World Bank: AI Could Reshape 61% of Pakistan’s Service Jobs — But Most Workers Won’t Be Replaced
Artificial intelligence is about to touch the working lives of millions of Pakistanis — but not in the way most headlines about robots taking jobs would have you believe. A new World Bank report, Job Opportunities and AI in Pakistan, finds that 61 per cent of the country’s service-sector workers are employed in occupations with above-median AI exposure. That makes the services industry — the shops, banks, offices and classrooms where a huge share of urban Pakistan earns its living — the front line of the World Bank AI Pakistan jobs transformation.
The report’s message is double-edged: the exposure is real and concentrated, but in many of these roles AI will work alongside people rather than instead of them — handling routine tasks while humans focus on judgement, relationships and expertise.
Which Pakistani jobs face the most AI exposure
The World Bank AI Pakistan jobs analysis breaks the economy down occupation by occupation, and the pattern is striking. In wholesale and retail trade, financial and insurance activities, real estate and education, more than 80 per cent of workers are employed in highly AI-exposed occupations. If you process information for a living — ledgers, customer queries, lesson plans, property listings, claims forms — AI is already knocking on your office door.
The contrast with the rest of the economy could hardly be sharper. In manufacturing, only 7 per cent of workers face above-median AI exposure. In other industrial sectors the figure is 5 per cent, and in agriculture — which still employs an enormous share of Pakistan’s workforce — it is less than one per cent. The country’s average occupational AI exposure score in 2024 stood 0.48 standard deviations below the median occupation, placing Pakistan roughly in line with the average for emerging markets and developing economies.
Exposure does not mean extinction
Here is the part of the World Bank AI Pakistan jobs report that tends to get lost in the noise: it carefully distinguishes between occupations where AI could assist workers and those where it could substitute for them. Around 18 per cent of employed Pakistanis hold jobs with both high AI exposure and high human-AI complementarity — roles where the technology makes a worker faster, better or more capable. Only 8 per cent work in highly exposed roles with low complementarity, where outright replacement is the genuine risk.
Real estate and education sit firmly in the complementary camp, according to the analysis: an AI assistant that drafts property descriptions or grades practice tests does not eliminate the agent or the teacher — it frees them for the human parts of the job. Wholesale and retail trade is the sector to watch most closely, combining a very large workforce with very high AI exposure, which makes it pivotal to how the country’s labour market adapts in the coming years.
Why services, and why now
The logic behind the World Bank AI Pakistan jobs findings is straightforward. The occupations most exposed to AI are those built on information processing, administrative tasks and knowledge-intensive work — exactly what services are made of. A bank clerk reconciling accounts, a shop manager tracking inventory, an insurance agent filling forms: these are tasks today’s AI handles increasingly well. Agriculture, by contrast, still runs on physical labour in fields where today’s AI has little immediate purchase — though the report notes the technology could still raise farm output over time.
Pakistan is arriving at this moment with unusual momentum. The government has committed one billion dollars to AI development through 2030, covering computing infrastructure, a sovereign AI model and mass training programmes, while ICT services exports reached 4.6 billion dollars in FY2025-26. The raw ingredients for an AI-adapted workforce are being assembled — the question, the World Bank AI Pakistan jobs analysis suggests, is whether workers in the most exposed occupations get the reskilling they need in time.
What this means for Pakistan’s workforce
For the millions of Pakistanis working in shops, banks, offices and schools, the World Bank AI Pakistan jobs report is less a warning than a timetable. The transformation it describes is already under way: the AI tools reshaping these occupations are products businesses are buying today, not laboratory curiosities. Workers who learn to use them — the shopkeeper who automates inventory, the teacher who uses AI for lesson planning, the clerk who lets software handle the repetitive half of the day — stand to become more productive, not less employable.
The real risk, the World Bank AI Pakistan jobs findings suggest, falls on those who wait. With wholesale and retail trade employing such a large share of the exposed workforce, even small shifts in how those jobs are done will ripple across the economy. Sixty-one per cent is a big number — but for workers ready to adapt, it is also a big opportunity.
Sources: World Bank report “Job Opportunities and AI in Pakistan” (Pakistan Development Update assessment of AI exposure and job complementarities), as covered 22 October 2026.
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