Reyhan Khan on remote work, AI systems and building a life abroad

Opening with the anxiety most Pakistanis are carrying

Muzamil Hasan opens by naming the mood he sees around him: people are anxious about where jobs are heading, whether AI will take their work, and whether dollar income is still reachable from Pakistan. He admits that many families pushed their children into computer science because the money was there, and now they are discovering that computer science itself is being automated.

Reyhan Khan joins from Lisbon, where he is based, though he was visiting Pakistan when they recorded. Muzamil says he had hoped to record the conversation in person at the beach, and both agree to do that next time.

Who Reyhan is, and where he started

Reyhan says he is from Rawalpindi and is proud of Pindi. He describes himself as an engineer by training who did not enjoy university. His real education, he says, was learning how to pass papers in the last two or three days before exams and how to make friends.

His first full-time job was as an engineer at Islamabad International Airport, wearing a helmet and a high-visibility jacket, on a salary of 25,000 in 2017. He describes the work as managing a team, six days a week, travelling to the site in a van. After about a year, he realised the effort was not building anything he could grow from.

A friend pointed him to a transcription company in Islamabad. Reyhan describes the work plainly: listen, type, repeat, and get paid for it all day. He stayed about four years and used the time to move into client-facing roles, realising that communication was the skill that would matter. He then moved into customer success before COVID.

Freelancing before the company

Reyhan started freelancing on the side at around $4 an hour. He says he was earning around $4,200 a month by 2018-19 while still living in Pakistan. He raised his rates after changing how he presented his value, and eventually a client asked him to join full-time.

He was not sure what he could sell. He tried copywriting because his English was reasonably good, then took on virtual assistant work, which he describes as doing whatever a client needed. He noticed that many of the small tasks he picked up were things a CEO was doing for their own business, when the CEO should have been closing sales. That pushed him toward operations, where he could package his systems thinking as a service. He reframed his offer as giving clients back their time by systemising the operations they were managing themselves.

Why Reyhan says systems come first

The central argument of the conversation is that Pakistan’s approach to AI will not succeed without systems. Reyhan is blunt about the typical operational setup, describing business run through WhatsApp, Google Sheets, and the owner’s mood that morning, and says a setup like that cannot run.

“You have to build structure, repeatable, automatable systems that can then be automated, and intelligence can be deployed on top of it,” Reyhan says in substance. He adds that AI amplifies whatever structure already exists, and that without structure the technology cannot deliver its value.

What recruitment looks like in the age of AI

Reyhan uses recruitment to make his point. He sketches a company posting a machine learning engineer role at 150,000 and failing to find the right person, and a recruiter who offers three profiles for a 25 percent fee. He says the old model meant hours of manual work on LinkedIn, scrolling and reviewing profiles one by one. Now a recruiter can instruct an AI system to score candidates from the CRM, draft outreach and send it, reducing work that once took about five hours to a final review.

His company, he says, helps recruitment agencies build those systems, and he has placed talent from the Philippines, India, South Africa and elsewhere. He also says he believes Pakistanis are among the most capable offshore resources in the world, and that he does not say this out of nationalism.

Muzamil asks about the forces reshaping the market. Reyhan argues that the slowdown in recruitment during 2024 and mid-2025 was partly driven by AI, but he frames the shift as one of capture rather than replacement. He lays out three layers: capturing the signals a business generates, automating the workflow, and then adding intelligence on top so the system can handle many more options instead of a few fixed branches. He says the intelligence layer is the simplest part to build, and the harder work is getting a client’s data, processes and alignment in order.

The reality of the AI slop problem

Reyhan describes a LinkedIn post he wrote, lightly edited with Claude, and published without much care. It received five likes and about 400 views, far below his usual reach. He concludes that audiences have learned to recognise the structure of AI-written posts and disengage. A human has to rework AI output in their own voice before it gains traction.

He says he is a strong believer in AI and is running a 30-episode series on it, while warning that many people entering the field switch off their judgment. Muzamil asks how the skills he now needs differ from critical thinking. Reyhan’s answer is simple: think about who the client is, what they want, and why they came to you, rather than shaking a product into a box and handing it over.

Skills, offers and where Pakistani freelancers go wrong

Reyhan says the most common problem he sees is that people cannot define the offer clearly. Are they an employee, a freelancer, a consultant, or an agency? What exactly is the deliverable, what does it cost, and why is it better than the alternatives? He says most people cannot answer these questions in a single document, and he admits he would benefit from niching more himself.

He argues that niching is one of the most valuable things a freelancer can do. A copywriter who writes landing pages for legal firms is worth more than a general copywriter, because the promise is narrower and easier to sell.

On hiring, he says he looks for curiosity, proactiveness and adaptability. He criticises the habit of calling oneself the most productive and most adaptable person in an interview and then not showing it in practice. He also notes that many people new to AI fixate on token usage or fear wasting resources, instead of asking how the tool can create real value.

Emigration, Portugal and the reality of residency

Muzamil moves to emigration, noting that doors are closing for many migrants. Reyhan says he is living in Portugal and explains that once he earned enough to think about relocating, the realities of living abroad, including ongoing flight costs and the need for a settled base, became clearer.

He describes his own route. He reached out to founders on LinkedIn using his own GTM approach, built a list of about 1,500 startup contacts, and pitched a short job. He says one founder offered him a three-month contract for around 1,000 euros, which gave him residency while he kept his US-based job. He notes that Portugal’s residency runs for two years, then three, and can renew without proof of ongoing employment, which he contrasts with stricter requirements in Spain and Germany under its Blue Card. He also says the timeline from Pakistan can be long, sometimes more than a year, and recommends consulting qualified lawyers rather than relying on relatives or social-media content.

Reyhan closes this part by saying that living in Portugal is manageable on a steady income, and that his own rent was modest compared with his other costs. He says migration deserves its own conversation. Muzamil agrees and repeats his wish to record a future episode in person at the beach.

Closing thoughts

Muzamil thanks Reyhan and the audience, and invites viewers to share in the comments whether they are satisfied with their current work in Pakistan, and what is holding them back from moving forward. Reyhan thanks him in return and says he hopes to speak again soon.