Syeda Amnah Batool

After the US crackdown on Indian IT companies accused of gaming its visa and immigration system, many people have asked what this means for Pakistan. First, understand the scale: India’s software services exports exceed $220 billion a year — roughly seven times Pakistan’s entire goods exports across all sectors combined. The policy reforms I introduced as Federal Minister a few years ago helped grow Pakistan’s IT exports from around $2.5 billion to over $4.5 billion. That is meaningful progress, but still minuscule compared with our potential. The most important thing we must fix is our higher education system. Business models built around low-skilled tasks on platforms like Upwork are especially vulnerable to AI automation. We cannot build our economic future on work that AI can increasingly do faster and cheaper. We need universities that produce an AI-ready workforce, high-tech startups, and solution architects capable of designing and deploying enterprise AI workflows. We need businesses building the platforms and datasets used to train AI models, and data centers capable of becoming part of the global compute infrastructure. That requires a serious overhaul of what we teach, how we train our graduates, and how we connect research with industry. Unless we build these capabilities now, we will once again be left behind — watching another technological revolution create wealth elsewhere while we debate its impact on Pakistan.