IDC PeerScape: Practices for Navigating the Early Stages of Enterprise Adoption in Quantum Computing

This IDC PeerScape draws on interviews conducted during the Going Mainstream: Enterprise Pathways to Quantum Adoption session at IDC Directions 2026 with Marna Kagele, technical fellow at Boeing, and Lucus Haugen, director of data science at AT&T. Their experiences surface three practices essential to building a sustainable quantum initiative:The following are the three best practices uncovered through this document:Quantum's developmental maturity challenges early investment decisions. Organizations must find ways to justify quantum investment before the technology can deliver production-scale results. Boeing and AT&T both found that anchoring early investment to specific, well-understood operational problems and creating organizational structures that allow quantum to be evaluated on longer timelines than traditional technologies were critical to building sustained momentum.Classical infrastructure creates unexpected bottlenecks in quantum workflows. As quantum workflows scale in complexity, the classical infrastructure surrounding them often becomes the primary constraint rather than the quantum hardware itself. Data preparation, computational overhead, and competition for classical resources with AI and other initiatives all emerge as significant challenges that organizations must plan for proactively.Quantum success requires expertise that is difficult to assemble. Building a capable quantum team is one of the most frequently cited barriers to quantum adoption. Boeing and AT&T both found that the most effective teams are not those built around quantum specialists alone but those that balance deep domain expertise with quantum knowledge and treat quantum software tools as an extension of existing engineering and data science capabilities."What Boeing and AT&T demonstrate is that you do not need to wait for fault-tolerant quantum systems to begin making meaningful progress. The work starts now, with the problems you already have and the teams you already have in place," said Heather West, PhD, senior research manager, Quantum Computing, IDC.