KARACHI: Research, incubators and startups were in focus during a talk by former senator and former Chairperson of the Higher Education Commission (HEC), the convener HEC Task Forces on Research, Innovation, Commercialisation and Business Incubators, Dr Javaid Laghari.

His talk on `Pakistan`s Untapped Intellectual Wealth` was organised by the English Speaking Union of Pakistan (ESUP) at a local hotel on Friday.

Dr Laghari said that AI was always there. It came about in the 1950s but the world only heard about it after ChatGPT came in 2022. And in the four years since then, it has exploded. `And it is no longer just ChatGPT. There is also Meta AI, Gemini, Claude and so many other AI platforms now,` he pointed out.

`This year we expect investments in global AI to exceed 800 billion dollars, while only last year it was 582 billion dollars. And this growth will continue,` he added.

`India was already in the AI race for the last decade.

They have already spent more than 11 billion dollars on AI. If we compare this to Pakistan, last year, we announced our AI policy. The prime minister said that Pakistan will be investing one billion dollars over the next five years. But India has developed an entire ecosystem in IT,` he said.

`But you must have data centres to do the coding, etc.

So all over the world, big investments are made for data centres. It costs about 50 million dollars per megawatt for a data centre. In 2022, the investment in data centres was 275 billion dollars. In 2026, it has already exceeded one trillion dollars. And, according to the Bank of America, by next year, it is expected that data centre investment will exceed 2.1 trillion dollars. The US has been building mega data centres in Texas because they need a lot of electricity, which the state is not short of,` said Dr Laghari.

`Facebook, which is Meta, is going to invest a lot in building their data centres as is Microsoft and the list goes on and on. Even the UAE is spending billions on building a data centre, the Star AI data centre, outside Abu Dhabi. In India, Google and Amazon are building data centres. So there is a lot of activity happening left and right of Pakistan,` he said.

`Out here we are building one data centre in Karachi along with one in Lahore and Rawalpindi. If you look at the AI race, it becomes very important for us to capture the AI innovation economy. We could never become a knowledge economy; we missed the IT revolution butwe do not want to miss out on the innovation economy.

There is an untapped intellectual wealth here through which we can at least build up our innovation economy, he added.

Dr Laghari said that we here in Pakistan have a lot of research but then there is a dead end. We need industry linkages, technology transfers, intellectual property, startups, setting up of incubators and setting up of accelerators to increase our gross domestic product.

`We have 278 universities in Pakistan including universities in the public and private sector. We have some 40,000 computer science and IT graduates. And we have more than half a million IT professionals in Pakistan. We have been focusing a lot on PhDs. Ten years back, we had 1,600 PhDs and this year we have 3,200 PhDs. Currently, the enrolled PhD students here number in 30,000 to 35,000.

`So there will be about 7,000 PhDs every year in Pakistan. And we have about 32,000 to 40,000 research papers being published every year. It is a very big number, which is because the HE C has flawed policies. They believe in `publish or perish`. If the faculty doesn`t publish research, they won`t get promoted. But this kind of research doesn`t help. So that is what we want to change,` he said.

`Some 10 years back when I was chairperson of the HEC, I started two programmes, the Offices of Research, Innovation and Commercialisation [ORIC] and the Business Incubator Centres [BICs] for universities. Now there are BICs in IBA, NED, LUMS, NUST Islamabad, etc. On top of that the Ministry of Science and Technology, too, has its incubators along with quite a few others in the private sector.

`More than 3,000 startups came about in the last 10 years and 25 billion rupees were generated from them.

More than 185 thousand new jobs were also created because of these incubators. Bykea, for example, was one such startup that came out of NED University. It alone generates more than a million jobs in Pakistan.

So even if 10 companies as successful as that take off, you have an operating ecosystem through BICs and ORICs where you train people and connect them to the outside world to also bring in local and foreign investors,` Dr Laghari pointed out.

`So we do not suffer from a shortage of talent. We suffer from converting our talent into innovative ideas for startups and connecting to investors to create wealth. We should know how to capitalise on our talent,` he concluded.

ESUP Patron-in-Chief Aziz Memon, President Irfan Qureshi and Secretary General Majyd Aziz also spoke.