Interview: Katherine Longergan, Chief Marketing Officer, Zapata Computing

Zapata Computing is one of the founding sponsors at Quantum.Tech Boston 2022. Ahead of the fantastic event in June 2022, we caught up Katherine Londergan, Chief Marketing Officer at Zapata, to discuss their place in the quantum landscape, their work behind the scenes in both science and engineering to help customers prepare for quantum and how their quantum solutions help the end user.

At the start of the year you published a report on quantum adoption in the enterprise can you give a little bit of insight into the findings?

In December 2021, Zapata Computing commissioned a survey of 300 executives at global enterprises with revenues of over $250 million. The most interesting finding was that the earliest adopters of quantum computing, or roughly 12% of adopters, are behaving differently than the rest of the pack. They expect to achieve some form of competitive advantage within a year – or answered that they already have. Part of this competitive advantage may be locking up or upskilling talent. A full 41% of adopters expect to achieve a competitive advantage within two years. (Please note, “competitive advantage” is not the “quantum advantage” frequently discussed in our ecosystem).

The findings suggest that more and more organizations are seeing quantum computing as the next frontier in their data analytics capabilities. Quantum computing has moved from the fringes to the core of the digital transformation agenda, and the earliest adopters are already closing in on a competitive advantage. If organizations don’t want to lag behind, they need to start building the infrastructure, applications, and workforce for quantum computing today. These things take time to develop and iterate, and if you wait for the technology to be much more mature, you’ll already be too late.

Were you surprised by the results?

Yes and no. Even though we’re deeply embedded in helping enterprises adopt quantum computing, it was still surprising to see the scale of that adoption. Our survey found that 69% of global executives have adopted or plan to adopt quantum computing in the next year. We were also pleasantly surprised by the growth in enterprise budgets dedicated to quantum computing. 28% of enterprises we surveyed now have budgets topping $1 million. This marks a turning point from the ~$100K R&D budgets of the past; enterprises are now getting serious about solving real problems across business units with quantum computing.

That said, given the complexity of quantum computing and the limited pool of qualified talent, it was no surprise that a whopping 96% of respondents agreed they could not successfully adopt quantum computing without the help of a trusted vendor. However, 73% of respondents were concerned about getting locked-in with a full-stack quantum vendor, while 47% were very or extremely concerned. This points to the need for flexible, interoperable, and most importantly, forward compatible quantum application development platforms, which allow users to swap different hardware and software components out on the backend as more powerful options become available. These requirements are shaping the development of our platform, Orquestra®.

Do you think the results show a shift towards acceptance of the opportunities quantum computing present?

Yes, leaders are acknowledging quantum’s inevitability and starting to internalize the urgency of adopting it. The next step is to get more tangible in their quantum strategies and answer some important questions. In particular, which use cases should they tackle in the near-term? What barriers will they need to overcome to adopt quantum computing beyond an experimental context? How can they integrate quantum computing into their existing enterprise IT environment? Who will they need to hire internally, and who will they need to consult with externally to drive their adoption strategies forward? As companies get more tangible, they will need to bring together expertise from across their organization, from research, engineering and IT operations to domain experts who understand the business problems that need to be solved.

If a reader wished to download the report; where could they find it?

You can find the report at www.zapatacomputing.com/enterprise-survey.

How do you see quantum software interplaying with quantum hardware?

Quantum software and hardware interplay at many levels of the stack, from a low level around pulse control up through circuit compilation, algorithms responding to hardware specification, orchestrating access to hardware, and more. But quantum hardware and software are just two pieces to a much larger puzzle. Quantum computing will always require significant classical computing resources. With such heterogeneous compute resources involved, enterprise users will need a way to easily swap out and test different hardware and software components, both classical and quantum, to identify the best resources for their particular problem. Given the early maturity of both quantum hardware and software, it is inevitable that both will become increasingly powerful over time, and enterprise users will want a way to easily incorporate the latest advances into their computational workflows. Our software platform, Orquestra, gives users the flexibility to benchmark the performance of different backends, simulate at scale before running on real quantum hardware, and swap in new pieces of software and hardware over time in a modular way.

Would it be right to define you as a Software as a Service company to major enterprise?

Zapata’s offering for enterprise is SaaS-like in that it is a subscription model, combining the Orquestra platform, applications, infrastructure, and access to our team’s expertise. We are more analogous to enterprise software companies than traditional SaaS—some might say we are PaaS. Orquestra, is the unified platform for building and deploying quantum-ready applications® at enterprise scale. Orquestra applications are forward-compatible with new technology, data and architecture over time.

How far do you think we are from Quantum Advantage?

It’s hard to say and hard to define! We like to talk about “practical quantum applications” which shifts the focus to quantum techniques that can deliver a business impact. If our hardware partners’ timelines are accurate, we expect to achieve this milestone in 2-5 years. We are actively working on accelerating quantum advantage for industry-relevant problems in quantum chemistry and materials, but we expect this milestone will be more than 5 years away. We do, however, see near-term low-hanging fruit in the domains of optimization and machine learning, especially with our proprietary approaches to generative modeling. As an example, say you have a dataset that you want to use to train a machine learning model, but the data is limited and incomplete. With quantum devices today, you can generate synthetic data to supplement the training dataset that is otherwise extremely hard to reproduce with classical devices. We envision quantum devices (or simulated devices) becoming the engines for these generative machine learning models. Additionally, we believe generative models can also help create novel solutions to optimization problems in the next several years.

Do you see quantum computing replacing or augmenting classical computing in years to come?

Augmenting, for certain. Quantum will first boost or improve classical solutions, then ultimately solve classically unsolvable problems. Generative modelling, as described above, might be the fastest path to an advantage from quantum.

Problems such as simulating chemical processes and material properties, are hard to solve classically despite decades of scientific efforts. As the problem size grows, these problems require an exponential increase in classical computing power to solve exactly. In practice, even moderately large instances are hopeless for classical computers. Quantum computing will provide a fundamentally unique resource for computation that has shown promise for efficiently solving these intractable problems. But we won’t be there for quite some time.

You are kindly one of our lead sponsors at Quantum.Tech in Boston this June; what are you looking forward to at the conference?

We’re excited to see the real and tangible things the earliest adopters are doing to pull ahead in the Quantum Revolution. We also look forward to giving attendees information and stories that will help them garner support within their organizations to truly accelerate their quantum capability-building. Ultimately, this could mean having our customers lead conversations around the business impact rather than leading them with technical concepts and potential. And that is super exciting.