Laurence Coldicott, Senior Content Director at Quantum.Tech
Laurence Coldicott, curator of global quantum technology conferences, is interviewed Yuval Boger. They discuss how enterprise engagement has expanded beyond early adopters in finance to logistics, pharma, and defense—and how agendas now balance computing with “quantum defense” topics like PQC and QKD. Laurence contrasts U.S. scale and federal momentum with Europe’s fragmented landscape, notes attendance growth from hundreds to over a thousand, and describes a successful new event in Doha. He emphasizes keeping conferences pragmatic and hype-free, prioritizing practitioner talks and real case studies, and offers advice to speakers: be candid about maturity, challenges, and near-term value. They touch on rising government participation, the growing intersection with AI and cyber, and much more.
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21:01
Bill Wisotsky, Principal Quantum Systems Architect at SAS
Bill joins Yuval Boger to discuss SAS’s vendor-agnostic, hybrid approach to quantum and analytics. Highlights include D-Wave warm-starts that let SAS prove optimal kidney-exchange solutions in seconds, as well as QML pilots for fraud and bankruptcy modeling and disaster response. He shares a pragmatic definition of “quantum advantage”, treating QPUs as just another PU alongside CPUs/GPUs, and why rapid progress toward error correction—and ideas like Penrose’s—keep him learning.
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24:19
Sergio Gago, CTO of Cloudera and former Head of AI & Quantum at Moody’s
Sergio Gago, CTO of Cloudera and former Head of AI & Quantum at Moody’s is interviewed by Yuval Boger. They discuss a practical, problem-first path to quantum in finance. Sergio contrasts annealers and gate-based systems, emphasizes hybrid workflows for portfolio optimization and Monte Carlo risk, and explores fraud detection and knowledge-graph use cases. Sergio stresses rigorous benchmarking against top-end GPUs/FPGAs, explainability for regulators, and total cost of ownership over lab metrics. They also touch on post-quantum cryptography (offense vs. defense), realistic definitions of “quantum advantage,” and why disciplined pilots—and candid vendor comparisons—matter more than hype, and much more.
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Constanza Bustamante, research fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS)
Constanza Bustamante, a research fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) is interviewed by Yuval Boger to discuss quantum policy at the nexus of national and economic security. Constanza contrasts China’s state-led, scale-oriented model with the U.S.’s science-first, private-sector translation approach; traces bipartisan continuity from the National Quantum Initiative Act through today; and examines Europe’s growing techno-nationalism and reciprocity gaps. Constanza argues broad tariffs risk hobbling a nascent U.S. quantum supply chain, explores quantum sensing as a near-term “atomic advantage”, weighs research-security safeguards against academic openness, and much more.
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Cisco quantum networking with Vijoy Pandey and Reza Nejabati
Vijoy Pandey, who leads Cisco’s Outshift incubation group, and Reza Nejabati, Cisco’s head of quantum research, are interviewed by Yuval Boger. They discuss Cisco’s strategy to enable distributed quantum computing and a future “quantum internet.” Vijoy and Reza explain why Cisco won’t build QPUs, focusing instead on room-temperature, telecom-band entanglement networking. They discuss Cisco's aim is to make networking a “no-brainer” and push modality complexity to the edge via transducers and even entanglement-mode conversion, the argument that scale-out plus scale-up will reach “million usable qubits” faster, and much more.
Yuval Boger, Chief Commercial Officer at QuEra, hosts thought leaders in quantum computing, quantum sensing, and quantum communications to discuss business and technical aspects that impact the quantum ecosystem. Full transcripts are available at podcast.yboger.com
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