Quantum Leap
According to recent industry-wide analyses and forecasts, 2026 is being viewed as a “pivot year,” with quantum flagged as the “next big tech disruptor,” on par with the rise of AI and cloud computing.
Recently, IBM’s name has been surfacing everywhere I look; at dinner conversations, across feeds, and in the news following the appointment of an ex-IBM executive to lead the Genesis Mission, a federal initiative some commentators have nicknamed “the new Manhattan Project for AI.” The comparison is dramatic,but it captures the scale of what’s unfolding:
the government is signaling that AI is about to transform society on a level we have only seen once or twice in modern history.
The new director, Dario Gil, previously served as IBM’s Senior Vice President and Director of Research, where he oversaw the company’s advances in quantum computing, AI hardware, semiconductor development, and large-scale scientific partnerships (including CERN and MIT). Gil is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in quantum information science.He helped drive IBM’s entire quantum roadmap, so placing him at the helm of a major national AI initiative hints at how intertwined the next era of AI and quantum computing is expected to be.
Quantum computing didn’t begin with IBM, even though many people associate the company with its rise. The earliest work on quantum information took place in universities and government research labs throughout the 1970s–1990s between the US and Russia, with scientists like Peter Shor at AT&T Bell Labs proving that quantum algorithms could outperform classical computers.
The first company dedicated to quantum computing wasn’t IBM at all, but the Canadian firm D-Wave, founded around 1999, which later sold early quantum-annealing machines to Lockheed Martin, Google, and NASA. IBM’s major breakthrough came much later, in 2016, when it launched the world’s first cloud-accessible quantum computer and introduced *Qiskit, opening the field to researchers, students, startups, and developers everywhere. This didn’t make IBM the first quantum-tech company, but it did make IBM the first to democratize real quantum hardware at scale, launching the modern quantum ecosystem and shaping the direction of today’s quantum-AI research.
*Qiskit is IBM’s open-source software framework that lets developers write, simulate, and run quantum programs using simple Python code.
Quantum computing is still in its early, imperfect era, but it’s already beginning to shape the direction of the AI industry. I hear about it increasingly in short mention, but I project that soon quantum will take over the AI boom.
Today, quantum processors are being used experimentally for tasks that classical systems struggle with, especially high-dimensional optimization (used for training neural networks, route planning, portfolio optimization, and fine-tuning large models), faster sampling, molecular simulations, and combinatorial search (used for drug discovery, logistics, and solving complex constraint problems). These are all core components of modern machine-learning pipelines.
Companies like IBM, Google, and IonQ are building hybrid workflows where classical GPUs handle most of the training while quantum circuits tackle the mathematically intense sub-problems that benefit from superposition and entanglement. This early overlap is revealing a future in which AI doesn’t just run on quantum computers but is co-designed with them:
quantum-native neural networks, quantum-accelerated training, and new models capable of exploring problem spaces unreachable by classical algorithms.
As quantum systems move toward fault tolerance and larger qubit counts, we can expect breakthroughs in areas like drug discovery, climate modeling, cybersecurity, logistics, and materials science, as these are areas where classical AI hits a wall. In other words, quantum is quietly building the foundation for the next epoch of artificial intelligence, one defined not just by scale but by entirely new forms of reasoning, simulation, and discovery.
In the 1989 TV show Quantum Leap, Scott Bakula’s character steps into a “quantum accelerator” that instantly transports him into entirely new realities, each leap opening doors to possibilities that seemed unreachable. As a kid, it felt like pure fantasy. Today, with quantum processors beginning to handle problems classical computers can’t touch, that premise feels less like fiction and more like a metaphor for what’s happening in real technology. Quantum computing isn’t sending anyone through time, but it is giving AI the ability to leap into computational spaces we never had access to before.
U.S. Genesis Mission video on YouTube —-> HERE
