Lahore, May 9, 2026 — TallyMarks Consulting hosted a practical session at the Aiwan-e-Iqbal Complex to help small and medium-sized enterprises adopt artificial intelligence and close Pakistan’s AI adoption gap. The programme drew SME owners, department heads, business leaders and academics from across the city and focused on actionable steps that local businesses can take immediately to benefit from AI for SMEs.
Dr. Syed Sohail H. Naqvi, Director EdTech at TallyMarks Consulting and Chairman of Knowledge Streams, urged attendees to view AI adoption as a matter of national competitiveness. Tanveer Ahmad Sheikh, Senior Vice President of the Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry, emphasised the need for AI solutions to tackle productivity shortfalls, rising costs and intensifying market competition for Pakistani SMEs.
Anas Wahab, Chief AI Officer at TallyMarks Consulting, presented a clear roadmap for immediate AI adoption tailored for smaller businesses. Trainers Shahmeer Maqbool and Ammaz Ahmad delivered hands-on sessions with live demonstrations of tools including Gemini, ChatGPT, Canva AI and Google Vids, showing how accessible these resources are for everyday business tasks.
The programme placed particular weight on prompt engineering so participants could learn to craft clearer instructions and get better outputs for marketing content, customer support replies, proposals, reports and quotations. Advanced use cases discussed included AI agents for customer interaction, recruitment bots, automated invoice processing and legal drafting workflows, all framed in the context of practical deployment for SMEs.
A TallyMarks spokesperson captured the event’s simple message: ‘AI is not your competition. The businesses using AI are.’ Speakers repeatedly stressed that AI for SMEs starts with small, manageable steps: try a free tool, draft a business message or social media post with AI, and map processes where automation can cut operational costs without replacing people.
Participants left with a practical action plan designed to help businesses become faster, more responsive and more competitive by empowering staff with AI tools and skills. The workshop underlined that with basic digital literacy even micro teams can begin using AI for SMEs to improve daily operations and better serve local markets.
