Quantum computing might sound like something out of a sci-fi movie, but for crop protection giant Syngenta, the technology represents the potential to develop the next generation of climate-resilient crop protection products.
During the 2026 World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit in San Francisco, Syngenta revealed a partnership with Swiss-based QuantumBasel to leverage its cutting-edge technology to solve farming problems. Through this partnership, Syngenta agronomists will work alongside quantum computing experts to use the tech in agricultural research, Feroz Sheikh, chief information and digital officer at Syngenta, told AgTechNavigator.
Quantum computing is built on the principle of physics of the same name, which processes qubits over bits, according to IBM. Quantum computing uses physics concepts, like quantum superposition and entanglement, to process qubits, which can represent 0, 1, or both.
Quantum computers have existed and been used by academics for decades, but questions remain about the technology’s large-scale commercial application. Widespread adoption of quantum computing could be far off, according to a 2025 MIT research paper.
However, Syngenta is not worried about a long time horizon when it comes to delivering commercial results from quantum computing, Sheikh noted. This partnership is part of the company’s long-term strategy of using cutting-edge technologies for research and development purposes, he added.
“We will start to hit limits of what is possible with the current computational technologies. Now, obviously, quantum is not yet mature to be at production scale, but we want to make sure that we are learning what it can do, what is possible with this technology, and how we can use that to deepen our research capabilities,” Sheikh said.
He added, “When you have a piece of technology that is not yet ready for prime time, one simple way to approach that is to not put it in prime time use cases.”
Is quantum computing & AI a winning combo for R&D?
While quantum computing is still in its early days, the technology shows promise in understanding the intersection of physics and chemistry and predicting structural chemistry processes, Sheikh explained.
Quantum computing represents a great opportunity, but the technology must work in concert with existing breakthroughs, Sheikh noted. Syngenta will achieve “the real value” of quantum computing by blending it with classical machine learning and generative AI, he added.
“If you throw any problem at this technology architecture that we have, you can maybe solve half of it or some part of it using the traditional machine learning architecture or a transformer architecture, and a part of it could be delegated to the quantum computer to come back with the result, and then feed that back into the AI to synthesize the final picture. So, that’s how we see it — that it is probably going to be a hybrid,” he elaborated.
