Govt eyes AI trade ecosystem

ISLAMABAD: The Ministry of Commerce has reviewed proposals to develop a secure, integrated and AI-enabled digital ecosystem for trade, aimed at safeguarding data exchange, building local cloud infrastructure and accelerating digital transformation.

Commerce Minister Jam Kamal Khan held separate meetings with representatives of the Pakistan Digital Authority (PDA) and Sky47 management to review various proposals.

The meetings focused on treating government data as a national asset, strengthening Pakistan’s sovereign cloud and data-centre infrastructure, enabling secure data exchange, and utilising artificial intelligence for evidence-based trade and export policymaking.

An official announcement said the ministry maintains extensive information on thousands of tariff and product lines, exporters, international markets, trade bodies, chambers of commerce, business associations, and overseas trade missions.

Commerce ministry moves to integrate data, build sovereign cloud

Mr Kamal stressed that this dispersed information must be standardised, integrated and readily available to authorised users in secure, decision-friendly formats.

“Pakistan’s trade data is a valuable national asset. It must be protected, properly classified and transformed into actionable intelligence for exporters, businesses and policymakers,” the minister remarked.

He emphasised the need to connect the Ministry’s wings, attached departments, the Trade Development Authority of Pakistan, chambers and trade associations, as well as Pakistan’s trade officers serving in more than 55 countries. He also called for greater integration of the ministry’s digital portals to provide a unified view of trade-related activities and market intelligence.

The PDA officials briefed the meeting on the emerging national framework for data governance, data exchange, enterprise architecture and cloud adoption. They discussed the classification of government data into categories such as open, shared, restricted and personally identifiable information, while preserving the ownership and control of data with the respective ministries and public bodies.

The participants also discussed the establishment of a national digital master plan, under which sector-specific digitalisation roadmaps could be developed in coordination with federal and provincial governments, public institutions and the private sector.

Cybersecurity

The meeting with Sky47 focused on Pakistan’s data-centre capacity, sovereign cloud services, cybersecurity, disaster recovery and the growing computing requirements associated with artificial intelligence. The Sky47 team briefed the minister on its data-centre infrastructure and plans to expand secure and reliable hosting capacity in Pakistan.

The meeting was informed that modern data centres could provide highly reliable services aligned with international standards while reducing the costs and security risks associated with numerous small, fragmented departmental facilities.

The discussions also covered energy-efficient cooling systems, intelligent data storage, metadata management, data-fabric technologies and the separate computing requirements of conventional applications, AI models and future quantum-computing workloads.

Published in Dawn, August 22nd, 2026