Muhammad Burhan Mirza on the AI Shift Already Transforming Pakistani Workplaces

An employee does not need permission from their company to open ChatGPT and ask it to draft an email, summarise a report, analyse data or help write code.

That is part of what makes AI different from many previous workplace tech: it can enter an organisation through an individual employee before management has decided how it should be used. That is increasingly the reality in Pakistan.

Graduates and service-sector workers are already using generative AI tools, while businesses are exploring AI to improve efficiency and reduce costs. A recent Dawn analysis noted that Pakistan remains at an early stage of digitisation, with widespread use of tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini but limited understanding of their broader implications. The problem is that adoption and preparation are not the same thing.

A company may have employees using AI every day without having a policy explaining what information can be entered into an AI platform, which tools are approved, how AI-generated work should be checked or who is responsible when an AI-assisted decision goes wrong.

Muhammad Burhan Mirza, a Pakistani entrepreneur and investor who has worked with technology companies and startups, was already raising some of these questions several years ago.

In a 2023 interview with Business Recorder, Mirza said AI and big-data adoption in Pakistan was still at an extremely early stage. He pointed to a lack of data infrastructure, skilled professionals and regulatory frameworks as barriers to wider business adoption. He also argued that companies needed to train existing and new workers before they could effectively implement AI systems.

Three years later, the technology has moved considerably faster than many of those organisational systems. AI is now being used for relatively simple tasks; drafting content, preparing presentations, generating marketing material and summarising documents; as well as more technical applications involving software development, customer management, analytics and automation.

Mirza’s earlier argument therefore takes on a different significance. The question is no longer whether Pakistani businesses will encounter AI. They already have. The question is whether they know what to do with it.

There is also a growing distinction between having access to AI and actually having AI skills.

Someone who knows how to generate a paragraph with ChatGPT is not necessarily equipped to evaluate its accuracy, protect confidential information or integrate the technology into a business process. That gap becomes more important as AI moves from experimentation into everyday work.

This is an area where Mirza’s focus on workforce development intersects with the broader AI debate. Through Skills360, which he co-founded, and The Coach360, Mirza has been involved in skills development and training initiatives. More recently, his public activity has included AI workshops covering practical applications such as prompting and AI-assisted content creation. The risks, meanwhile, are not theoretical.

An employee can unknowingly upload sensitive business information into an external AI service. An AI-generated report can contain convincing but incorrect information. A company can begin relying on automated recommendations without establishing who remains accountable for the final decision. There is also the question of jobs.

The immediate effect of AI in many Pakistani workplaces may not be wholesale replacement of employees. It may be a gradual change in what employees are expected to accomplish in the same amount of time. A worker who can use AI effectively may produce more than one who cannot, creating pressure for organisations to rethink training, recruitment and performance expectations.

Pakistan’s government is already setting ambitious targets around AI. The National AI Policy 2025 includes a target of training one million AI professionals by 2030, while the government has announced a $1 billion investment in the country’s AI ecosystem and a programme to train one million non-IT professionals in AI skills.

But national ambition does not automatically translate into workplace readiness.

For Pakistani companies, the first step may be less complicated than building sophisticated AI systems. They need basic rules: what employees can use, what data they can share, when human review is mandatory and which tasks should never be delegated entirely to an AI system.

Mirza’s argument from 2023 was essentially that technology adoption requires infrastructure, skills and a framework around it. Pakistan now has considerably more reason to take that argument seriously.

AI is already entering Pakistani workplaces. It is arriving through employees, freelancers, startups and businesses experimenting with whatever tools are available. The policy question has moved beyond whether Pakistan should adopt AI. It is whether its organisations can catch up with the people already using it.

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