Steam power was that moment for Britain, mass production for America, and export-led manufacturing for South Korea and China. Artificial intelligence is the new opportunity of our age, if we dare to grasp it. and it is swinging now.

For Pakistan, a nation of more than 250 million people trapped for decades in boom-and-bust cycles, recurring IMF programmes and chronic foreign-exchange shortages, AI is the most consequential economic opportunity since independence, and the price of missing it will be a lost generation.

The central fact is simple: AI provides top expertise at negligible cost. A farmer in Bahawalnagar, a lady health worker in Tharparkar, a schoolgirl in Swat and a small exporter in Sialkot can now command diagnostic, legal, agronomic and tutoring capability that until yesterday only the wealthy could afford. Nations that organise themselves to deliver that capability at scale will leapfrog. Those that do not will watch the same technology deepen the very inequalities it could have erased.

Pakistan has seized such a moment before. When I took charge as federal minister for science and technology in 2000, the country had almost no IT industry to speak of. Within three months we drafted Pakistan’s first IT policy, and then moved quickly to make it real. A 15-year tax holiday for IT exports gave software houses the confidence to invest, and successive governments renewed it long after it was due to expire.

International bandwidth charges fell from about $86,000 to under $4,000, and internet access spread from a few dozen cities to well over a thousand towns. When Pakistan stood to lose its last orbital slot at 38 degrees East, we placed our own communication satellite, PakSat-1, there before the April 2003 deadline.

We built the Pakistan Education and Research Network, PERN, linking our universities and opening a digital library of some 65,000 textbooks and 25,000 international journals free to every public-sector university. IT departments were established across universities, and to ensure that the revolution reached every province, we founded the Balochistan University of Information Technology and Management Sciences in Quetta, today’s BUITEMS, which now educates thousands of young Baloch.

The results are on the national balance sheet. An industry that once earned a few tens of millions of dollars reached a record $4.6 billion in exports in FY2025-26, with freelancers alone contributing $1.76 billion, and more than 2.37 million registered freelancers now place Pakistan among the largest freelance markets on earth.

That talent is our decisive asset today. Roughly two-thirds of Pakistanis are young, and while ageing economies must import talent to run an AI economy, Pakistan can grow its own. The opportunity reaches far beyond software. In agriculture, phone-based crop-disease detection, AI-guided irrigation for a water-stressed Indus basin and data-driven credit can transform the lives of smallholders. In health, AI triage and screening can multiply the reach of every clinic where doctors are scarce. In education, AI tutors speaking Urdu, Sindhi, Pashto, Punjabi, Saraiki and Balochi can reach the millions of children the school system has failed. AI can widen a stubbornly narrow tax net, expose procurement fraud and sharpen flood forecasting so that the catastrophe of 2022 is never repeated on the same scale. The National AI Policy of 2025, which aims to train one million AI professionals by 2030, and the Uraan Pakistan target of $10 billion in IT exports by FY29 show that the state recognises the stakes.

The first and most urgent step is to build AI centres across the country. As head of the National Task Forces on Science & Technology and also of Knowledge Economy, I had submitted a Rs40 billion project to the Ministry of IT to build AI Centres of Excellence across Pakistan, and the ministry has completed its feasibility study. It must now be approved and funded without delay, for these centres would anchor research, train the professionals the national policy promises and incubate the startups that will build Pakistani AI products.

I also submitted a Rs13-billion-rupee project to develop trained manpower in new and emerging technologies, which was approved and handed over to HEC for implementation. That provides Pakistan the means to train our brightest young people in fields such as AI and robotics. Alongside this, Pakistan must treat compute and power as national infrastructure, channelling the surplus-generating capacity for which the nation already pays into data centres at guaranteed tariffs and building a shared national computing cluster that universities and startups can rent cheaply. Just as cheap bandwidth unlocked the first IT revolution, cheap compute will unlock the second.

To make use of this new opportunity presented to Pakistan, education must be rebuilt around AI literacy on a foundation of strong mathematics, with teachers retrained first and an elite tier of researchers capable of frontier work. Our government should become the first major customer of Pakistani AI firms, contracting them for focused missions in taxation, farming and maternal health, each with a named owner and published results. A strong, autonomous National AI Authority must be formed with statutory teeth and multi-billion-dollar funding to implement national projects that boost industry, agriculture and national defence. Pakistan should mobilise its engineers abroad and deepen technology partnerships with China, the Gulf, the US and Europe alike, while protecting those whom automation displaces through reskilling and transparent public tracking of every target.

Pakistan missed the East Asian manufacturing miracle. It cannot afford to miss this opportunity because the barrier to entry is no longer capital-intensive factories but ideas, data and will. The government must approve the Rs40 billion project on National AI Centres of Excellence in the IT Ministry with urgency. The same courage, applied to AI, can achieve far more.

The algorithm does not care about a nation’s past; it rewards only those who prepare for the future. We are fortunate to have millions of the brightest young minds, eager to learn and deliver. If Pakistan acts with urgency and discipline, AI can become the engine that finally breaks its cycle of crisis. If we hesitate, the opportunity of a century will belong to someone else.

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