This week, I stood in front of a room of Pakistan’s newest civil servants, the probationary officers of the 54th Common Training Programme, the men and women who will run our districts, our ministries, and our public financial system, and I asked for a show of hands. How many had used ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude in the last twenty-four hours? Almost every hand went up.
Then I asked the question that should keep every policymaker in this country awake. If every one of these officers already trusts AI to run their personal lives, why does the state of Pakistan still make them leave that power at the office door and pick up a pen designed for the 19th century?
Because that is what we are doing. We are trying to govern the fifth most populous nation on earth, 250 million people, with a mindset built for an age of control, not delivery, an age that measured a good officer by the order he signed, not the citizen he served. We inherited the paperwork of an empire and mistook it for the architecture of a state. And then we act surprised when the world leaves us behind.
Look at the mirror the world holds up. On the UN’s E-Government Development Index, Pakistan climbed 14 places in 2024 and crossed into the "High EGDI" tier for the first time. But we still rank 136th out of 193. In South Asia, India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives all lie above us; only Afghanistan lies below. A single good survey is not a destination. On the World Bank’s 2024 Government Effectiveness measure, Pakistan scores approximately -0.6 on a scale centred on zero, reflecting weak perceptions of public service quality, policy implementation and institutional credibility.
Here is the heart of the problem. Our crises now move at the speed of compute. Our government still moves at the speed of committees. A flood, a currency shock, a disinformation wave, a cyberattack, these arrive at machine speed. In our system, a summary memo can take three weeks and four signatures. That gap is not an inconvenience. It is where citizens fall through.
I told those young officers something to carry alongside everything they have learned this week: you no longer need to be an engineer to fix this. The most powerful programming language on earth is no longer Python or Java; it is clear human speech. Describe a problem with precision and conscience, and AI will write the code, build the tool and set up the database in an afternoon. I asked them to become builders, not just custodians, of the state, to not wait until they hold a Secretary’s chair to start fixing one broken process at a time. You can design the solution, build a working prototype in a weekend, and put it in front of the people who can test and harden it.
This is not a motivational fantasy. We are living through the most violent compression of what one person can do in human history. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has a standing bet with other tech founders on when the first one-person, billion-dollar company will appear. A few near-solo contenders already exist, one founder and a fleet of AI agents doing what used to take hundreds of employees. If a single person with the right tools can approach a billion dollars of value, ask yourself honestly: what could a single motivated officer, armed with the same tools and the full data of the state, build for 250 million people?
I am not speculating from the sidelines. I have watched it happen inside my own house. The Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority, the body I chair, was built as an AI-native institution from its first day, because I refuse to pay lip service to a technology we are not ourselves willing to use. Where Dubai, Singapore, and Hong Kong each took years to stand up their virtual-asset regimes, we built ours in months. We were given a budget to do it and spent less than two per cent of it. AI did the heavy lifting at every stage: the research, the automated AI screening and merit-scoring of our recruitment cycles, the systems, the scaffolding of an entire new regulator. That is tech-enabled governance, proven on ourselves before we ask anyone else to believe in it. If a brand-new institution can be built that lean and that fast, imagine what is possible when the whole machinery of the state learns to work the same way.
And this is the part too few in our corridors understand: no technology in history has ever been this suited to governance. Governance is, at its core, the processing of information at scale: records, claims, risks, decisions. That is precisely what these systems do best. We are sitting on mountains of data and decades of hard-won institutional wisdom. We have simply never had a tool powerful enough to turn one into the other. Now we do.
We are not the first to see it. Estonia has deployed AI across more than a dozen government functions, from satellite-based crop and flood monitoring to automated school enrollment, and built its own AI-native vision for public services. The UAE appointed the world’s first minister for artificial intelligence back in 2017, and handed the post to a 27-year-old. This year, it went further, committing to move 50 per cent of all government services to autonomous AI within two years. China’s latest Five-Year Plan mentions AI 52 times, up from 11. The serious nations are not debating whether. They are executing how.
Let me be clear about the guardrail required, because the fire without it is just arson.
Speed means nothing if we surrender our sovereignty while building it. Every query a Pakistani office sends to a foreign model exports our data and rents back the intelligence built from it. That is digital sharecropping. Our neighbours are already building their own GPU clusters and language models, which they own and audit at home. We need our own compute, our own data law, and models that understand Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, and Pashto.
This is arguably the largest reset of state capacity available to us in our lifetimes, and what it requires is the nerve and the will to act. Pakistan is one of the youngest nations on earth, with an average age of 22, a country of restless, tech-native talent already fluent in these tools. The only thing standing between that generation and a state that finally works at their speed is our willingness to let them build.
The future is not waiting for our paperwork. Neither should we.
The writer is a minister of state and chairman of the Pakistan Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (PVARA).
