LAHORE: As artificial intelligence reshapes the global economic order, Pakistan faces a narrow but significant window to reposition itself provided it moves quickly, trains the right people, and translates policy ambition into on-the-ground execution. That was the central message from AI practitioners on Tuesday, who warned that the nations claiming the largest share of the next decade’s growth will not be those with the most resources, but those with the clearest strategy.
“AI is the new electricity that can spin the wheel of Pakistan’s economy,” said Muhammad Sohaib, an AI-driven engineering leader and 2025 Acumen Fellow who designs and orchestrates agentic AI systems for large-scale projects.
“Every nation now has the opportunity to redefine its position in the global arena. Those that move first, educate their people with a builder mindset, and frame policy around measurable outcomes will hold a meaningful share of the next global economy.”
The stakes, he argued, extend well beyond conventional industry transformation. AI capability will shape outcomes at every level of public life — from a village clinic improving diagnostic accuracy, to a tehsil office issuing land records without delay, to a sugar mill optimising yields. At the highest level, AI-enabled systems are already reshaping intelligence, logistics, and strategic decision-making worldwide.
The governments across Asia have moved decisively over the past 18 months to convert AI policy into workforce action. China’s Ministry of Education announced in April an AI Plus Education action plan that, by 2030, will embed AI literacy into the national curriculum at every level, from primary schools through universities. The United Arab Emirates has gone further, becoming the first country in the world to commit to shifting 50 per cent of its government services and operations to autonomous agentic AI within two years, while its Dubai Centre for Artificial Intelligence is simultaneously training one million people in prompt engineering. India is combining a national training platform with sovereign computing infrastructure; more than 2.62 million candidates have already registered on the FutureSkills PRIME platform under the IndiaAI Mission.
Pakistan is not without a response. The National AI Policy 2025, approved by the federal cabinet in July, targets training one million professionals by 2030, alongside 1,000 fully funded PhD scholarships and the introduction of an AI curriculum in federally administered schools. Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s USD 1 billion commitment, announced at Indus AI Week 2026 in February, signals the strongest political backing the country’s AI agenda has yet received.
Sohaib said the policy direction was sound, but argued that the conversation must now shift to the architecture of execution. “China is training a generation. The UAE is rewiring its state with autonomous agents. India is scaling a training platform. Pakistan has the opportunity to train builders and orchestrators fewer in number, deeper in skill, and deployed quickly into real workflows,“ he said.
He identified four structural foundations that would multiply the return on the government’s existing investments. The first is sovereign AI compute — a national GPU pool that local builders can access on subsidised terms. The second is an open public datasets platform, anchored on data held by NADRA, FBR, NEPRA, and provincial agencies, and released under clear privacy standards. The third is a public-sector deployment pathway through which ministries and provincial departments actively source AI solutions from domestic builders. The fourth is growth capital — specifically, the operationalisation of the AI Innovation Fund and the AI Venture Fund envisaged in the National AI Policy.
“AI is the new electricity,” Sohaib said. “With the right compute, data, deployment pathways, and capital, it can power Pakistan’s economic wheel to a speed this country has not seen in decades.”
Copyright Business Recorder, 2026