Pakistan’s IT Export Evolution: From Services to Product-Driven AI Platforms  

By Sajid Ahmad — PakUpTech | March 2020

Pakistan’s technology export landscape is undergoing a structural transition. For more than a decade, growth in IT and ITeS exports has been anchored primarily in outsourcing and project-based delivery. While this model built a large talent base and generated foreign earnings, it also reinforced a dependency on labour-linked revenue rather than scalable product value. Official figures show that Pakistan’s IT export earnings reached approximately US $1.44 billion in 2019, rising to around US $1.72 billion in 2020, despite macroeconomic instability and restricted global demand.

Yet behind these headline numbers lies a deeper conversation: whether Pakistan can transition from selling hours to selling intellectual property particularly AI-powered software products with recurring commercial value. As global markets increasingly demand standardised SaaS and data-driven operational intelligence rather than bespoke custom builds, the competitiveness of Pakistan’s technology sector hinges on product innovation and exportable platforms.

There are already examples of this shift on the corporate scale. NetSol Technologies, with its globally deployed automotive finance platform NFS Ascent, has demonstrated that Pakistani-built enterprise software can secure multinational clients and export recurring revenue beyond services.
Systems Limited, one of Pakistan’s oldest technology firms, has expanded international enterprise delivery and product revenue across North America, the Middle East and Africa, representing a long-term model of export-driven technology scale.
Similarly, TPS Pakistan has proven that financial-technology products developed domestically particularly digital payments and switching platforms can be deployed across banks and financial institutions internationally.

These companies reflect what is possible when Pakistan competes through owned technology, not outsourced labour. However, they also represent large-scale enterprises with decades of history, large capital footprints, and global operational capacity a scale that smaller firms and independent product leaders historically struggled to achieve.

It is within this gap that a newer category of product-focused entrepreneurial leadership has begun to emerge individuals developing specialised AI-driven platforms at the SME and mid-market level and exporting them into operational industries locally and abroad. Ahsan Sharif, whose work has centred on converting real-world operational problems into commercially viable AI software deployed across international industrial and service-operations environments. His approach was rooted in evidence-based market research, hands-on operational interviews with factories and service businesses, and structured analysis of inefficiencies like fragmented telemetry, reactive maintenance, and opaque scheduling. From that research emerged exportable AI-driven operational intelligence platforms packaged under subscription models, generating more than £500,000 in recognised revenue by 2020 both locally and internationally.

Commercial performance was matched by measurable operational outcomes: deployments reported material reductions in machine downtime, increased throughput, and improved cost-visibility, reinforcing the economic case for Pakistan-built AI products in global markets. Unlike major corporates, this impact was driven from the product-startup tier of the ecosystem rather than large institutional structures illustrating that Pakistan’s future export growth may also come from product-led teams operating at a smaller but agile scale.

The implications are significant. Five years ago, Pakistan’s technology export narrative centred almost exclusively on outsourcing and freelance work. By 2020, the groundwork had emerged for recurring-revenue SaaS and AI-product exports, which are higher-value, margin-efficient and strategically defensible. If scaled, product-based exports could support improved foreign-currency inflow, reduce reliance on labour-based pricing, strengthen the technology trade balance, and position Pakistan as a provider of advanced operational intelligence rather than inexpensive development labour.

The question is no longer whether Pakistan can build globally competitive technology products examples now exist at both institutional and emerging-leader levels but whether the ecosystem can accelerate and replicate these models fast enough to shift the national export trajectory.