Summary: Pakistan is entering a new AI era where students, entrepreneurs and communities are moving beyond consuming technology to building locally relevant solutions for agriculture, accessibility, education and public services.
Saman Khan
There were days when a farmer had to wait for an agriculture expert to visit his fields, identify a likely disease and suggest what to do next. Today, a farmer can photograph a diseased crop with a mobile phone and receive an indication of what might be wrong.
For a Deaf person, an emergency warning delivered through television or an audio announcement may not always be accessible. AI-based systems are now being explored to translate critical information into sign language, potentially reducing delays in receiving important alerts.
And increasingly, young people are building these kinds of solutions themselves. Students, entrepreneurs and community members are no longer simply using technology created elsewhere; they are experimenting with technology to address problems they encounter around them.
Artificial intelligence is often described as something entirely new and revolutionary. That perception is already influencing debates about how Pakistan should regulate it. But Pakistan has experienced transformative technological shifts before: computers, the internet and mobile phones have each changed how people communicate, work and solve problems.
We have been here before.
The real measure of a technology’s power may be what ordinary people are able to create once it moves beyond the hands of experts.
Pakistan has seen this happen before. During the 2010 floods, mobile phones became tools for civilian crisis response through initiatives such as PakReport. Computers were used by grassroots organisations such as the Citizens Archive of Pakistan to preserve collective memory. Technology gradually moved from being something people simply consumed to something they could use to respond to problems around them.
Governments, too, have repeatedly tried to expand access. Each province has introduced programmes to establish computer labs and provide desktops in classrooms, including the Punjab IT Labs Project, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s 500 IT Labs Project, and the Sindh Education Foundation’s INSTAL programme. At the federal level, the Prime Minister’s Laptop Scheme sought to put personal computers directly into the hands of university students, from Khuzdar and Turbat to Muzaffarabad and Gilgit. In 2023–24 alone, the scheme distributed 500,000 laptops.
The underlying assumption was straightforward: access to technology could expand educational and economic opportunities and, ultimately, contribute to national development. At the national level, wider access to technology has been linked to the broader ambition of accelerating development. Countries such as Taiwan, through the development of its semiconductor industry, and Singapore, through its focus on becoming a regional technology hub, are often cited as examples of technology-driven development.
The spread of mobile phones demonstrated this even more clearly.
With GSM networks, mobile phones became a foundation for services that had previously been difficult to access. They connected families separated by distance, supported communication during crises and opened new possibilities for informal businesses and public services. Mobile technology helped enable branchless banking, connected small retailers with supply chains and allowed telemedicine services to reach patients in underserved communities.
But some of the most interesting developments came when ordinary people began using these technologies to address problems that were specific to their communities.
In 2017, amid concerns over child kidnappings, 17-year-old Lahore student Nuzaina Faisal Khan developed TALASH, an alert system intended to help track and report missing children when time was critical. The project was piloted in Lahore and Kasur with the Punjab Information Technology Board and the Child Protection and Welfare Bureau, with the support of the provincial government at the time.
TALASH subsequently informed policy discussions around child alerts and recovery, contributing to a broader framework that included the Zainab Alert system and the Zainab Alert, Response and Recovery Act, passed by Parliament in 2020.
The significance of TALASH was not simply that a technology was developed. It showed how someone close to a problem could use technology to respond to it.
AI could take that process a step further.
With the introduction of AI, the question is no longer only what we can access collectively, but what individuals can build with these increasingly powerful tools.
There are already examples of people from Pakistan participating in this shift. Sualeh Asif, who was born and raised in Karachi, co-founded Anysphere with colleagues from MIT, the company behind Cursor, an AI-assisted coding tool that allows developers to work alongside AI while building software. The example points to a broader change: AI is lowering some of the barriers to developing digital products and allowing smaller teams to attempt tasks that previously required considerably more time, expertise and resources.
Beyond commercial applications, AI is also increasingly being used to address community problems, from agriculture and accessibility to public services.
For years, the central conversation around technology in Pakistan was about access: Who has a computer? Who has internet connectivity? Who has a smartphone? Who has access to digital services?
With AI, another question is becoming increasingly important:
Who can build?
Pakistan is already seeing early examples of this transition.
In 2025, a student team at the Institute of Management Sciences in Peshawar worked with Code for Pakistan and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Agriculture Department to develop Agri-Alert. The project was designed to allow farmers to photograph a diseased crop with a mobile phone and use an AI model to identify a likely disease or pest and suggest possible next steps.
What makes the example particularly relevant is the attention to local conditions. Government feedback led the students to consider local crop diseases, Urdu-language support and offline functionality for farmers in areas where reliable connectivity cannot be assumed.
Accessibility provides another example. ConnectHear emerged from the need to improve communication between Deaf Pakistanis and the wider community and has explored AI-based tools for translating critical public information into sign language. The broader lesson is that technology can be shaped around needs identified by the people who experience those problems.
DeafTawk provides another example of technology emerging from lived experience. Its co-founder, Wamiq Hasan, who is Deaf, returned to Pakistan after studying computer engineering and helped develop a platform through which Deaf users could communicate with sign-language interpreters during situations such as medical appointments, classes and job interviews. The organisation has since explored AI-based translation as another way of reducing communication barriers.
These examples point to a broader transition.
But teaching people to build with AI is not the same as teaching them to build responsibly.
The more easily applications and AI-powered tools can be created, the more difficult questions also emerge. Who checks whether an AI system is accurate? What happens when it produces a false answer? How is personal information protected? If an organisation develops an application to help women in rural areas track health information, where does that sensitive data go? If government agencies train systems on data about citizens, how is that information stored and used?
There is also the problem of scale. When content, applications and automated systems can be produced rapidly, distinguishing useful information from inaccurate or low-quality AI-generated material becomes increasingly difficult.
These are not reasons to slow technological development. They are reasons to ensure that technological access is accompanied by digital literacy, technical skills, safeguards and accountability.
Pakistan is again at a technological inflection point. More than 80 percent of the population has cellular coverage, according to the Pakistan Economic Survey, even as formal education levels remain significantly lower. The country’s experience with computers, mobile phones and the internet shows that access can create opportunities but access alone does not determine what people ultimately gain from technology.
The next stage may be different.
Earlier technological waves largely moved from putting tools in people’s hands to providing services through those tools. Artificial intelligence has the potential to move the relationship another step forward: enabling more people to create, adapt and solve problems themselves.
That possibility matters particularly in a country where many challenges are deeply local from agriculture and disaster response to accessibility, education and public services.
The question, then, is not simply who has access to AI. It is who can use it to create value, for whom, and under what safeguards.
Pakistan’s AI story will ultimately be shaped not only by the technologies it imports or the services it consumes, but by what its students, communities, entrepreneurs, institutions and governments are able to build with them.
This time, perhaps, the opportunity is to move from being technology’s users to becoming its problem-solvers.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational and analytical purposes. Views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect The Tribune International’s editorial position or views.
