Pakistan moves to implement national AI policy with focus on data protection and practical rollout
LAHORE - Oct 12, 2025: Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif directed ministries to fast-track effective implementation of Pakistan's Artificial Intelligence policy to strengthen the digital economy. In a meeting on AI promotion, he emphasized data protection, data sovereignty, and responsible use as non-negotiable principles.
The government will constitute a Steering Committee to drive implementation and an AI Advisory Panel comprising experts to guide execution. Under the Prime Minister's vision, AI and R&D centers are planned to support public sector delivery and industry adoption.
What this means for IT and development leaders
- Prioritize data governance: classify datasets, define retention rules, and enforce access controls across training, validation, and inference pipelines.
- Architect for sovereignty: prefer regional data residency, local KMS, and clear data localization paths (on-prem, sovereign cloud, or hybrid with geo-fencing).
- Build privacy-by-design: consent capture, PII minimization, synthetic data where feasible, and differential privacy for sensitive workloads.
- Establish model governance: versioning, model cards, lineage, reproducible training, risk registers, and approval gates before deployment.
- Secure the AI supply chain: SBOMs for models and libraries, signed artifacts, dependency scanning, and policy on model provenance.
- Evaluation and monitoring: bias, safety, and performance tests pre-release; drift, abuse, and anomaly monitoring post-release with audit logs.
- Vendor due diligence: residency guarantees, fine-tuned model isolation, IP terms, and incident SLAs that meet public-sector expectations.
- Upskill teams: data stewards, ML engineers, prompt engineers, evaluators, and security engineers aligned to one operating model.
Policy pillars to plan for
- Stronger data protection standards and enforcement for AI systems handling citizen or financial data.
- Clear rules on data sovereignty and cross-border transfers, including approved regions and custodianship.
- Transparency and accountability measures: documentation, auditability, and human oversight for high-impact use cases.
- Public-sector adoption guidance: procurement criteria, reference architectures, and compliance checklists.
Action plan: next 90 days
- Appoint an AI program owner and form a cross-functional steering cell (IT, data, security, legal, risk).
- Map data flows for all AI use cases; classify PII and critical data; set residency and retention by class.
- Stand up an MLOps stack with policy controls: repo + registry, feature store, evaluation suite, observability, and secret management.
- Implement model documentation: purpose, datasets, known limits, safety tests, and rollback procedures.
- Pilot one high-value use case under strict governance to validate controls end-to-end.
- Prepare for audits: enable immutable logging, access reviews, and incident response runbooks specific to AI systems.
For frameworks that align technical controls with risk management, see the NIST AI Risk Management Framework here.
If your teams need structured upskilling for these roles and controls, explore curated tracks for IT and developer jobs at Complete AI Training.
Governance structure announced
The Prime Minister instructed the formation of a Steering Committee to oversee promotion and implementation of AI across sectors. An AI Advisory Panel of experts is being formed to support execution and advise on standards, safeguards, and adoption pathways.
Who was in the room
- Federal Minister for Economic Affairs Ahad Khan Cheema
- Federal Minister for Information Technology and Telecom Shaza Fatima
- Minister of State for Finance and Railways Bilal Azhar Kayani
- Special Assistant to the Prime Minister Bilal Bin Saqib
- Senior government officials and AI experts
Bottom line: expect clearer rules on data protection, sovereignty, and AI accountability. Teams that align architecture and process to these standards now will ship faster when procurement and compliance windows open.
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