Pakistan aims to position AI as an engine for productivity and exports, but the World Bank says major gaps in innovation, skills, and infrastructure could hold the country back. The findings come from the Bank’s latest MENAAP Economic Update, titled “From Divide to Opportunity: AI, Jobs, and Growth.”
The report places Pakistan alongside Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Tunisia as economies with technical talent and growing digital ecosystems but significant AI readiness gaps. Pakistan’s national AI strategy targets training 200,000 individuals annually, including 3,000 postgraduate scholarships. That is the largest annual training target among the national strategies the report examined.
The country also has a $1 billion AI programme running through 2030. It covers shared GPU infrastructure, a sovereign multilingual model, 1,000 AI PhD scholarships, and training for one million non-IT professionals. Pakistan currently produces an estimated 75,000 IT graduates annually and recorded ICT services exports of $4.6 billion in FY2025-26.
However, the innovation deficit is stark. Only 3% of Pakistani firms reported product innovation and just 1% reported process innovation. Lower-middle-income economies average 23% and 14% in those categories. The report also flags a data gap for local languages. Urdu accounts for just 0.03% of global URLs in Common Crawl, compared with 0.7% each for Arabic and Persian.
AI could boost productivity in 13% to 20% of jobs across the MENAAP region. Meanwhile, near-term automation threatens less than 10% of jobs, according to the report. But the benefits are likely uneven. Educated, urban, and non-wage workers face the most exposure.
The World Bank suggests that “small AI” could offer a practical path forward. These are affordable, purpose-built applications that run on basic mobile devices with low bandwidth and intermittent power. Such tools could serve agriculture, health, and education without requiring frontier-level computing.
The Bank also noted Pakistan’s relatively strong online public-service delivery. However, it cautioned that weak innovation, limited economic integration, and unreliable electricity could still constrain the AI opportunity despite progress in digital infrastructure.
