Pakistan Software Houses Association for IT and ITeS (PASHA) is holding a Skills Roundtable titled “Navigating Pakistan’s AI Shift: From Adoption to Impact” on September 21, 2026, from 2 PM to 5 PM, featuring three focus group discussions built around different dimensions of the country’s AI transition. The roundtable is being held as one of the sessions accompanying the PASHA ICT Awards 2026 in Karachi, with Computerworld Pakistan serving as a technology media partner for the awards. The first focus group, AI in the Workplace, will examine adoption, strategy, barriers, and return on investment, giving participants a chance to discuss the practical hurdles companies face when integrating AI tools into existing workflows rather than treating adoption as a purely technical exercise.
The second discussion, Building Pakistan’s AI Ecosystem, centers on industry-academia connections, strengthening higher education, and advancing foundational AI literacy across the country’s broader talent pipeline. This session builds on a recurring theme PASHA has raised in previous roundtables and whitepapers, including its earlier “Future Skills for the IT Industry” report synthesizing discussions from the P@SHA Skills Roundtables held at ICT Awards Lahore 2025 and ITCN Asia Karachi 2025, which found that Pakistan’s core IT talent challenge lies less in the quantity of graduates produced and more in their actual employability given persistent gaps in practical exposure and industry-aligned skills. The third focus group, Workforce Transformation, will address productivity, job design, hiring, and career pathways, extending the conversation from ecosystem-level gaps into the more immediate question of how AI is reshaping what jobs and career trajectories actually look like within Pakistani companies today.
Together, the three discussions are designed to examine what it takes to build an AI-ready workforce and translate technology adoption into practical results, moving beyond broad policy statements toward more granular, sector-specific insights drawn directly from industry, academia, and workforce participants in the room. This structure mirrors PASHA’s established format for its skills-focused roundtables, which have consistently combined representatives from industry, academia, government, and the broader technology ecosystem to examine the disconnect between education output and actual labour market needs in fields like AI, data analytics, cloud computing, and automation. Given that Pakistan’s AI policy conversation has increasingly moved from broad strategic ambition toward more specific implementation questions over the past year, the roundtable’s focus on workplace-level adoption and workforce transformation reflects where much of the practical debate within the country’s tech industry currently sits.
As part of the broader PASHA ICT Awards 2026 programming in Karachi, the roundtable adds a substantive policy and workforce discussion component to an event otherwise centered on recognizing individual companies and innovators across the country’s technology sector. Insights gathered from the three focus groups are likely to feed into future PASHA publications and advocacy efforts, following the pattern set by its earlier skills roundtable whitepaper, which translated roundtable discussions into a broader synthesis document aimed at informing policy and industry practice. Whether the discussions held during this particular roundtable produce similarly actionable recommendations will likely become clearer once PASHA compiles and shares outcomes from the September 21 session in the weeks following the ICT Awards.
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