South Asia will spearhead the next era — if it learns to communicate

Why this conversation happened in the first place

The episode opens with Muzamil naming the obsession he has been circling for months: how Pakistan grows its IT and services exports from the four-to-five billion dollars they sit at today to something closer to the thirty-five-to-fifty-billion-dollar opportunity he believes is on the table. He frames the diaspora — the people often dismissed as brain drain — as Pakistan’s largest underused asset, the same lever India pulled to build a services-exports industry Goldman Sachs now projects to cross seven hundred billion dollars within five years.

Shahyan Shabbir is on the call because he reached out on LinkedIn from Adelaide with a specific note: he is seeing real demand in Australia for AI and data work, and he wants to source talent out of Pakistan to plug into it. Muzamil’s instinct, stated upfront, is that he keeps looking for “no-nonsense” operators — people willing to say what is actually broken — and Shahyan reads as one of them.

Shahyan introduces himself crisply. He started in IT as a teenager, building machines for relatives. His first job was at the World Bank in Yemen at seventeen, on the back of an FSC and a couple of certifications. From there: a computer-science degree in Pakistan, a stint as a network administrator at Air University, five years in Manchester across corporate banks and a broadband company called Pipex, and the last fifteen years in Australia across energy, defence and health. Twenty-eight years total, fifteen of them in cybersecurity, more than five hundred cyber incidents managed. Nine months ago he left his executive role to start Strategic Pulse, a professional-services firm covering business performance, cyber, data and AI.

Cybersecurity as the unsexy compound bet

Muzamil presses on a point most founders skip. Everyone is talking about AI. Everyone is talking about data. How serious, actually, is cybersecurity as a long-term domain?

Shahyan does not oversell it. He calls it “a very noble field,” but is honest that it requires a different mindset from generic IT. The market opportunity, in his telling, is large and structurally underserved — and crucially, it is the precondition for the AI work everyone else is racing toward. His own thesis at Strategic Pulse is to build what he calls a “cyber immune system” — an ecosystem where cyber, data and AI respond to incidents together rather than as three disconnected functions.

He is also direct about Pakistani talent in this space. “Pakistanis are extremely resilient because we have been through a lot,” he says. “That mindset, coupled with giving them the opportunity to step into cyber, is going to pay dividends for anybody who steps in.” This is not a throwaway line — it returns later when he argues that South Asia, not the United States, will lead the next era of services delivery.

The communication gap nobody wants to name

Muzamil asks the question he asks every guest on this arc: what is actually missing in Pakistani talent that keeps enterprise clients from buying? Shahyan does not flinch.

“The biggest thing is communication,” he says. “English has become the global language — with much regret — and that is something key for our industry to understand.” He points at the Philippines as the obvious case study. Filipino call-centre workers are now indistinguishable from American speakers because the country invested capital, deliberately and at scale, in language and accent work. China has done the same. Pakistan has not.

The second weakness is dedication and ethics, though he is careful to note this is improving. He tells a story about leading an Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP rollout — a multi-million-dollar build on brand-new technology — where his entire team ended up being overseas Pakistanis. The capability was there. The constraint was that several of them were running three projects in parallel, and quality slipped. His framing is constructive: focus on showing return on investment to the client, and a five-year sustainable pipeline opens up for you.

Muzamil reinforces the point with a structural observation. Pakistan’s high-school throughput is roughly five-to-six million eighteen-year-olds a year. Half do not graduate high school. Of the half who do, only twenty percent reach higher education — about five hundred thousand a year. The two million who graduate high school but stop there are the most underutilised cohort in the country: connected via TikTok, ambitious, hungry for higher-value work, but with no infrastructure to absorb them.

Why infrastructure is not the government’s job

Shahyan’s response to the infrastructure gap is one of the sharper moments in the conversation. “We don’t have to wait for infrastructure to be built by the government,” he says. “We can invest ourselves into an infrastructure for creating value for a certain cohort of people. Interview them, do psychometric testing, understand their attitude and aptitude, and then bring them in.”

Muzamil pushes the same point harder, naming what he has seen across three years of interviewing Pakistani IT leadership: an escapist victim mentality. The framing he hears too often runs roughly: “the government has failed us, so what can I do — I have three or four hundred staff, my farmhouse, my annual trips, I am fine.” The vision problem, in his read, is that founders running profitable agencies are not reinvesting in the eighteen-year-olds who could compound their business by an order of magnitude. India’s IITs sent people abroad. The real Indian services machine — TCS and the rest — was built by private operators who treated raw talent as the actual scarce resource.

Shahyan agrees but stays “glass half full.” He sees the new cohort of Pakistani leadership as genuinely visionary; the gap is between strategy on paper and execution on the ground. He quotes a phrase he picked up locally: “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.” Five days a year of senior-team strategy work with a serious consultant, he argues, is enough to align people, processes and technology — and if those three move together, retention stops being the problem it currently is.

Data is the wedge. AI is the wrapper.

The conversation turns to AI, and Shahyan is unusually clear-headed about where the actual money sits. The noise around AI products will, in his estimate, continue for another year or year-and-a-half as mergers and acquisitions shake out. But the durable opportunity is not in shipping a clever AI product. It is in the data layer underneath.

“If you are building an AI product — a call-centre product, for example — it needs to feed off data. That data requires compliance,” he says. Australia is strict. Privacy and security frameworks are mandatory. The companies who win are not the ones with the flashiest models; they are the ones whose data is structured, governed, accessed and managed properly.

He tells a story that lands. Strategic Pulse went into a client to do an AI-readiness assessment. The client’s access management was loose enough that the AI, once switched on, could read across every structured and unstructured file in the business — salaries, incident reports, everything. “The real gold is on the corporate side,” he says. Customer-service AI will be table stakes. The differentiator is whether AI can be integrated into corporate operations without leaking the company in the process.

For Pakistani operators trying to position into this opportunity, Shahyan names the roles he is actively looking for: data strategists, data architects, data solution architects, AI strategists, AI solution architects. AI engineers will be in demand, but he expects much of the engineering layer to become plug-and-play; the strategic and architectural roles are where the durable margin will sit.

The actual economics of offshore — and the 60 percent number

Muzamil walks through the economics of offshore services in detail, because his audience genuinely does not see how the unit math works. A fresh US computer-science graduate costs around $120,000. Nearshore in Latin America, that drops to roughly $60,000. Offshore to South Asia, it drops to about $30,000. From that $30,000, the resource takes home a salary, the agency covers infrastructure and laptops and office space, and a third component flows into the company pool to cover bench time and the months when a resource is not billable. Pakistani founders frequently miss this last piece and price themselves into a hole.

Shahyan’s contribution is the specific Australian number. He does not pitch on resource cost alone — Strategic Pulse pitches outcomes, three-month sprints, MVPs against prioritised problems — but he is direct about what makes the offshore conversation viable in the first place. “It needs to make sense for the provider and the client,” he says. “About sixty percent. So if it is a hundred rupees onshore and it comes in at forty offshore, that gives them food for thought to actually consider the model.”

Sixty percent is the number. Anything less and the friction of working across time zones, compliance regimes and trust gaps is not worth it for an Australian buyer.

He is also clear on which sectors are even available for offshoring. Defence, never. Several regulated sectors, no. Mid-market and SME work in everything else, yes — and that is where the volume is. Small companies go to Upwork and Fiverr. Medium-sized organisations and enterprises feeling the cost burden of inflation are the ones who turn to hybrid Australia-plus-offshore models, and that is where Strategic Pulse plays.

How a Karachi CEO actually breaks into Australia

Muzamil sets up the closing arc with a persona. An average Pakistani CEO with a hundred-person agency has never seriously looked at Australia. He has now realised there is opportunity. What does he actually do?

Shahyan’s first move is unromantic: market analysis. Is the sector even viable for offshoring? What do the tax laws say? What is the regulatory burden? “Just thinking of it is good. The practicality of it is what matters.”

His second move is the one most founders skip. Do not set up shop. Find a collaborative partnership with someone already on the ground. He gives an example: an Indian firm reached out to him asking for exactly this — they did not want an Australian entity, they wanted Shahyan to build pipeline locally while they staffed delivery. He took it because it was a clean two-way deal: he had the connections and ground knowledge; they had the capacity. “There is no competition,” he says. “There is the opportunity to collaborate with everyone.”

The third move is trust, and Shahyan is concrete about how he evaluates it. Desktop due diligence on the website, reviews and prior projects. Supplier-risk checks. Conversations with the team, not just the founder. The red flag he names directly is weak leadership — specifically, an inability to articulate the operating model, the vision, and what value each side expects to get out of the partnership. If a founder cannot do that in plain language on a first call, the partnership is unlikely to survive a real project.

He shares a line from a senior advisor at Strategic Pulse — Ashish — that captures the philosophy: “The day we have to pick up the paper to look at what clause X, Y, Z says — that is the end of the partnership.” Contracts are a backstop. Trust is the actual product.

Why Australia is worth taking seriously

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil asks Shahyan to widen the lens. How is the Australian economy, actually? Where is services demand going?

Shahyan reaches back to 2008 to make the point. Australia was the only major economy that did not enter recession during the financial crisis, and the reason was structural: it is heavily regulated across financial and other industries, which slows it on the upside but makes it remarkably durable on the downside. The recent election under Anthony Albanese has cleared the policy fog that always slows enterprise spend before a vote, and growth should pick up from here.

He does not have a combined services-sector figure to hand, but he offers one data point: in a market analysis Strategic Pulse ran across thirty sectors, the health sector alone came in at around forty-three billion dollars in revenue. Multiply that across thirty sectors and the addressable pool is significant. And the Australian buyer, in his read, has a specific virtue Pakistani founders should appreciate: a no-nonsense attitude. If they do not like something, they say it. Yes and no come quickly. That is exactly the operating tempo a well-run Pakistani agency should be able to match.

The conversation closes with Muzamil flagging two things to his audience. First, he is building an early-stage solution for the communication and soft-skills problem in Pakistani tech, and is actively looking for English-language and professional-communication trainers willing to be retrofitted into a tech-delivery pipeline. Second, Australia — almost universally ignored by Pakistani founders chasing the United States, Europe and the Gulf — is a serious market that rewards exactly the kind of disciplined, outcome-priced, trust-built services work the better Pakistani agencies are already capable of delivering.

The wedge, as Shahyan frames it, is not AI. It is data. And the path in is not a flight to set up shop. It is a phone call to someone already on the ground.