Sponsor Interview - Scott Bucholz, Global Quantum Lead, Deloitte

As a leading professional services firm, Deloitte has been at the forefront of exploring and implementing quantum computing solutions for businesses across multiple sectors. In this interview, Scott Bucholz, Global Quantum Lead, Deloitte discusses the future prospects of quantum computing, key challenges of quantum, his thoughts of the event in April and other topics.

Please give us a little introduction on your current role and what you do

I serve as the Global Lead for Quantum Computing at Deloitte. In that role, I am responsible for coordinating efforts to explore the applications of quantum computers and quantum technologies, coordinating with vendor partner organizations, demystifying the topic of quantum computers to business and technology executives and overseeing Deloitte’s overall strategy and investments in the quantum space

What do you consider your biggest professional achievement to date?

The proudest moments in my consulting career have been the client system go-lives. After months and years of effort to modernize systems, seeing the new system and processes in use is the most rewarding thing I get to do.

What are you most excited about for quantum in 2023? What predictions do you have for the year ahead?

I am most excited on two fronts:

 - First, the degree of progress in gate-based approaches is incredible. From the algorithms to applications to hardware, every month brings exciting announcements and future promise that we will see quantum advantage that is meaningful to businesses in the future.

- Next, in the meantime, we’re starting to see that by using approaches like combining annealers and classical techniques, we can beat the best classical techniques in some cases. That’s incredibly exciting.

I look forward to 2023 bringing more of all the above and increased diversity of innovation.

Where does your organization sit within the quantum ecosystem?

We are a consulting organization. We work to connect our clients with solutions to their business problems, from strategy and discovery to implementation and sustainment.

Will 2023 be a year we come closer to quantum advantage for enterprises. If so, how?

Depending on one’s definition of “quantum advantage,” there is some available today using quantum sensors and annealers and other “inspired” technology. While those tend to exist in narrow niches, I expect those niches to continue to grow over the course of 2023 and beyond.

If we think about annealers, as I mentioned in question #3, we are using them jointly with classical machine learning techniques to develop improved techniques that can beat (or at least tie) one or the other separately.

What do you think the key challenges of working with quantum in the NISQ era is?

Beyond the challenges of working with the hardware, it’s currently tricky manage expectations while balancing the future potential of the technology with the current reality on the ground.

Download the Quantum.Tech Agenda:

Scott Bucholz will be participating on the 12:25 panel on April 26, discussing Quantum for Enterprises; overriding the hype and showing the ROI. The panel will explore:

• How far off is a real quantum advantage for enterprises?
• How are they scaling up their Quantum teams?
• What realistically can quantum achieve?
• Why is it important to leave the hype at the door?

To find out other topics that will be discussed in Boston, download the agenda

How many qubits do you see us reaching in the next year to 18 months? Will they make a difference?

For qubit counts, I’d refer readers to the public roadmaps from the hardware vendors. The difference qubit counts will make depends on the quality of those qubits, and vendors are simultaneously focused on improving both qubit count and qubit quality and connectivity.

How do you think quantum will impact on cyber-security? Do enterprises need to be approaching this challenge now, or is that hype?

Today, enterprises need to be inventorying their data and identifying its sensitivity, where its stored, and how its secured (at rest and in motion.) They also need to understand where and how they are employing digital signatures.

That prepares them to be able to respond when global standards are finalized. It will be necessary to validate deployment of the new standards to existing resources and remediate edge cases that may not see cryptography and digital signature upgrades occur as part of routine operations (i.e., older IoT (Internet of Things) devices and equipment.)

In terms of finding the right talent; how are you going about the looking for the best people to work on your product?

It’s challenging for everyone, but happily we have a core team of experienced resources who are practiced at identifying candidates with the right backgrounds and bringing them up to speed.

Do you see quantum as a service becoming a major trend? Do you think most quantum will be from the cloud?

Time will tell. There are many options being explored, some of which may lend themselves to being more portable and some much less so.

In the near term, exploratory usage tends to be in the cloud because the rate of change is such that most commercial organizations will find that renting beats ownership at this juncture.

How do you see quantum working with AI (Artificial Intelligence) and machine learning?

As we are already seeing today, quantum annealers can have a positive impact on the ability to train AI and machine learning models. That means we can combine our best classical techniques with some quantum tuning and get better results.

Research suggests that the gate-based quantum computers will be able to train better with less data than our classical techniques. As that hardware matures, we may see dramatic improvements in the outcomes of AI and ML (Machine Learning). Moreover, if we can develop quantum memory and potentially connect quantum sensors directly to the computers, we may have even more capabilities available to us that we can barely imagine today!

What are you looking to showcase at our show in Boston this April?

We’re looking forward to sharing the sorts of positive results that we’re seeing organizations achieve with the current state of quantum computing and related technologies today.

Who are you looking forward to meeting?

I look forward to meeting with others in the industry to talk shop as well as those who are curious to learn more about what is going on in quantum computing.

Quantum.Tech covers quantum computing, cryptography as well as sensing; what area are you most excited about and why?

As a long-time computer scientist, I am most excited about the advances in quantum computing and its associated algorithms and use cases. With that said, there are fascinating developments occurring in the security and sensing domains (among others.) Manipulating individual particles to do useful work is right at the edge of science fiction!

Scott Buchholz will be speaking on the 12:25pm panel Quantum for Enterprises; overriding the hype and showing the ROI on April 26. Make sure you don’t miss hearing from him at Quantum.Tech Boston at Marriott Copley Place this April here.