which are commercially investable well ahead of large-scale computing. For enterprises, he suggested, the strategic question is less “when can a quantum computer solve my problem” and more “where in this stack does my business already intersect.”
Drawing on his background investing in healthcare, Manaloto pointed to the intersection of quantum, AI, and biology as a near-term frontier. He described portfolio companies building quantum sensing devices that capture biological signals — vibrational data inside cells, oxidative-stress markers, brain activity — at a precision not previously possible, with applications in drug discovery, diagnostics, and personalized medicine. The pattern he sketched is one Avasant finds compelling: the earliest enterprise value from quantum may come not from a universal computer but from sensing and detection that feeds richer data into the AI systems organizations are already building.
If most of the panel rewarded initiative on the enterprise’s own timeline, Manaloto and Tepanyan were emphatic that one dimension does not: security. “Q-Day” — the point at which a quantum computer can break today’s public-key encryption — is commonly placed seven to fifteen years out, but Manaloto argued that estimate is far too comfortable. He cited systems moving from tens of thousands toward hundreds of thousands of qubits and efforts explicitly aimed at breaking RSA, and Tepanyan added that researchers are now hesitant to publish certain algorithms for fear of how quickly they could be weaponized.
The exposure, both noted, is not only future-tense. Rinaldi, drawing on his CIO experience, underscored that encrypted data stolen today can be stored and decrypted later — a “harvest now, decrypt later” logic that already puts long-lived sensitive information at risk. For most enterprises, the prudent moves Manaloto urged — inventorying cryptographic exposure, planning migration to quantum-safe networks, and protecting data with a long shelf life — are worth beginning regardless of the precise arrival date, and they double as an accessible on-ramp to building broader quantum literacy.
The throughline of “The Quantum Effect” was that treating quantum as a problem for later is understandable and mistaken. As a general-purpose technology, it rewards the organizations that engage while the roadmap is still being written; the means of engagement are now low-cost and hardware-agnostic; the value will likely emerge across a broad stack rather than from computing alone; and the security dimension runs on a clock no enterprise sets for itself.
The path forward the panel pointed to is concrete. Identify the two or three problems in your business where quantum could plausibly matter, get into a sandbox, build the internal language, and begin the cryptographic groundwork now. As the panelists agreed in closing, the objective is not to predict the landmark application — it is to be close enough to the technology to recognize it, and ready to act, when it arrives.
By: Minos Stratakis, Consultant, Avasant and Jim Rinaldi, Distinguished Fellow, Avasant
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