The divide is inside the building
Pakistan learned crypto before it had rules for it, and nobody ran a programme. So what is actually stopping the same thing happening inside a company?
There were some interesting discussions at the leadership summit in Islamabad last week. Most of it was about the economy and the next wave. One of the important discussions was on AI, and where the opportunity actually sits.
My view is simpler than most of what I heard.
Our young people are not waiting for us. They pick things up on their own, fast, without anyone running a programme.
Look at crypto. Pakistan sits third in the world for adoption, behind India and the United States. The regulator was only set up last year. Parliament passed the law this March. The adoption came first. The rules came afterwards.
Nobody trained anyone. People learned it because they could see the value in it.
Building sovereign infrastructure still matters. Other countries are moving that way, the debate here is the right one to be having, and we should build.
Aamir Ibrahim made the point I agree with most. Take steps now. Do not wait for a ten year plan to be signed off first.
Because the divide I keep seeing is not between countries. It is inside the building.
I have watched it happen many times in my career that teams or customers demand new technologies but what they did not have was a process or access to work with any room for it.
That one does not need a data centre. It needs somebody to change the process and simply start building it.
The pointer
Chainalysis, 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index. India first, the United States second, Pakistan third. Worth knowing what the index measures before quoting it: it weights on chain activity by purchasing power and population, so it is a measure of how widely crypto has spread through a country rather than a headcount of users. That is the thing that makes Pakistan's position interesting.