The 12-Month Mandate
Ask enterprise, government, and academic leaders what quantum technology will deliver, and you'll get seven different answers. Ask them what to do about it in the next twelve months, and the responses converge fast: get your cryptographic house in order, and start now.
The Cryptographic Inventory Problem
Brian Miles, Principal Technical Lead at AT&T, has been making this case for a while — and says most companies still aren't there.
"I hear from a lot of companies and quantum tech vendors, the vast majority of companies have very little idea as to what their cryptographic posture even looks like. How can anyone possibly secure their networks and data against quantum threats when they don't know the 3 Ws: What cryptography do they have, Where is it located, and Who owns it."
Miles also champions crypto-agility and overlay solutions — what he calls a "PQC proxy" — as a way to get near-term protection in place "while still working to migrate all the underlying infrastructure to PQC," since a full migration will realistically take years.
Karnika Yashwant, CEO of KEY Difference, framed the urgency in starker terms, pointing to the risk of data being stolen today and decrypted once quantum computers catch up.
"Harvest-now-decrypt-later means the data being exfiltrated today is already exposed to a machine that does not exist yet, so the migration clock started before the hardware did. Most enterprises cannot currently answer the basic question of which systems use which algorithms and who owns them — that answer is a twelve-month project in itself, before any post-quantum migration begins. Everything else can wait; this cannot."
Jay Lowell of Boeing put it more simply: enterprise leaders should be "thinking about their migration path to post-quantum encryption" as one of just two priorities for the year ahead. And Yancho Gerdjikov of Nestlé was equally direct — quantum-safe security, he said, "is not a future issue." Organizations need to understand their cryptographic landscape, improve crypto agility, and begin planning migration paths now, particularly for long-lived data.
Beyond Crypto: Roadmaps, Pilots, and People
Cryptography wasn't the only priority on the table. Susan Gregurick of the NIH said her top recommendation is structural: "Enterprise leaders should be developing a QIS roadmap for the next 3 years," treating quantum as reachable across many use cases and worth folding into a broader scientific strategy.
Gerdjikov laid out three priorities for Nestlé and peers to weigh alongside PQC readiness: identify high-value problem areas rather than chasing technology trends, and invest in people and ecosystems. "The companies most likely to benefit from future breakthroughs will be the ones that start building internal expertise today," he said. "The key message is that leaders should prepare for quantum as a long-term capability, not as a short-term bet."
Aleena Taufiq of Verizon urged leaders to treat quantum readiness as a strategic planning exercise rather than a research curiosity — building internal awareness, identifying meaningful use cases, and fostering collaboration between technical and business teams. She also flagged a role for AI in the transition: it "may also play an increasingly important role in helping organizations simplify complex decision-making, identify opportunities, and accelerate readiness as quantum technologies continue to mature."
Rick Mukherjee of UTC recommended a specific tactic: lean on universities. "Investing in university-led R&D can provide an objective and realistic benchmark for evaluating quantum applications," he said, helping enterprises separate genuine potential from vendor pitches with a commercial interest in the answer.
Yashwant added two pieces of tactical advice of her own: pick a single workload and run "a small, honest pilot with a clear kill criterion" rather than a sprawling quantum strategy that commits to nothing, and stop treating qubit counts as a proxy for progress. "Ask about error rates, coherence and logical qubits, and treat raw physical qubit numbers as marketing until proven otherwise," she said, noting that fault tolerance is realistically a 2029–2035 story — so budgets should be sized "as a call option, not as a line item expecting near-term return."
What Attendees Want from Quantum.Tech 2027
Looking ahead to next year's event, speakers converged again — this time on wanting less hardware roadmap talk and more honest accounting of what's actually working.
Gerdjikov wants to see "enter enterprise implementation journeys and measurable business outcomes" take center stage, including how organizations prioritize use cases, distinguish a successful proof of concept from a failed one, and measure progress well enough to know when to scale or stop an initiative.
Yashwant would like the 2027 program to treat PQC migration "as an execution problem rather than a policy discussion," built around practitioners who have actually done the inventory and migration work — "case studies with real numbers, not roadmaps." She'd also welcome a track dedicated to the research-to-product translation gap, including "honest post-mortems from the ones that did not make it."
Miles wants a similar shift from talk to action: "A focus on operationalizing inventory, embedding Crypto-Agility... into application and network architectures, deploying overlay solutions to get some relatively quick PQC protections in place, and how to actually implement and solve challenging problems on a real quantum computer."
Mukherjee, meanwhile, would like to see the hardware-heavy agenda balanced with more depth on quantum algorithms and quantum machine learning — building on a keynote from Peter Shor that he said "was, naturally, very well received."
Taufiq wants Quantum.Tech 2027 to help organizations "bridge the gap between curiosity and execution" through sessions on security readiness, AI-enabled quantum workflows, adoption roadmaps, and workforce development, alongside more real-world case studies.
And Lowell, for his part, had the simplest ask of all: "I think Quantum.Tech does a great job placing focus on the main topics and challenges of the day. Keep that up."
CONTRIBUTORS
● Yancho Gerdjikov, Manager, Emerging Technology, Nestlé
● Rick Mukherjee, Ph.D., Director, UTC Quantum Center; Associate Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
● Susan Gregurick, Associate Director for Data Science, Office of Data Science Strategy, National Institutes of Health
● Karnika Yashwant, CEO, KEY Difference
● Brian Miles, Principal Technical Lead, AT&T
● Aleena Taufiq, Senior AI Product Manager, Verizon
● Jay Lowell, Principal Senior Technical Fellow, Boeing
