Why Pakistan's BPO industry never scaled like India's

From cotton leaf curl virus to contact centers

The episode opens with Muzamil asking Salman Wajid Mian to go all the way back — schooling, early life, the first job. What emerges is one of the more unusual origin stories in Pakistani tech. Salman did his BSc and MSc in biological sciences from Government College Lahore and Punjab University, then joined the National Institute for Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering under Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission in 1999 as a research officer. The work was genuinely cutting-edge: his team was attempting to genetically reprogram cotton plants to resist the cotton leaf curl virus.

He left after one year. Not because the work wasn’t exciting — he says it was — but because a job offer arrived while he was mid-way through an MS in computer sciences at what is now the University of Central Punjab. He never finished the degree. The offer was from Align Technologies, which later became TRG, and it was the beginning of Pakistan’s contact center industry.

“We were contact center agents back in days,” Salman says, “and that was the first time it was a very high paying job. We used to get paid around 23,000 to 24,000 PKR plus incentive. Back in 2001, 2002 — that was a lot of money.”

The jump from genetic engineering to a night-shift call center is jarring on paper. Salman’s explanation is simple: he had the aptitude for it, the money was real, and the work was new enough to carry its own thrill.

Building the industry from the floor up

What follows is two decades of climbing through every layer of the contact center world. Salman spent roughly two and a half years at TRG, then moved to Mobilink as a floor manager, then Telenor as assistant manager for operations. By 2008 he was at Zong (CMPak) as head of the contact center, where he built the operation from scratch. When he left in 2013, there were 2,700 people working across two centers in Islamabad.

“2,700 people in customer service,” Muzamil repeats, visibly surprised. It is a number that reframes the scale of what was being built inside telecom companies even as the international BPO story stalled.

From Zong, Salman moved to DGS — now Ibex — as executive director for sales operations, overseeing both Pakistan and Philippine operations. He joined Systems Limited in July 2015 as senior vice president for BPO. By the time of this conversation, he is approaching seven years there and holds the title of Chief Process Outsourcing Officer.

The career arc matters because it is not a founder story. Salman rose entirely through operations — agent, floor manager, assistant manager, head of center, executive director, SVP, C-suite. His authority on the industry comes from having lived every layer of it.

What Systems Limited’s BPO operation actually looks like

Muzamil asks Salman to describe the canvas he inherited when he joined Systems in 2015 and what it looks like in 2022. Two legacy pillars dominated: land records digitization for Pakistan’s public sector, and mortgage title-and-settlement operations for the US market.

The land records work required physical outposts in remote areas — teams sent into districts to scan documents on-site, with further processing for indexing and OCR done centrally. Muzamil asks whether Urdu OCR was part of that work. Salman confirms it was attempted, but is candid about its limits: “We are there, but it’s not something that’s gonna blow anybody’s hair at this stage.” The practical usability, he says, is not yet strong enough for wide deployment — and the commercial incentive to invest heavily in it is limited when the primary market is domestic.

By 2022, the operation has diversified. On the domestic side, Systems is servicing some of Pakistan’s largest e-commerce players — end-to-end: order management, website management, transaction processing, after-sales, customer service. Internationally, the US remains the anchor market, now running a true omnichannel contact center with email, chat, and WhatsApp integrated alongside voice. Australia has been added as a market. Europe is being developed. A deal with an Australian service provider was recently closed. An alternate energy client is in the pipeline.

The approach, Salman explains, is deliberately industry-agnostic: “Anything that is acquirable and you have the ability to do that, that’s what we’re doing.”

Why Pakistan never built a fifty-thousand-seat BPO

This is the sharpest section of the conversation. Muzamil frames the question directly: India built a massive BPO industry. The Philippines built one. Pakistan had an early start with TRG and others, but the industry never scaled. It always seemed like someone would set up a few hundred seats, collect a handful of contracts worth a few hundred thousand dollars a year, and stop there. Why?

Salman’s answer is blunt: “They were hustlers. They were not there for the long haul.” The arbitrage paid quickly. If you knew how to connect a Western client to a Pakistani operation, the money came fast. And then it went into real estate. “They were so unsure about how they were able to sustain it to the next level,” he says. “Whatever we are earning, are reinvesting — that’s a huge risk based on the kind of environment and circumstances created around you.”

Two structural factors compounded the problem. First, the telecom boom arrived at exactly the same moment as the outsourcing opportunity. In 2001, Mobilink and U Phone couldn’t even send an SMS to each other. Telecom was new, exciting, and absorbing enormous amounts of capital and talent that might otherwise have gone into building international BPO capacity. “That’s where we lost track of a very good opportunity we could have capitalized on,” Salman says. “And that’s where exactly India did capitalize on, and Philippines as well.”

Second, Pakistan’s geopolitical situation created persistent skepticism among potential clients. The post-9/11 environment, the war on terror, the Osama bin Laden episode, energy crises, currency instability — “one after the other,” Salman says. “I’m surprised it’s still alive.” His primary responsibility at Systems, he adds, is not just winning new business but actively working to change Pakistan’s image as an outsourcing destination. “Why is there so much skepticism? Why is Pakistan still not a preferred outsourcing destination? These are the kind of taboos.”

He notes a fact that rarely surfaces in these conversations: Pakistan is the third-largest English-speaking country in the world, after the US and India — ahead of Nigeria and the Philippines. That positioning is almost entirely absent from how Pakistan markets itself internationally.

The pandemic as structural inflection point

Later in the discussion, Muzamil pushes on what actually changed to drive Pakistan’s IT exports from roughly $400–600 million for years to breaking $1 billion, then $1.4 billion, $1.8 billion, $2.2 billion, and now past $3.5 billion. Was it the pandemic? Global digitization? The dollar? Salman says it was all of the above — but he singles out one mechanism that is underappreciated.

India, despite its scale, could not execute work-from-home at the same level during the pandemic. “Indian demographics — in a small house there are like thirteen, fourteen people living there. The work-from-home concept is very different from what we think of work from home. They can’t.” Pakistan’s workforce, by contrast, was able to shift quickly. Systems kept its BPO teams operational and became a business continuity anchor for clients who were struggling onshore.

“When they tried, when they looked at the kind of work, the work ethics, the delivery system, the discipline and structure, the infrastructure — they were wowed,” Salman says. “This was something we were missing on a gold mine.”

He is careful to credit the industry rather than the government: “It is not something which is done based on the kind of support we were given from the governments. It is something we have done for ourselves, and we came to limelight. Then government came to support us.”

AI, automation, and the case against scaremongering

Muzamil raises the standard critique: AI and robotic process automation are coming for repetitive, rule-based work. Contact centers are full of repetitive, rule-based work. Is BPO structurally threatened?

Salman’s response is measured. He has been hearing this argument for years, and the pandemic was the clearest test case: “When these AIAs and the RPAs were gonna kick in and take over and everything’s going to become redundant — and it didn’t happen.” He draws a parallel with e-commerce and physical retail: everyone said brick-and-mortar was dying during the 2020–21 e-commerce surge, and it didn’t die. People still want to touch a product. They still want to walk through a mall.

“I don’t think this is going to cannibalize us. I think this is going to complement the services we are going to be providing.” The argument for human contact centers, he says, is personalization — the white-glove service that automation cannot replicate. “There’s always going to be a requirement for personalization. There’s always going to be a requirement for that human experience.” He gestures toward Japan’s hyper-automated society, where people are hired specifically to have lunch with isolated individuals, as evidence that human connection generates its own demand as automation expands.

He does acknowledge one gap: data annotation, image labeling, and AI training data work — the kind of large-scale human-in-the-loop operations running out of Eastern Europe and the Philippines — is something Pakistan has not broken into. “That’s something which is not my expertise at this stage, and this is something we must do.”

The generation that has to lead — and what it’s leaving behind

The conversation closes on a wider register. Muzamil observes that the leadership of Pakistan’s IT industry clusters tightly between 45 and 50 years old — Generation X. There is almost no one older in senior roles, because IT is simply too young an industry to have produced them. Salman agrees and adds a dimension: this generation has seen rotary phones, brick phones, and smartphones. It has lived through every technological revolution of the last forty years. That experience makes it more adept to change, more open to ideas, less attached to management principles from the eighties and nineties.

But Muzamil presses further: this generation is largely invisible in mainstream public life. It is risk-averse, focused inward, and not visibly leading the national narrative. The boomers still dominate politics and media. The millennials are looking for someone to connect with and not finding them.

Salman does not dispute this. He turns the question toward the generation coming up behind them — the one that will define what Pakistan looks like in 2050. “The fruits we are eating from the trees right now, they’re sown by somebody else. We need to make sure that our legacy is passed down to the next generation.”

His assessment of that next generation is honest and a little worried. “It is a very confused generation. They don’t know. They’re seeking answers. They’re looking for immediate gratification, immediate satisfaction, immediate results.” He describes a youth that is culturally unmoored — “back in the day we were raising a generation of Saudi Pakistanis, and now we are raising a generation of Turkish Pakistanis and American Pakistanis. Where are the Pakistanis?” The element of nationalism, he says, has been drowned out by religious and political noise, leaving individuals numb and isolated.

By the end of the conversation, Salman’s argument has come full circle: the same reinvestment mindset that Systems applied to its BPO business — staying relevant, not extracting and leaving — is what this generation owes to the country. “If you’re not doing anything, the expected outcome is what you’re going to leave behind.”