As the world marches ahead into the era of artificial intelligence, the promise of a smarter, faster, and more efficient future seems tantalizingly close. Yet in the case of Pakistan, this leap into the digital age may come at a hidden cost-deepening the already wide chasm between the elite and the underprivileged. While global powerhouses like the United States, China, and European Union aggressively invest in AI governance, ethical frameworks, and inclusive technology ecosystems, Pakistan finds itself standing at a critical crossroads: will it harness AI to uplift its population, or will it become yet another case study in how technology, if unchecked, can amplify inequality?
The Ministry of IT and Telecommunication in Pakistan has launched the “National Artificial Intelligence Policy” draft in 2024, seeking to place Pakistan in the league of digitally competitive nations. It outlines ambitious goals: promoting AI adoption in governance, agriculture, healthcare, and education. But critics argue the policy lacks an actionable roadmap, is heavily donor-reliant, and fails to address the foundational crisis of digital illiteracy. As of May 2025, only 37% of Pakistan’s population has regular access to the internet. The rural-urban digital divide remains stark: while urban centers like Islamabad, Lahore, and Karachi are witnessing a rise in AI startups and digital freelancers, vast stretches of rural Sindh, Balochistan, and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa remain digitally silent.
Global institutions have already sounded the alarm. A 2025 World Bank report on AI and equity identifies South Asia as a vulnerable hotspot where automation is likely to displace semi-skilled labor faster than governments can reskill. In Pakistan, where over 64% of the population is under the age of 30 and the informal sector constitutes more than 70% of total employment, the threat is existential. Robotic process automation is already being experimented with in banking and telecom sectors, while e-commerce giants have begun exploring AI-based warehouse management and delivery logistics. What happens to the daily wager, the warehouse loader, the call center representative, when AI steps in?
Furthermore, the education system remains tragically outdated. Despite the launch of various EdTech platforms and digital classrooms, the ground reality paints a grim picture. According to Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, as of 2025, over 22.8 million children are out of school. The curriculum still emphasizes rote learning over critical thinking, and less than 10% of public schools have functional computer labs. How can a country leap into the age of artificial intelligence when its future workforce has never touched a computer? This disconnect becomes even more troubling when we examine gender. In rural areas, only 14% of women have access to smartphones or the internet. Cultural norms, infrastructure gaps, and affordability issues lock out half the population from even beginning to participate in the digital revolution. In urban tech hubs, young women are making strides, but they remain the exception rather than the rule. With AI increasingly influencing healthcare, governance, and legal rights, exclusion from this ecosystem risks reinforcing patriarchal structures in new digital forms.
International comparisons add further weight. India, for instance, has launched a multi-billion-dollar initiative in 2024 titled AI for Bharat, focusing on AI in agriculture, language processing for regional dialects, and digital upskilling. Bangladesh has partnered with the UNDP to create an inclusive AI framework prioritizing vulnerable populations. Rwanda, often seen as a digital leapfrog nation, has integrated AI into its public healthcare system, training community workers via mobile applications. Pakistan, despite having a stronger population base and diaspora support, lags behind on most comparative benchmarks.
A citizen data trust should be created to ensure the people-not private firms-control the use of national data resources.
The private sector’s enthusiasm in Pakistan is commendable, but fragmented. Startups are building AI tools for credit scoring, e-commerce targeting, and predictive analytics. Yet these services largely cater to the top 10% income bracket. Financial institutions using AI for credit assessment rarely extend services to the informal economy. Agricultural AI is in its infancy, with pilot projects in Punjab failing to scale due to lack of policy alignment and extension services.
Then comes the issue of data. AI runs on data, and Pakistan lacks a coherent national data protection law. The Personal Data Protection Bill remains stuck in bureaucratic review since 2021. With global AI ethics emphasizing data privacy, algorithmic transparency, and human rights, Pakistan risks becoming a data colony-feeding global AI systems without safeguarding its own citizens. Moreover, the security and surveillance dimension of AI raises critical concerns. Facial recognition systems are being deployed in major cities without proper public consultation. The risk of profiling, political targeting, and social control via AI tools cannot be ignored in a country with an already fragile civil liberties record. Without stringent oversight, AI can become a tool of repression rather than empowerment.
To understand Pakistan’s digital journey, one must examine the past decade. Despite the Digital Pakistan initiative and various IT ministry interventions, on-ground implementation has remained slow and riddled with bureaucratic inertia. Projects aimed at rural digitization have either been shelved or underfunded. Tech-based educational reforms launched during COVID-19 lost steam after the pandemic receded. Even today, most public school teachers remain untrained in digital pedagogy, let alone AI-integrated teaching. The state’s reliance on donor-funded ICT programs, without a long-term capacity-building strategy, further undercuts sustainable change. The labor market implications are equally worrying. AI is not just a tool but a disruptor. While it offers enhancements in productivity, it also renders obsolete many low-skill jobs. In Pakistan’s textile sector, automation has already replaced manual quality control in export-oriented factories. In retail, cashier-less checkouts and inventory prediction models threaten entry-level jobs. In agriculture, drone-based pest detection and yield prediction will eliminate the need for many traditional support roles. These developments, while exciting for efficiency, beg the question: where will Pakistan’s unskilled youth go?
Another dimension is religious and cultural resistance to technological change. In many segments of society, AI is viewed as Western, intrusive, and morally ambiguous. Clerics have raised concerns about facial recognition in public spaces, biometric attendance in mosques, and AI-generated religious content. In some madrassas, there is open resistance to incorporating computers, let alone AI. Such concerns needs to be addressed via Ulama Council.
The linguistic barrier is another critical hurdle. With over 70% of Pakistan’s population speaking languages other than English, and with Urdu NLP tools still underdeveloped, AI applications built on Western datasets fail to serve the majority. Even voice assistants, chatbots, and recommendation engines remain largely English-centric. Efforts like the Lughat project or Urdu corpus development remain academic and disconnected from mainstream tech products. This exclusion further marginalizes rural and non-English-speaking communities, creating a class of digital outcasts.
Provincially, the AI gap is glaring. Punjab leads in digital experimentation, from AI-enabled surveillance in Lahore to agricultural pilots in Faisalabad. In contrast, Balochistan and Gilgit-Baltistan have no state-backed AI programs, and even KP, despite its tech-savvy youth, lacks AI-specific funding mechanisms. This uneven development risks reinforcing provincial resentments, as digital progress becomes another lens of inequality.
Meanwhile, multinational corporations operating in Pakistan-banks, telcos, logistics companies-are rapidly integrating AI into their systems. Chatbots now handle customer complaints, fraud detection models analyze transactions, and delivery algorithms optimize logistics. Yet, this AI wave rarely translates into employee training or job creation. Often, it leads to leaner operations and fewer human roles. The profits grow, but do the people?
On the international front, public sentiment on AI is shifting. A recent Gallup Pakistan poll revealed that while 62% of urban youth are optimistic about AI’s future, over 70% of rural respondents see it as irrelevant or threatening to their way of life. This dichotomy mirrors global debates on AI ethics, inclusion, and governance. Countries like Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey, and South Africa are actively crafting frameworks to ensure AI does not become a new form of digital colonization. Pakistan must join these efforts, not remain a passive consumer of imported technologies.
The conversation must move beyond technocratic circles. AI cannot remain the obsession of conference panels in five-star hotels. It must be discussed in classrooms, community centers, local government bodies, and on mainstream media. Universities need interdisciplinary programs that combine AI with philosophy, sociology, economics, and law. Civil society must advocate for algorithmic accountability just as it does for electoral transparency.
Artificial intelligence is not just a technology. It is a power structure, a social force, and a transformative opportunity. If Pakistan does not act with vision and urgency, it will not just miss the AI revolution-it will be buried under it. The question is not whether AI will come. It already has. The real question is: who will it serve? It must serve the many, not the few. For that to happen, Pakistan must legislate a national digital inclusion framework with enforceable timelines and funding. The Personal Data Protection Bill must be passed without delay and monitored by an independent digital ombudsman. Provincial governments must be mandated to allocate a minimum budget to AI literacy and infrastructure, especially in underserved districts. A national reskilling strategy should be launched with support from the private sector, focusing on youth, women, and displaced workers. Incentives should be offered to startups developing AI solutions in local languages, and open-source platforms must be encouraged to democratize access. Pakistan should lead a regional dialogue with other Global South nations to co-develop ethical AI principles suited to emerging economies. Every university must have an interdisciplinary AI ethics unit, and a dedicated AI-for-Governance Task Force should be constituted to prevent the technology from being used for political suppression. A sovereign AI development fund must be created, backed by public-private partnerships, to localize innovation and support regional startups. All government tenders involving AI tools must be subjected to pre-deployment risk assessments to avoid unintended harms. Tax relief should be extended to companies investing in AI for agriculture, healthcare, and education. The state must invest in Urdu and regional NLP capabilities to make voice and AI tools linguistically inclusive. The NDMA and other emergency agencies must be supported with AI-integrated disaster forecasting systems. Special Economic Zones can be created to attract AI hardware manufacturers and robotics firms. Pakistan should launch an AI inclusion index to monitor equitable adoption across provinces, and formally engage the diaspora through repatriation fellowships and advisory boards. Finally, judicial and law enforcement tools using AI must be subjected to algorithmic audits to prevent bias and abuse. A citizen data trust should be created to ensure the people-not private firms-control the use of national data resources. If these steps are taken with urgency and resolve, Pakistan may not only catch up with the AI revolution, it might even lead parts of it on its own terms.
The writer is a financial expert and can be reached at jawadsaleem.1982@ gmail.com. He tweets @JawadSaleem1982