Seoul: Federal Minister for IT and Telecommunication of Pakistan addressed a special panel discussion at the Global AI & Digital Summit 2026 in Seoul, South Korea, saying that artificial intelligence must be built on strong digital public infrastructure to be safe, scalable and trusted.
The panel discussion, titled “Enabling Digital Government Service Delivery through DPI and AI,” was organised under the auspices of the World Bank.
Beginning his address by thanking the World Bank, the minister said Pakistan’s experience had shown that artificial intelligence was “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,” he said.
The minister said the real question was not which AI to deploy, but what needed to be in place before AI could serve every citizen safely.
Highlighting Pakistan’s experience, he identified four key foundations for using AI in digital government service delivery.
The first foundation, he said, was digital identity. He noted that an AI service must know whom it is serving, while the citizen must remain in control of who can see their data. NADRA’s national identity system already provides verified identity to more than 100 million Pakistanis, he said, adding that it was now being extended into a digital identity that could authenticate citizens online and record and enforce their consent.
“Identity is what allows an AI service to be personal without being invasive,” he said.
The second foundation was payments. The minister said many public services ended with the movement of money, including social protection transfers, subsidies or fees. He said Raast, the State Bank of Pakistan’s instant payment system, provided a public payment rail. When an AI model identifies a household that qualifies for support, this rail turns that insight into delivery, he added.
The third foundation, he said, was trusted data exchange through WASL. The minister said AI in government failed when each ministry’s data remained in its own silo. Under the World Bank-supported Digital Economy Enhancement Project, Pakistan is building its first national Digital Public Infrastructure stack, with WASL as the national data exchange layer at its core.
Through WASL, institutions share data securely and under clear rules, he said. Every transaction is authenticated, encrypted and logged, while citizen consent is built into the exchange. On top of WASL, a citizen “Super App” and the National Open Data Ecosystem, known as NODE, are being established to give researchers, startups and AI developers lawful access to public data.
The fourth foundation was safeguards through the National Data Governance Policy. The minister said the policy, issued by the Pakistan Digital Authority, had been designed from day one to provide a single national rulebook for how public data was classified, shared, protected and published.
He said this framework included visible and withdrawable citizen consent, audit trails to hold institutions accountable, and a clear principle that AI supports human decisions but does not decide anyone’s rights or entitlements on its own.
The minister said these four foundations together made AI scalable, inclusive and trusted.
Outlining the future roadmap, he said the government was building the AI layer on these foundations through the NAIEDP programme, which includes two core components.
The first component is sovereign national AI infrastructure, involving the procurement and provisioning of public compute capacity so that Pakistani data is processed within Pakistan and value remains in the economy.
The second component is Pakistan’s own large language model, Buraq. The minister said Buraq was being trained on Urdu and regional languages to make AI inclusive by design for every citizen.
Concluding his address, the minister said building digital public infrastructure first could feel slow, but once it was in place, every AI service that followed became faster, cheaper and safer to launch.
“Pakistan has chosen this path, and we are grateful to the World Bank for walking it with us,” he said.
