IBM CEO predicts quantum computing breakthrough in 3-5 years | Karl Haller

Posted by timmreardon on 11/15/2025
Posted in: Uncategorized.

When IBM CEO Arvind Krishna says quantum computing is “three to five years away from shocking people,” it’s time to sit up and take notice.

I shared earlier highlights of the AI portion of Arvind’s discussion with Malcolm Gladwell. They also went into #quantum, which is getting closer to becoming a reality for enterprises.

3-5 years is 2028-30 — not so far into the future. And when he says “shocking,” he’s talking about:

  • Making billions in the financial markets. Appr. $13 trillion moves through the financial markets each day. Even a 1 basis point improvement is $130 billion. Now you see why the recent paper by HSBC that “using quantum computer, bond trading was 34% more accurate than their prior technique” caused a ripple.
  • Dramatic improvements in operational efficiency. “Let’s take a post office in a mid-sized country [that] … burns 1 billion gallons of fuel per year.” Optimizing last-mile delivery is the classic #travelingsalesman problem. But we can currently only get to 80% efficiency. With quantum, if we can get another 10%, that’s 100M gallons of fuel, which could drive hundreds of millions in savings.

“These are pretty attractive problems to go after.” Indeed.

Today’s challenge is scale. “Quantum computing today is where GPUs and AI were in 2015.” But if your business has challenges that are solvable with quantum, and you’re not starting to experiment with it now, you may risk being “out of business in 10 years.”

Quantum represents a “new kind of math” which enables us to solve “new kinds of problems.” For retailers and brands, I think about three things:

  • Merchandise planning at the item x store level that’s accurate to within 1-2% of demand.
  • Personalization at scale that actually delivers on the 1to1 promise we’ve been chasing for 25 years.
  • The ability to monitor E2E (farm to home) supply chains and dynamically trigger IFTTT actions with little-to-no human intervention.
    (and i’m sure there are many others)

Arvind sees quantum as being “equal to semiconductors” in the ranking of technology advancements of the past 150 years. Yet it’s barely part of today’s conversations.

The internet had its #NetscapeMoment.
With AI, it was the launch of #ChatGPT.
Quantum will hit its #TippingPoint as well … and it will probably happen sooner than we think.

YouTube video — https://lnkd.in/eE9FdEU3
IBM Smart Talks — https://lnkd.in/eHhgTF7z
(also available on all major #podcast platforms)

Article link: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/karlhaller_quantum-travelingsalesman-netscapemoment-activity-7392561559732105217-J44C?