AI is already in the office

Artificial intelligence is no longer something organisations are preparing for. It is already inside the workplace. Employees are using generative AI platforms to summarise lengthy documents, draft correspondence, review contracts, analyse data, prepare presentations and carry out research. Work that once consumed several hours can now be completed in minutes. The attraction is obvious. The problem is that, in many organisations, the technology has arrived before the rules governing its use. Consider a fairly ordinary situation. An employee receives a hundred-page confidential document and needs to prepare a summary before the next morning. Uploading it to an AI platform may appear to be the most efficient solution. Within seconds, the system produces a neat summary. But a more important question is often never asked: was that employee authorised to place the organisation's information on an external platform in the first place? This is where Pakistan's conversation about AI needs to become more practical. The Federal Cabinet approved the National AI Policy 2025, providing a much-needed national direction for innovation, data protection, cybersecurity, responsible AI and domestic capacity. The policy is an important beginning. But national policy alone cannot determine how a bank, regulator, hospital, law firm, university or company should manage AI inside its own workplace. Every organisation now needs its own rules. Employees should know which AI systems they are permitted to use; what information may be entered into them and what material must remain completely outside public AI platforms. Confidential contracts, personal data, internal investigations, legal advice, financial information and sensitive government records cannot be treated in the same way as a publicly available newspaper article. AI governance must begin with this basic distinction. The answer, however, is not to prohibit AI, as it would ignore both technological reality and human behaviour. If a tool can reduce a three-hour task to 20 minutes, employees will want to use it. Organisations should therefore focus on providing safer alternatives: approved enterprise systems, controlled AI applications or privately hosted models where the sensitivity of information justifies greater control. There is also a larger opportunity here. Government organisations possess years, sometimes decades, of valuable institutional knowledge buried in files, circulars, decisions, manuals, contracts and correspondence. Instead of employees repeatedly uploading individual documents to external systems, organisations can develop internal AI tools capable of searching their own authorised records. An employee could ask whether a similar issue had arisen before and receive relevant internal precedents within seconds rather than spending hours searching old files. Such systems could significantly improve productivity while reducing dependence on public AI platforms. Pakistan should not limit its AI ambition to becoming a large market for foreign technology. Our institutions should develop the capacity to use existing models within controlled environments, train or adapt suitable systems for local requirements and build solutions around Pakistani laws, languages, administrative practices and specialised institutional knowledge. But control over data is only half the issue. AI-generated answers must also be treated with caution. These systems can produce excellent work, but they can also misunderstand documents, invent references and present incorrect information with remarkable confidence. Human review therefore remains essential, particularly in law, medicine, finance, engineering, regulation and public administration. AI may assist judgement, but responsibility for a decision must remain with the human being making it. Pakistan's real AI challenge is therefore not simply how quickly we adopt new technology. It is whether our institutions can adopt it intelligently. The organisations that benefit most from AI will not necessarily be those that use it the most, but those that know where it should be used, what information it may access and where human judgement must remain decisive. AI is already reshaping the workplace; our rules and safeguards must now keep pace.