Why AI rewards problem solvers and could bring women back to work

The only woman CEO in the room

Muzamil opens by naming the thing that makes this conversation unusual. Mahe Zehra Husain is, as far as he can tell, the only woman CEO he knows of in Pakistan’s tech industry. He frames the sector plainly: IT services in Pakistan is a closed-off boys’ club, hard to break into for anyone, and harder by an order of magnitude for a woman. So this was a conversation he wanted to have.

Husain runs Five Rivers Technologies, a Lahore software house founded in 2003 — almost twenty years old at the time of recording. She joined in 2010 after her master’s, and has been there thirteen years. The firm has done the full range of services work over the years: WordPress, the whole wave of mobile platforms when apps first boomed, e-learning content for a US children’s platform built on the American curriculum. But the part she keeps returning to is AI, machine learning and data science. Her own training is entirely in mathematics, and she is candid that she steers the company toward work the team is actually passionate about rather than taking whatever lands. “We try and look for the right fit for the right person,” she says — because that is what makes the work and the environment dynamic instead of mechanical.

Hire the attitude, not the knowledge

Asked what persona she looks for in a fresh graduate, Husain does not name a university or a stack. She names a temperament: a problem solver, “someone who doesn’t say no.” In interviews she tries to read how a person will respond to a challenge, because nobody knows everything, and the half-life of what you learned in school keeps shrinking. What matters is willingness. “You have to be willing to learn. Every single day.”

She points out that the bottleneck is no longer access. Open YouTube, Coursera, Udemy — there is nothing you cannot learn. The scarce thing is the internal drive, the fire of I can do this, I will do this. That is what she screens for, above all.

Muzamil takes the same point and turns it on the education system. The country talks about $10 billion in IT exports, he says, but divide that by output and you need a million-plus engineers. Pakistan produces roughly 25,000 IT graduates a year, and by his estimate barely 5,000 are employable. Husain does not push back on the numbers. She agrees the real problem sits earlier, and she insists the situation is fixable rather than hopeless.

Homeschooled into problem solving

Her own story is the argument made flesh. All four siblings in her family were homeschooled for part of their lives. She left school in class six, at ten years old, and did not sit another exam until her O levels. Her parents let her choose her own subjects, get her own books, and plan her own timetable. She worked out how fast she had to move to take her O levels early — she sat them around fourteen — and how to study maths versus science. “The skills that I learnt then, the confidence of I can do it,” she says, are what carried her through everything since, from writing books to moving into real estate. “I am a mathematician. You just need to know how to problem solve. You just need to know how to learn yourself.”

That, she argues, is what the system fails to produce. Pakistani students rote-learn well — and she is clear that rote-learning itself takes intelligence — but the intelligence is pointed at the wrong things. Her practical proposal is unglamorous: take a graduate with potential, drop them for three to six months into an environment where they simply have to problem solve, on their own, with no spoon-feeding. They will find things in themselves they did not know were there.

The four-year degree, disrupted

Muzamil widens the question past Pakistan: does the four-year university model survive the age of AI? Husain’s answer is direct. It will be disrupted, and it should be. A curriculum built for thousands of identical students forces every person into the same shape, when everyone is passionate about different things. She wants to combine fields that traditional degrees keep apart — data science with marketing, with water management, with real estate — because real problems do not respect departmental boundaries. During her own master’s she took water-quality courses, convinced Pakistan’s water crisis was a place data science could be useful.

This, she says, is an exciting time to be alive precisely because you can assemble any combination of skills toward a problem you care about. The world is short on solutions and long on problems, environmental and industrial alike, and solving them is now the point of an education.

AI takes care of mediocrity

When Muzamil asks her to step out of the technologist’s seat and look at AI as a consumer, Husain gives the line that anchors the episode: “I think it will take care of mediocrity.” The work where a company “sat a person down to do a machine’s job” is going away. People will have to upskill, redefine themselves, do something they are actually passionate about — and she calls that a good thing, because it forces a person to use their head and be creative instead of becoming a machine themselves.

She is not naive about the costs. As someone passionate about art, she raises the ethics squarely: tools like DALL·E and Midjourney are trained on data humans made, often without consent, and that carries bias and a real grievance from artists whose work was fed in without permission. New technology, she argues, always arrives before the guidelines that govern it, and AI will need the same eventual rules. In her own day-to-day she does not sit in code; she uses ChatGPT as someone to bounce ideas off, to generate ideas, after which human creativity has to take over. The menial busywork disappears — and that, she suggests, might even buy people back some work-life balance.

Muzamil presses on her own industry. The lower-value BPO work, he predicts, will simply be automated away. He sketches a ten-year future where almost nobody codes, where coding is a narrow specialism and product-building becomes conversational — a person describing what they want to an AI and refining it in real time. The Python-and-syntax-error skills of today, he says, are “great party tricks” that mean nothing to anyone. Husain reframes the same future more sharply: “I think it’s the age of ideas.” The people who rise will have the most out-of-the-box ideas and solve the most real pain points — and they will need to tell the story well, because there is always a marketing angle. Ideas, storytelling and problem solving, in conjunction. The machines will handle the nuts and bolts.

How you actually build the soft skills

Husain refuses to leave problem solving and idea generation as abstractions. Asked how an average 21-year-old develops them right now, without waiting for the government to fix education, her answer is concrete: put yourself in different situations. She is blunt about a youth culture that wants overnight success from a few viral videos, when what is needed is hard work and real work environments. She tells a small, damning story — interns who say they will show up Monday at 9am and simply never appear once the offer lands. Any internship, any job that forces a little discipline, teaches the soft skills that grades never do. “Nobody cares” about your CGPA after a point, she says. “They want to know your story.”

And failure is part of the curriculum. Pakistanis, she observes, are a fast nation that does not tolerate failing — yet she has watched people who never failed break the first time they do. “Without failure you don’t learn how to live.” What you learn from failing is something success can never teach you. The only thing a society should insist on, she says, is trying, and trying again, because nothing worth having is easy.

Why women drop out — and what would keep them

The conversation turns to the number that started it. Of Five Rivers’ 200-plus staff, only about 10% are women, which Husain calls sad. Her explanation is structural and unsentimental. Life as a girl in this society is hard in ways most people do not understand. The women she has retained for a decade or more are the ones whose situations were actually heard. The path is built one way: a girl studies, marries, leaves her home, has children — and the industry is not set up to support her through any of it. There are too few women even one rung below the C-suite, so there is nobody these conversations can happen with safely, without being read as weakness.

Muzamil supplies the macro case. Pakistan has roughly half its population female and only about 20% of women in the workforce; lift that toward Bangladesh’s 40% and you add millions of productive, often educated workers. He argues IT, with a genuine supply-side shortage, is exactly where this should be solved — and that blaming “society” is a cop-out when Bangladesh and China built solutions. He keeps returning to one concrete fix: daycares. It fascinates him that IT firms, with their otherwise beautiful cultures, do not provide them. Husain agrees, adds remote work for women who relocate after marriage to cities with no tech firms, and insists the deeper unlock is representation: policies become “words on paper” unless there is a woman in the room to implement them properly.

There is a current that runs under both of them — that AI, being functional in nature, may disrupt men’s work while opening a door for women. Many Pakistani women trained in literature and the arts, historically denied opportunities, could now re-enter the workforce digitally, learning a few accessible tools and putting their creativity and problem solving — honed daily, Husain notes, on the relentless multitasking of running a home — to paid use. She tells her own welcome-to-STEM story: the only A-level student in a Punjab University master’s class of eighty girls and twelve boys, greeted by a professor who told the women they were wasting government money by taking merit seats they would abandon for marriage. From roll number one to thirty, she says, the list was all girls. Her conclusion is firm: a country that leaves half its workforce at home cannot progress.

Relationships, not headcount

On how the business actually runs, Husain describes a model built on trust rather than scale. About 80% of Five Rivers’ work is relationship-based, with clients of six, ten, twelve years. Outsourcing’s core failure, she argues, is disconnect — so clients come to visit, the developers teach them Urdu, they run chilli-eating contests (one visiting American turned out to be a champion, unbeaten on Mexican chillies). That rapport is what makes a client treat the team as an extension of their own, and it is why she fits people to work they care about rather than slotting a games-passionate developer into enterprise software just because the skills match. It scales slowly, she admits, but it is sustainable — twenty years with no real ups and downs, now on a growth trajectory.

She is also pushing the firm beyond services into products — Smart Windows, a Windows workspace manager, is already live, and a Blackberry photo editor the company once built reached number one on its app store. Through Ink Tribe, a publishing collective, she wants to take Pakistani creators — especially women — to the US market via print-on-demand, an income earned “just sitting at home.” And she is expanding into the Middle East, with a UAE company set up this year and a chaotic but worthwhile trip to Saudi Arabia’s LEAP. Muzamil presses the regional thesis hard: everyone defaults to North America, but the founders who win in five years are the ones building relationships in MENA and South Asia now. Husain frames the Gulf’s rise as something to support — the Islamic world moving back toward the knowledge and craft it once led, from algebra to the astrolabe-makers of old Lahore.

Too big to fail

She closes on the question Muzamil asks every guest — Pakistan in 2050, with the hope and the ifs removed. Her answer is unhedged: “I think it’s going to be wonderful.” The population is young and full of optimism, resilient, and rich in underused resources — tourism, IT, real estate, and a smart-farming agricultural sector barely touched. Most of all, she argues, the numbers are simply too big for there to be nothing. The people with money and top degrees can leave; the vast majority are Pakistani, will stay, will raise their children here. Too big to fail, she says — and too many people with too many dreams and too much hope.