Delivering the Future: USPS CIO Pritha Mehra on Quantum, AI, and Trust
At Quantum World Congress 2025, Pritha Mehra, Chief Information Officer of the United States Postal Service (USPS), took the stage to highlight how one of America’s most trusted public institutions is preparing for the quantum era.
A Network at “Quantum Scale”
Mehra began by underscoring the sheer scale of the USPS operation: more than 32,000 post offices, 260,000 carrier routes, and 370 million mail pieces delivered daily. “When you look at our scale, our speed, our precision, you realize this isn’t just a logistics challenge. It’s really a quantum-scale optimization problem,” she said.
Data as the Foundation
With every package scan, address change, and delivery point feeding into USPS’s digital footprint, Mehra described the Postal Service as a national data engine. USPS has invested in unifying its systems and building platforms for analytics at scale, ensuring that data is not only voluminous but also secure, semantically rich, and machine-readable.
“Strong data underpinnings are the first step to prepare for both AI and quantum,” she emphasized, noting how USPS is already using machine learning to optimize routes, predict package volumes, and improve delivery accuracy.
Preparing for Post-Quantum Security
“When you look at our scale, our speed, our precision, you realize this isn’t just a logistics challenge. It’s really a quantum-scale optimization problem.”
Beyond logistics, Mehra highlighted USPS’s proactive work in cybersecurity. The agency has launched a discovery effort to evaluate which cryptographic algorithms won’t withstand quantum threats and is building migration roadmaps for critical systems. “We know we can no longer rotate keys once every two years. We need to be ready to rotate them continuously to reduce the risk of quantum attacks,” she explained.
The Question Ahead
While USPS is not running quantum algorithms today, Mehra framed the Postal Service’s complex logistics and data challenges as a “treadmill” ready for future quantum applications. Still, she closed with a note of caution: “The most important question will not be what quantum can do. It is what quantum should do.”
For an institution built on public trust, the balance between technological innovation and responsibility remains paramount.