The Gulf’s AI economy won’t wait for Pakistan 

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Earlier this year Pakistan crossed a milestone it had chased for a decade: its freelancers earned a record $1.76 billion, up 78 percent in a single year and more than four times what they brought in half a decade ago. At home it was celebrated as proof that the digital economy had finally come of age. From where I sit in Dubai, close to how this region is actually building its digital future, I read the same number as a warning.

The billion-dollar figure is real, and so is the talent behind it. But look closely at what much of that work is. It is execution to someone else’s specification: an interface another company imagined, a dataset cleaned for a platform owned elsewhere, code written to a brief drafted abroad. It sits at the commoditized end of the value chain, and it is precisely the layer of digital work that artificial intelligence is expected to automate first. Pakistan, in other words, is celebrating its deepest exposure as though it were its greatest strength.

Pakistan’s own standing underlines the point. It has slipped for three straight years on the Global Innovation Index, falling to 99th of 139 economies in 2025 from a peak of 87th in 2022, and the decline traces almost entirely to what it does not build. Pakistan ranks 75th in the world on innovation outputs, the software and services it sells abroad, but 124th on the inputs that produce them: research, human capital, institutions. Its research spending sits under 0.2 percent of GDP. A country can sell the world’s knowledge work and still starve the machinery that would let it produce knowledge of its own. Pakistan is doing exactly that, and the gap is widening.

Meanwhile, the market it should be aiming at is being rebuilt from the ground up. Saudi Arabia’s HUMAIN, launched in 2025 under the Public Investment Fund with........

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