Govt eyes AI trade ecosystem

ISLAMABAD: The Ministry of Commerce has discussed plans to establish a secure, integrated digital ecosystem harnessing artificial intelligence for trade purposes. The initiative aims to bolster data security, bolster local cloud infrastructure, and hasten digital modernization efforts. Commerce Minister Jam Kamal Khan convened separate discussions with officials from the Pakistan Digital Authority (PDA) and Sky47, focusing on treating government data as a national resource, enhancing sovereign cloud and data-center infrastructure, ensuring secure data sharing, and leveraging AI for trade and export policy decisions.

The ministry holds a vast repository of data encompassing thousands of tariff and product categories, exporters, global markets, trade bodies, chambers of commerce, business associations, and overseas trade missions. Kamal stressed the imperative of standardizing and integrating this information, making it readily accessible to authorized users in decision-friendly formats.

"Pakistan's trade data is a valuable national asset. It must be safeguarded, properly classified and transformed into actionable intelligence for exporters, businesses and policymakers," remarked the minister. He stressed the necessity of unifying the Ministry's divisions, attached departments, the Trade Development Authority of Pakistan, chambers and trade associations, as well as Pakistan's trade representatives stationed in over 55 nations.

He called for deeper integration of the ministry's digital platforms to provide a cohesive overview of trade-related activities and market insights. PDA representatives briefed the meeting on the emerging national framework for data governance, exchange, enterprise architecture, and cloud adoption. They delved into categorizing government data into open, shared, restricted, and personally identifiable information, while preserving ownership and control over the data with the respective ministries and public bodies.

Discussions also centered on creating a national digital master plan, under which sector-specific digitalization strategies could be devised in collaboration with federal and provincial governments, public institutions, and the private sector. The meeting with Sky47 centered on Pakistan's data-center capacity, sovereign cloud services, cybersecurity, disaster recovery, and the escalating computing demands linked to artificial intelligence.

Sky47 briefed the minister on its data-center infrastructure and expansion plans for secure, dependable hosting capacity within Pakistan. The discussions touched upon energy-efficient cooling systems, intelligent data storage, metadata management, data-fabric technologies, and the unique computing needs of traditional applications, AI models, and upcoming quantum-computing workloads.