Pakistan's ambitious artificial intelligence steps

Pakistan's IT sector posted its strongest export performance on record in the fiscal year just ended, with exports reaching $4.6 billion — a 21% jump from $3.8 billion in FY25 — as the government pushes an increasingly ambitious artificial intelligence agenda meant to accelerate that growth even further.

A record year for IT exports

The sector generated a $3.9 billion trade surplus, the largest among all of Pakistan's services categories, and now accounts for 11.7% of the country's total exports. Under the government's Uraan Pakistan plan, officials are targeting $10 billion in annual IT exports by FY29, a goal that would require sustaining a compound annual growth rate of 29.5% over the next several years — a considerably steeper trajectory than the sector has managed even in this record-setting year.

The policy architecture behind the push

That growth target rests on a stack of relatively recent policy moves. The National AI Policy, adopted in 2025, formally designates artificial intelligence as a national priority and is backed by a $1 billion government commitment through 2030 aimed at expanding sovereign computing capacity and domestic AI research. On the legal side, the Regulation of AI Act 2024 provides the regulatory framework the sector had previously lacked, while the National AI Fund (NAIF) is intended to support integrating AI tools into existing industries rather than treating AI purely as its own standalone sector.

Institutionally, the government has stood up the Sino-Pak Centre for AI at Haripur and the National Centre of AI (NCAI) at the National University of Sciences and Technology, giving the policy framework physical research infrastructure to build on rather than existing purely on paper.

A seat at the global table

Pakistan became a founding member of the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organisation (Waico) in July, one of 29 founding members of the Shanghai-headquartered body. Deputy Prime Minister Ishaq Dar signed the founding agreement on July 16, giving Pakistan an early position in a China-led effort to shape global AI governance and cooperation frameworks outside the US-dominated standards that have so far defined much of the industry.

The freelance economy is already growing fast

While the formal AI policy apparatus is still being built out, Pakistan's freelance economy has already responded to global AI-adjacent demand: freelancer earnings grew 78% to $1.76 billion in FY26, a figure that suggests individual Pakistani technologists and remote workers are capturing AI-era opportunities faster than the country's broader institutional and export infrastructure has been able to formalize and scale.

The gap between ambition and execution

Reaching the government's $10 billion IT export target by FY29 would require Pakistan to nearly triple its IT sector's size within roughly three years, a pace that outstrips almost every prior period of growth the industry has managed. Analysts following the sector caution that the policy architecture, however comprehensive on paper, still needs to translate into functioning computing infrastructure, trained talent at scale, and reliable power and internet connectivity in secondary cities if the freelance-driven growth of the past year is to be matched by the kind of institutional, enterprise-scale AI exports the Uraan Pakistan plan is ultimately betting on.

The National AI Fund and the AI Seekho training programme will likely be watched closely as the two most direct levers the government has for converting policy ambition into measurable workforce capacity over the next several years, since export targets ultimately depend on having enough trained engineers and technologists to service the additional demand the government is hoping its diplomatic and policy efforts, including the Waico membership, will help generate.