Nobody’s really saying this out loud in boardrooms across Karachi or Lahore, but Pakistan’s tech moment? It’s happening right now. And this isn’t just about launching another food delivery app or pushing internet penetration numbers up, this is about something fundamentally bigger. This moment is what determines Pakistan’s digital future – will we finally write our own rules or will we continue following someone else’s playbook?
The secret to winning the tech market is simple – countries that construct their own technology infrastructure end up calling the shots. You become one of two things; the trailblazers or the followers.
Pakistan doesn’t belong in the second category—but honestly, pulling ourselves into the first one demands a particular kind of leadership that’s pretty rare.
Why the CTO Role Has Fundamentally Changed
All roles change and they simply aren’t that straightforward anymore. It’s not just about keeping servers going and maintaining the digital infrastructure. Now, today’s CTO is balancing digital transformation with the philosophical and ethical realities of implementing those changes.
Today’s CTO is asking; how can we make sure that our algorithms aren’t discriminating and creating further inequalities for the same people we claim to have deployed these AI systems for? How do we minimize risk when these systems are responsible for finance or healthcare?
We’re trying to navigate these ethical minefields about our digital society and we’re doing that in real time.
The Build-or-Buy Trap (And Why We Keep Falling Into It)
The old guard is falling; we can’t continue to identify a need and implement American or European systems like Salesforce and SAP when Pakistan’s market realities and customer behaviors are vastly different from the ones the systems are built for.
If you want to lead, you need to know when to stop buying and start building instead. That means building teams that are capable of crafting solutions tailored to our specific market dynamics and cultural landscape. That means taking algorithmic authorship – creating for our realities.
Take JazzCash and Easypaisa for example; they weren’t just duplicates of Venmo or PayPal, they undertook a digital transformation to match the flow of money through our streets and markets. Roadside vendors now accept mobile payments and millions of people who’ve never set foot inside a bank still participate actively in the digital economy.
The AI Hype Machine
AI is not the genie people are treating it as – you don’t get to sprinkle machine magic and get instant transformation. I’ve watched companies dive right into the hype with obscene amounts of money, completely blind to the problem they want to solve and emerge six months later with nothing to show except a massive dent in their monthly expenditure.
What actually produces measurable results is starting small; pick one specific problem that’s costing you money or customer and see whether AI can actually help with that. For example; our customer support response time is driving people to competitors. Now can AI help with this or is there a simpler and cheaper solution that can accomplish the same outcome more reliably? Sometimes it’s the latter.
Now, are Pakistani companies actually succeeding with AI? They treat it like any other tool in the toolbox; they prototype small, test relentlessly, iterate fast, and measure actual improvements – keep it small, and scale if you see it working out.
The Uncomfortable Ethics Conversation Everyone Keeps Dodging
When AI systems make decisions about who gets opportunities and who doesn’t – it affects real people’s lives. We expect them to be objective but the truth is that AI systems amplify existing societal biases because of the historical data these models are fed.
If a hiring algorithm which decides who gets called for interviews and who gets filtered out is trained on data showing your company predominantly recruited men over the past decade, what do you think will happen? Your AI ‘learns’ that male candidates are superior performers so your hiring becomes skewed toward male employees. Or your loan database which decides who gets a loan and who doesn’t skews toward middle-class applicants and leaves out rural entrepreneurs or working class borrowers, which creates further inequalities on a societal level.
The solution is simple; examine your data critically and look at who is being represented in your database, and who’s being left out of the algorithms. Cover the margins of society.
Then, test your systems against real-life scenarios by running your diverse groups through your algorithms and check whether outcomes are equitable or not.
Finally, bring in marginalized people to work on these systems. Create an inclusive and diverse space that allows for equally diverse AI systems.
Responsible Leadership in AI
Ethical AI discourse is necessary to how you construct technology from day one – ask the hard questions and the right questions when designing systems.
The advantages are heavily considered in any system application but it is equally necessary to consider the disadvantages and work on reducing harm.
Ensure people genuinely understand how their data is used to train models and be radically transparent.
When deploying AI into production: Can we actually explain in plain language how this system reaches its decisions? If it screws up can we identify precisely why and implement fixes?
You have to keep asking these uncomfortable questions for real change.
Pakistan’s Specific Headaches
Messy infrastructures, terrible internet connections that vanish during critical business hours, unreliable electricity and nepotism in our institutions – and these are just off the top of my head.
We can’t be bothered to nurture talent properly so our sharpest minds pursue opportunities where they’re valued and compensated properly. Money’s tight for most organizations and most companies can’t afford system transformations.
But Pakistanis are scrappy, and our successful corporations are creative, resilient and innovative despite the brutal constraints. They create systems that work within this weak infrastructure and cultivate the talent they need while taking very calculated risks by launching contained pilots instead of betting it all on massive transformation projects that might flop.
The Digital Sovereignty Question Nobody’s Taking Seriously Enough
Here’s a development that should fundamentally change how we think about Pakistan’s tech future: Data Vault and Telenor just launched Pakistan’s first locally-hosted AI data center with over 3000 actual enterprise-grade Nvidia GPUs, available as GPU-as-service. This is transformative for Pakistan itself, because we were once on a restricted list for acquiring these AI accelerators and have been historically blocked from accessing the computing power required for AI development. We would therefore rely on foreign services.
But this development gives us the sovereignty to dive deep into sector specific and language specific AI models. With a cross-sectoral collaboration between researchers, startups and enterprises, we can now train models that reflect our population’s needs and behaviors—without that data ever leaving our borders. This isn’t just about computing power, it’s about building digital sovereignty over our own data and prioritizing our people’s needs first.
The Workforce Challenge
By now we already know that Pakistan is underprepared for the AI disruption heading towards the world. According to OpenAI, globally generative AI might affect 10% of work processes for 80% of people, and these are primarily white collar jobs. Pakistani universities are already producing a large number of underskilled graduates who will now be competing against fully efficient AI systems, and we need to shift toward skills-based training. A coordinated response is necessary to address the scale and speed of the disruption approaching—like the proposed PakGPT initiative that brings together different sectors to face this challenge strategically.
What Actually Works
In order to produce measurable results in digital transformation initiatives, we need a smart approach.
Identify a process that’s costing and fix it with technology. Demonstrate tangible results and build momentum and organizational buy-in. Then tackle the next problem.
Incorporate user reviews by talking regularly to your sales teams, shadowing customer service operations and observing real people working day-to-day. Next, measure the real business outcomes which are the exact impact the changes had, like “customer complaints dropped 30% quarter-over-quarter”.
How Language Shapes AI
The overwhelming majority of AI systems worldwide are engineered exclusively for English while Pakistan’s actual market operates primarily in Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto and Balochi.
If you genuinely want AI that serves Pakistani users rather than exclusively the English-educated urban elite (maybe 10-15% of the total market?), you need to train models on our languages. You need interfaces that make intuitive sense for how people here actually think, communicate, and process information.
This isn’t about optics for corporate social responsibility, it is the key difference between technology for the people, by the people and technology for the 1%.
Building Resilient Systems
Pakistan is now experimenting with indigenous capability, pushing the boundaries like we never have before. For example, SOCByte recently launched Dexter—Pakistan’s first AI-powered cybersecurity analyst, which, for a country that faced around 34 million cyberattacks between 2023 and 2024, could prove to be a turning point. It’s built to work alongside security analysts as an augmentation model that reduces the burden on the analyst.
Newer threats need new and improved solutions, and this is one of them. It’s also showing us what algorithmic authorship actually looks like in practice; building the systems we specifically need, using our data, addressing our threat landscape, serving our market.
The Open Source Opportunity
Did you know Pakistan now ranks 5th globally in percentage growth of open-source software projects? We’re ranked 9th worldwide in total number of GitHub contributors, with 71% growth, which is incredibly important for us to acknowledge.
It means Pakistani developers are confident enough to contribute publicly and we’re now developing indigenous technical expertise that can compete internationally. Equally important is that we need to capitalize on this moment – enterprises need to know when to use open source, when to build solutions and how to contribute to open source projects to serve our market’s needs. According to recent data, 96% of global organizations have maintained or increased open-source usage. Over 53% cite cost reduction as the primary driver. Open-source isn’t just about free software anymore—it’s about control, customization, and avoiding vendor lock-in. We need to contribute now.
Data Privacy Without Regulations
Despite the progress, Pakistan lacks the cybersecurity and data protection legislation that would protect our data.
It’s necessary, as the CTO, to take that initiative yourself. If you wouldn’t want your family’s data out there, don’t do it to other people’s families either. Encrypt the data properly and restrict access on a strictly need to know basis. Delete anything that isn’t being used and be transparent with your consumers. Build the reputation of doing the right thing and the butterfly effect will take over from there.
The Next 5 Years
Keeping in mind what could be possible is necessary to keep building; Pakistan could go from outsourcing services to shipping tech products. We could have engineers building sophisticated AI systems and contribute to the global turn of digital transformation. We could ensure inclusive and equitable financial systems, and digitalize government services that really work.
This isn’t fantasy or naive optimism. Bangladesh is doing fascinating work in fintech. Vietnam’s tech startup scene is absolutely exploding with innovation and investment. Indonesia’s attracting billions in data center investment. We absolutely can compete—if we make smarter choices starting today.
What You Can Actually Do Tomorrow Morning
If you’re a CTO or technology leader reading this during a brief moment between meetings, here’s your concrete starting point:
Identify your problem area and ask yourself: could we build something more tailored to our specific circumstances, customer needs, and competitive positioning? Take a look at your current data practices. Marie Kondo your tech: keep what holds up to international data standards and throw away what doesn’t. Then, bring in your team and start conversations about ethical AI development, and make it an open space that prioritizes solutions and not hierarchy. Don’t dive right into massive transformations, rather start small, see how it goes and scale if the outcomes work. Learn what works and what doesn’t and scale up.
The Two Paths
Pakistan’s digital trajectory over the next decade gets written by whoever’s making technology decisions right now. That might be you reading this. It’s definitely people throughout your professional network.
The choice is ours: Do we construct equitable technological systems that reflect our market and population needs or do we continue to wag our tails and follow whoever holds the biggest bone in the tech market?
The ones who figure it out are set for life – the blend of algorithmic leadership, responsible AI practices and budding tech capabilities would build successful, resilient businesses and, over the long term, shape Pakistan’s digital economy. The real mandate is serving the population with integrity, purpose and commitment to serve. Amid the rising infrastructure, open source communities and growing cybersecurity capabilities, we have an opportunity to seize the moment. Will we take it?
