Joe Ghalbouni is interviewed by Yuval Boger and describes his journey from quantum communication research and teaching in Lebanon to leading quantum and AI initiatives at Point72 and founding Ghalbouni Consulting. They discuss how to educate non-technical audiences, identify sector-specific use cases, and build roadmaps for quantum, AI, HPC, PQC, and QKD, including quantum risk assessments and migration to post-quantum cryptography. Joe highlights high-value financial use cases in optimization and quantum machine learning, the role of quantum-inspired methods on classical hardware, and the practicalities of deploying production systems with SLAs, security, and hybrid cloud/on-prem access. He argues that algorithms and domain understanding are today’s main bottlenecks, gives an optimistic timeline for quantum usefulness.

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