Looking ahead at long, mid and short term IT plans
The news that Google researchers have demonstrated quantum technology that can scale exponentially, without incurring massive error overheads, is seen by many as a breakthrough in this emerging technology.
“In benchmark tests, Willow solved a standard computation in less than five minutes,” CEO Sundar Pichai said in a Twitter post. The same task run on today’s fastest supercomputer would take, according to Pichai, longer to complete, than the age of the universe.
Arguably Willow represents the culmination of continued technological developments, pushing the barrier of the art of the possible. Staying on quantum technology, IBM’s Heron offers what the company calls IBM Heron offers error mitigation while Quantinuum has revised its roadmap and will have a product offering an error rate of 0.0001 by 2029.
Meanwhile D-Wave’s CEO, Alan Bartiz, has been on Fox News, claiming the quantum annealing technology the company uses, means D-Wave has been able to provide its customers with real world optimisation applications that use quantum computing.
However, in spite of all the excitement, management consultant, McKinsey, estimates that 5,000 quantum computers will be operational by 2030 and it could take until 2035 before hardware and software is readily available to solve computationally complex problems.
AI in the medium term
Beyond the breakthroughs in quantum computing, the hype surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) is reaching a point where reality is kicking in. While in every boardroom, there are on-going debates over the risks and opportunities of AI, genuine AI innovation is extremely difficult. The way large language models for AI inference are licensed means that what works in a pilot implementation, may not necessarily be cost-effective if it is scaled up.
Recognising an opportunity to embed AI as part of their product capabilities every software company offers AI-enabled tools, and this represents an easy win, especially in overworked IT departments, where such tools can greatly simplify IT admin tasks. The fact that programming tools now include AI for code generation, will no doubt have a positive impact on software developer productivity in years to come.
Outside of IT, these tools can process and generate vast quantities of information for end users out-of-the-box. This means they are becoming embedded in business processes, irrespective of an organisation’s AI strategy, which is arguably more of a mid-term, multi-year plan, involving carefully thought out plans for stewardship of data and AI models given the organisation’s legal obligations.
While quantum computing and AI should be considered as part of a long and medium-term IT strategy, there is an endless list of short-term initiatives that IT leaders should consider. Budgets are tight. Can we do more with less, skip upgrades or defer big projects? There is no right or wrong answer. Every CIO will have a different priority.