#341 Celia Merzbacher: Beyond the Buzzword: The Real State of Quantum Computing, Sensing, and AI in 2025

Hi there. I'm Celia Mertzbacher. I'm executive director of the Quantum Economic Development Consortium or QEDC. QEDC is an unusual public private partnership of sorts that was called for by Congress in the National Quantum Initiative Act signed in 2018 by then president Trump. And in that act, Congress directed the Department of Commerce and in particular NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, to establish a consortium of stakeholders. And I think that was an intentionally broad term. And the purpose of this consortium was to gather and build a community of stakeholders who were gonna be essential to realizing the benefits and the economic value of quantum technologies. The US government was about to make some really big investments on the government side to help to fund the research that needed to be done, but they already were, like all of us, reading the headlines that said companies were building quantum computers, and they were gonna be here soon. And so they created they decided they sort of needed an an organization that would be a bridge between the private sector and the public sector. And that's what QEDC is. And here we are about seven years later now and or more. And, we've built a community, a consortium. It's a member based organization. We have about nearly 250 members, nongovernment members. We also allow government to participate and and really get the benefits of membership without having to sign any membership agreement agreements. So we have a lot of opportunities for government and industry to interact and connect and talk about what are the gaps and who should fill them. QADC was stood up, and we were, directed to identify gaps that needed to be filled and strategies for filling those gaps, but we weren't given a big checkbook to write the checks to fill the gaps. So we really rely on partnership with government agencies and sometimes the private sector to fill the gaps and allow everyone to run faster. And we have members from across the ecosystem, from small startups making small components and critical enabling technologies to the big deep tech companies that are building systems and moving the products ahead that are gonna be in not just the quantum computing space, but also quantum sensing, quantum communications, and so on. So quantum is a very broad platform type of technology, and I look forward to jumping into that with you today, Craig. Yeah. And and so you have, one of the things that that you're able to do is you collect data from quantum engaged companies through a survey. And I know last year you did a, market report on, quantum in 2025. I imagine you're working on one for 2026. I mean, besides the size of the market, which, is is currently somewhere around a billion dollars and most certainly will will grow exponentially if if, quantum computing becomes practical. What do you learn from, from your survey? In particular, how …