THE Higher Education Commission issued its notification in February 2026 and confirmed it at its 47th Commission meeting in July: from this autumn, every student in a Pakistani university, whatever the discipline or institution, must complete three credit hours of artificial intelligence. The instinct is sound. Nations slow to build computer literacy in the 1990s spent two decades importing skills they could have developed at home. The difficulty lies below instinct, in the machinery that must carry instruction into classrooms.

A three-credit-hour course requires a competent instructor. In July 2025, the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunication, with the HEC, the National Computing Education Accreditation Council, Meta and atomcamp, announced a two-track programme: soft-skills training for more than a thousand non-technical faculty and hard-skills certification, including Meta’s Llama credentials through Coursera, for 250 to 500 technical faculty. This cohort was never meant to be the whole teaching pool. Pakistan already has computing departments and qualified staff. Yet much of that staff is concentrated in established departments and carries responsibility for existing programmes, while the mandate reaches every discipline in every university.

The task is measured not by institutions but by sections. The Economic Survey records higher-education enrolment at about 1.96 million. Across four-year degrees, annual intake runs to several hundred thousand students. At forty to a class, compliance requires roughly ten thousand sections each year.........

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