Pakistan and Russia list tech projects but sign no deals, and the goal for AI skills needs three times the graduates
PSEB and a Moscow university held a third webinar on cybersecurity, AI and cloud. The targets for skills and exports are large, and no contract or commitment was announced.
The Pakistan Software Export Board and a Moscow university held a webinar on 5 November that ended with a shortlist of projects and no signed agreement. It was the third in a series of bilateral sessions. Pakistan's Planning Minister set a goal of one million AI professionals by 2030, and the arithmetic behind that goal is steeper than the speeches suggested.
PSEB organised the session with Moscow's University of World Civilizations. Six priority areas were set out: AI and cloud computing, cybersecurity, digital governance, IT services trade, workforce development and quantum computing. Two Pakistani companies, Ebryx and TMC, met Russia's Positive Technologies and the Russian Quantum Center to discuss developing and delivering solutions together. IT Secretary Zarrar Hasham Khan said the discussions produced a shortlist of potential projects, and that the ministry is working on regulatory hurdles and market intelligence. No commercial agreement or investment commitment was announced.
A skills target that outruns the pipeline
Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal said Pakistan produces more than 75,000 IT graduates a year and aims to train one million AI professionals by 2030, supported by seven new AI centres. From 2027 to 2030 there are four full years, and one million divided by four is 250,000 people a year, more than three times the current annual number of graduates. If every IT graduate in those four years became an AI professional, which they would not, the total would be 300,000, or 30 percent of the goal.
The target can only be met if it counts a much wider group than graduates: short courses, bootcamps, working engineers retrained, and students from other disciplines. That is a reasonable way to define it, but the definition has not been published. Without it the figure cannot be tracked, and a partner abroad cannot judge how many people it could draw on.
The export base
The ministers set the talks against a record. IT and telecom exports reached $4.6 billion in the year to June 2026, up about 20 percent. A 20 percent rise means the previous year was close to $3.8 billion, so exports grew by roughly $0.77 billion. That is the scale against which any new Russian business has to be measured. No figure was given for current exports to Russia, or a target for them, so the market could be worth $10 million or $100 million a year to Pakistani firms.
Iqbal said digital development is one of five pillars of the URAAN Pakistan plan, which aims for a $1 trillion economy by 2035. Pakistan's ambassador in Moscow, Faisal Niaz Tirmizi, said ties had entered a more mature phase, and that his mission would work with PSEB to open the Russian market to Pakistani companies. The talks follow a Russian proposal in April 2026 for cooperation on cybersecurity to protect Pakistan's energy infrastructure.
PSEB chief executive Faisal Jeddy said partnerships rarely fail for lack of intent and usually fail for lack of follow up. He said PSEB would give each participating company a defined opportunity, a named counterpart and a clear next step.
Three obstacles
Three practical issues stand between a shortlist and revenue. The first is payment. Many Russian banks have been cut off from the international payments system since 2022, so a Pakistani exporter invoicing a Russian client has to settle through a limited set of arrangements, which can be slow and expensive. The second is compliance. Positive Technologies has been on a United States sanctions list since 2021, and a Pakistani firm that sells to American or European clients would have to check how a partnership with it could affect those customers. The third is trust: in cybersecurity above all, buyers in the West and the Gulf ask who a supplier works with, because security vendors are given deep access to a client's networks and data, so a Russian tie can narrow a vendor's other markets. None of this makes the project wrong. It means the commercial case has to be made company by company, and in the open.
A firm like Ebryx or TMC stands to gain a counterpart and perhaps a contract, and PSEB gains something to report. The decisive test is the follow up Jeddy described: whether the named counterparts and next steps for each company are made public. Until then, the shortlist is a list of intentions.
