Ali Dar
In partnership with LUMS and with support from the Gates Foundation, our Office of AI Delivery Unit is piloting Awaaz-e-Sehat, an AI-powered maternal health voice assistant designed to help women access maternal health information and guidance through conversations in their own languages and local dialects. The ambition goes well beyond translating medical advice into Urdu or Punjabi. A woman in a rural community may describe her symptoms using expressions, colloquialisms or traditional terms that are very different from formal medical terminology. The same symptom may be described differently across districts, dialects and communities.
For AI to be genuinely useful, it must understand not just what a woman is saying, but what she actually means. That is precisely what we are seeking to test through Awaaz-e-Sehat: whether AI can understand local speech patterns, interpret the medical meaning behind everyday expressions, and provide reliable, context-sensitive maternal health guidance, while recognising when professional medical attention is necessary.
This is particularly important for women who may have limited literacy, limited access to doctors or little experience navigating digital services. If we can make AI work for these women, in the language and context they understand, we can begin to demonstrate what genuinely inclusive AI looks like.
Our broader work through the Office of AI and its AI-enabled Delivery Unit is built around this same principle: technology must solve real problems for real people.
Language inclusion also represents an economic opportunity. Pakistan should not simply become a consumer of AI developed elsewhere. We have an opportunity to contribute to developing AI that reflects our languages, knowledge and local realities, while creating opportunities for our researchers, universities, technology companies and entrepreneurs.
An innovation designed to solve a problem in Punjab could offer lessons and solutions for millions of people across other developing countries facing similar challenges.
The real test of inclusive AI
My time in Seoul reinforced that countries like Pakistan have much to learn from the technological progress of nations like South Korea. But we also have an opportunity to contribute something important to the global AI conversation: how to make AI work for the diverse linguistic, social and economic realities of the developing world.
The global conversation is shifting from what AI can do to who AI can do it for.
That distinction matters.
Governments, technology companies and international development partners must work together to ensure that AI reaches people who have historically been excluded from technological progress.
Making this ambition a reality will require investing in local language datasets, supporting Pakistani innovators, and bringing universities, researchers, industry and government together. Our engagement with countries like South Korea and international development partners provides an opportunity to learn from global experience while building our own capabilities. The diversity of our languages and communities should not be seen as a barrier to innovation, but as an opportunity to develop solutions that could eventually serve millions of people facing similar challenges around the world.
But inclusion must also be built on trust. An AI system that speaks someone’s language but misunderstands their needs, provides inaccurate advice or mishandles personal information is not truly inclusive. As governments introduce AI into essential services, we must ensure these systems are tested across local dialects, protect people’s privacy, acknowledge their limitations and allow access to human professionals when needed. Trust is not built through technology launches or impressive demonstrations. It is earned when technology consistently proves useful, reliable and worthy of people’s confidence. For Punjab, our responsibility is to turn that ambition into real applications that people can access, understand and trust.
We cannot allow the AI revolution to create another divide between those who speak the language of technology and those who do not. The true measure of AI progress will not be how powerful our models become, but how many people they empower.
And for that to happen, AI must learn to speak the language of the people, not the other way around.
—Ali Dar is a software engineer by education, business leader and Advisor to the Chief Minister of Punjab on Artificial Intelligence and Special Initiatives. He writes on the future of governance, artificial intelligence, digital transformation and public policy.
