Seoul: Pakistan\u2019s Federal Minister for IT and Telecommunication has said that artificial intelligence can deliver trusted public services only when governments first build strong digital public infrastructure, secure data systems and citizen safeguards.<\/p>\n
Speaking at a special panel discussion titled \u201cEnabling Digital Government Service Delivery through DPI and AI\u201d at the Global AI & Digital Summit 2026 in Seoul, the minister said the session was organised under the auspices of the World Bank.<\/p>\n
The minister began by thanking the World Bank and shared what was described as a key lesson from Pakistan\u2019s experience: \u201cArtificial Intelligence is the last layer, not the first. An AI model is only as good, as fair, and as trustworthy as the infrastructure beneath it. When governments skip the foundations, they do not get AI in public services; they get pilots that never scale and systems that citizens do not trust.\u201d<\/p>\n
The minister said the central issue was not which AI system should be deployed, but what must exist before AI can safely serve every citizen.<\/p>\n
Highlighting Pakistan\u2019s approach, the minister identified four core foundations required for digital government services supported by AI.<\/p>\n
The first foundation, according to the minister, is digital identity. An AI-based service, the minister said, must know whom it is serving, while citizens must retain control over who can access their data. NADRA\u2019s national identity system already provides verified identity to more than 100 million Pakistanis. This system is now being extended into digital identity to authenticate citizens online and to record and enforce their consent. The minister said identity enables an AI service to be personal without becoming invasive.<\/p>\n
The second foundation is payments. Many public services, including social protection transfers, subsidies and fees, ultimately involve the movement of money. The minister said Raast, the State Bank of Pakistan\u2019s instant payment system, provides a public payment rail. When an AI model identifies a household eligible for support, this payment rail can help convert that insight into delivery.<\/p>\n
The third foundation is trusted data exchange through WASL. The minister said AI in government fails when each ministry keeps its data in a separate silo. Under the World Bank-supported Digital Economy Enhancement Project, Pakistan is building its first national Digital Public Infrastructure stack. At its centre is WASL, the national data exchange layer, through which institutions can share data securely and under clear rules. Every transaction is authenticated, encrypted and logged, while citizen consent is built into the exchange.<\/p>\n
The minister said that, on top of WASL, a citizen \u201cSuper App\u201d and the National Open Data Ecosystem, or NODE, are being established to provide researchers, startups and AI developers lawful access to public data.<\/p>\n
The fourth foundation is safeguards through the National Data Governance Policy. Issued by the Pakistan Digital Authority, the policy provides a single national rulebook on how public data is classified, shared, protected and published. The minister said this framework includes visible and withdrawable citizen consent, audit trails to hold institutions accountable, and the principle that AI should support human decisions but must not decide anyone\u2019s rights or entitlements on its own.<\/p>\n
The minister said these four foundations together make AI scalable, inclusive and trusted.<\/p>\n
Referring to the future roadmap, the minister said the government is building the AI layer on these foundations through the NAIEDP programme. The programme includes two main components.<\/p>\n
The first is sovereign national AI infrastructure, involving the procurement and provisioning of public compute capacity so that Pakistani data is processed within Pakistan and its value remains in the national economy.<\/p>\n
The second is Pakistan\u2019s own large language model, \u201cBuraq\u201d, being trained on Urdu and regional languages to make AI inclusive by design for every citizen.<\/p>\n
Concluding the address, the minister said building digital public infrastructure first may appear slow, but once it is in place, every AI service launched afterwards becomes faster, cheaper and safer. The minister said Pakistan had chosen this path and was grateful to the World Bank for supporting the journey.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At the Global AI & Digital Summit 2026 in Seoul, Pakistan\u2019s IT minister said AI in public services requires digital identity, payments, data exchange and safeguards first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":21595,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peakpoint.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peakpoint.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peakpoint.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peakpoint.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peakpoint.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.peakpoint.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21596\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peakpoint.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.peakpoint.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peakpoint.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.peakpoint.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}