Welcome to TQDR, brought to you by Overmoro — a weekly newsletter bringing you all the must-know updates and developments in quantum technology adoption. If you’re new here, you can check out previous issues on our website.
Last week we were at The Economist’s Commercialising Quantum Global 2026 event and it was an excellent, full 2-day event with some of the biggest names in quantum making an appearance. A really well-organised event, we noticed a few key themes appearing across sessions - 10 of them to be exact. Find them below alongside the last week’s quick reads and qutebits.
The Big Story
10 takeaways from Commercialising Quantum Global 2026
Last week The Economist hosted their 5th annual Commercialising Quantum Global event. We were in attendance at the two-day gathering, speaking with those on the ground, and taking in the wealth of experience and knowledge on display. The event was packed with over a thousand attendees and dozens of speakers trying to separate the real from the hype.
There were a number of key themes repeated throughout the event, and plenty of thought-provoking statements from speakers. Here are our 10 takeaways from the event:
It’s never too early to start - maybe the most repeated message over two days was also the clearest: get involved in quantum, understand the technology, train your people, then build and start testing. A call-out from several individuals, including Phillip Intallura, Group Head of Quantum Technologies at HSBC, was not to wait until fault-tolerant computing is here. Waiting for better hardware may mean that you get there too late.
Useful quantum computing won’t be gradual - one day we will have quantum computers large enough to be useful, and they will instantly open the door to many possible use cases. This step-wise change, even if still a while away, will catch many off-guard and is another reason to start preparation early.
Quantum is physical in a way that AI isn’t - you can’t abstract away the hardware component. Engineers need to be in the same room to solve hardware problems and they want to be near their suppliers. The idea of geographic quantum clusters was a topic of much discussion, and showed how this technology will be different to AI. Distributed teams will struggle, which raises the importance of governments supporting their national infrastructure.
No single modality is going to win - there was plenty of discussion of benefits of different modalities, from Sir Peter Knight, chair of the UK National Quantum Technology Programme’s Strategic Advisory Board, to the CEOs of major companies. However, most speakers were of the same mind - it’s unlikely that one single technology is going to be the outright winner. The type of quantum technology you adopt will likely come down to integration and use case. Size, physical requirements, and integration into existing systems will all be factors that will have to be considered in developing a solution.
Quantum middleware is going to be key - enabling access through the cloud and developing physical computers is only part of the solution. Organisations need to be thinking about how quantum technologies fit into hybrid classical-quantum systems, how we connect quantum technology to existing systems, and how do we develop the engineering and support talent to onboard and adopt the technology. This less-discussed element of adopting quantum might be the current weak link.
Quantum is an organisational challenge, not just a technical one - good technology alone doesn’t win. Senior leaders need to understand why quantum matters, governance systems need to adapt to the unique challenges of quantum technologies, and talent to lead the implementation needs to be hired and trained. These are not quick things to do. Organisations can take years to adopt a new technology — just look at the struggle with AI — and the sooner you start thinking about integrating quantum the better.
Standards and benchmarking are key to building trust - responsible development of quantum technologies will require shared ways to measure and compare results. The UK Government announced the morning of the event the creation of a National Quantum Standards Network, with £10m of funding, to set common standards.
Governments need to be buyers, not just supporters - Lord Hague gave an impassioned talk about the UK needing to do more on quantum, and that was reflected in many other talks, where it was highlighted that governments should also commit to acquiring quantum computing technology, not just investing in it. The UK's ProQure programme is a deliberate move in that direction, building procurement into how the state supports the sector.
There’s more to quantum than quantum computing - throughout the event there was great opportunity to learn about all the different applications of quantum technologies of all kinds. Quantum computing can often feel like the default, but quantum technologies are much broader than this single application. On display was the Infleqtion CEO, Matthew Kinsella, presenting the company’s success with quantum timing, there was regular discussion of quantum communication and cryptography (and the looming timelines of Q-Day), as well as applications in quantum sensing. Adopting quantum into business use cases will likely cover many of these different areas, and organisations need to be aware of all the possibilities.
Quantum hype is more measured, but still hard to parse - as a community, those working in quantum aren’t as recklessly hyped as those working in AI. There were many at the event arguing for increased excitement around quantum, others were more measured, but, as an observer, it was clear there's still confusion among those outside the immediate community — about what the timelines are, which developments actually matter, and how to sell quantum as an urgent strategic priority.
The Quick Reads
Each week we’ll also share a longer list of interesting things that are going on, more technical bits to get your teeth into, and links for further reading.
If you’d like to listen to the sessions at The Economist event discussed above, then check out their YouTube channel with full recordings.
France buys its first cat-qubit machine. Walking the walk of government’s getting involved in procurement, GENCI signed on at VivaTech for an 18-cat-qubit Alice & Bob system, to be hosted at the CEA's TGCC and hybridised with the Joliot-Curie supercomputer from 2027 — the world's first state acquisition of cat-qubit hardware.
The University of Jordan opens its first quantum computing master's programme. The course is the first of it’s kind in the country and shows the increased spread of interest in quantum computing globally.
The Lord Hague paper we referenced above, A New National Purpose: A UK Quantum Strategy for Sovereignty and Scale, sets out the case for UK quantum leadership.
Allstate and IBM have collaborated on a new pre-print publication on solving the knapsack problem. The problem has direct applications to insurance portfolios, and quantum computing could enable insurance companies to create better balanced portfolios that give customers greater value while managing risk.
The Qutebits
We’ll be ending our newsletter with the fun, cute bits of quantum news - the Qutebits (see what we did there?).
Did you know that the famous Schrödinger's cat example was actually a criticism of the current (at the time) view of quantum mechanics? A translation of his famous text prefaces the experiment with the phrase “One can even set up quite ridiculous cases” - suggesting the absurdity of the views at the time. If you’d like to see a translated version of the original 1935 paper, then you can check it out here.
Fancy a game? QPong is exactly what it sounds like — a quantum reworking of the 1972 arcade classic, built with IBM's Qiskit and PyGame and dreamed up at IBM's Qiskit Camp back in 2019. Instead of nudging a paddle up and down, you steer it by building a quantum circuit on the fly.
And that’s all the news for this week - we’ll see you again next Monday.
Over the coming months we'll release our first benchmark — the National Quantum Index. It will be the first comprehensive ranking of global quantum adoption, and it will show, clearly, which countries are leading and which are catching up.
In the meantime, we're publishing regular insights and opening early access to our intelligence platform. This newsletter is the best way to follow the stories that matter and our analysis of them. Subscribe, get in touch, and let's talk quantum.