Poor condition of roads in Dasht

By Arooba Younas The surge in the use of Artificial Intelligence by businesses, corporations, and organisations has been illustrated by the latest McKinsey Global Survey on the state of AI. Accordingly, 88 per cent of organisations reported the regular use of AI in at least one business function, a 10 per cent increase from the results of the survey conducted in the preceding year. Indicative of business leaders’ desire to boost productivity and reduce operational costs, companies adopted AI to achieve greater efficiency. The reverberations of AI integration are felt in the splintering of the organisational pyramid, driven by the expansion of what a single individual can accomplish. However, flattening hierarchies is not tantamount to flattening skill hierarchies or democratisation of expertise. Research has shown that Generative AI (GenAI) has the greatest impact on the level of expertise required to perform jobs, resulting in an accelerated learning curve for entry-level workers. Whilst shortening the learning curve and the time it takes novices to gain competence at new tasks, the limits of GenAI in upskilling workers have been revealed in an experiment conducted by researchers from Harvard Business School’s Data Design Institute and Stanford University, involving 78 employees from IG Group, a UK-based fintech company. Dividing the employees into three groups of occupational insiders (professional writers), adjacent outsiders (marketing specialists), and distant outsiders (technologists), the experiment attempted to gauge whether marketing specialists and technologists could match the performance of professional writers in conceptualising and drafting articles for IG Group’s website while receiving GenAI assistance. The results revealed that AI levelled the playing field at the conceptualisation stage. However, when the nature of the task shifted to executing the ideas by putting them in writing, a prominent expertise gap emerged. Both with and without GenAI’s help, the writers produced the best work, with marketers coming close and technologists lagging behind regardless of AI use. The divergence in performance, despite AI support, is a portrayal of the “GenAI Wall”, depicting the point at which GenAI does not sufficiently reduce the expertise gap between occupational insiders and outsiders. This is indicative of GenAI’s limit in how far it can carry workers outside their domain expertise. Without foundational knowledge, it becomes difficult for outsiders to distinguish between effective and flawed suggestions generated by GenAI. As a result, they may rely on its outputs without applying the necessary refinement, critical judgement and contextual understanding. Nonetheless, the experiment has implications for business organisations, particularly for leaders who overestimate the abilities of AI. It can only hasten the competency of individuals who are adjacent to a domain, and not conjure expertise out of thin air. In this regard, work structure, which is already undergoing change, can be rethought along the lines of expertise. A more fluid work environment can be created, where, in lieu of strict job roles, boundaries can blur by converging adjacent specialists. However, the experiment is not an advocacy for hiring fewer novices. Studies have shown a reduction in entry-level role postings, falling by 32 per cent in 2025 compared to 2019-2022. This suggests a myopic conclusion drawn from GenAI’s putative capabilities, for it is beginners who, when assimilated into the company’s culture and learn through practice, become experts. By thwarting the pipeline of learners by letting AI take over early-career work, which actually led to the making of experts, today’s efficiency may be sacrificed for impoverished talent tomorrow. The latter has been represented by the AI boomerang effect – recent AI-related layoffs, which are now being quietly reversed – as reports indicated employers regretting layoff decisions. This is because of AI hallucinations as well as its inadequacy to replace the required context or institutional knowledge, which human employees possessed. Although the IG Group experiment was conducted in a Western context, its implications can be generalised across the world, particularly as the allure of AI has diffused across continents. However, the embracing of AI in the Global South, whether in businesses or other sectors, has to be accompanied by digital literacy, localised governance, and a research ecosystem. This is significant lest the adoption of AI brings with it downsides in the form of overdependence and a putative magic bullet solution to solving complex issues ranging from bad governance to climate-related disasters. Additionally, GenAI’s exposure to the labour market has caused faster materialisation of disruptions rather than productivity gains due to a higher risk of job losses, as AI-driven automation can close clerical and administrative positions, which have historically served as pathways to decent work. Conclusively, GenAI has brought the promise of enabling individuals to bridge their capability gaps. However, AI cannot replace expertise or be an all-encompassing fix because it relies on pattern recognition rather than understanding real-world context. Thus, the future of work is where humans can learn to effectively partner with AI, grounded in human judgement, and not replacing it.   Arooba Younas is a Research Assistant at the Centre for Aerospace and Security Studies (CASS), Lahore. She can be reached at info@casslhr.com.  

EVERY year, hundreds of fresh law graduates walk into Pakistan’s leading chambers and firms for what is euphemistically called an “internship” or “pupillage.” Most will not be paid a rupee for months, sometimes years, of full-time work drafting pleadings, researching case law and sitting in on client meetings. Some will eventually be “made permanent” on a modest salary; many others will simply be replaced by the next batch of eager graduates willing to work for free. This arrangement is so normalized within the legal fraternity that it is rarely discussed as a labor rights issue at all. It is treated, instead, as an inevitable rite of passage the price of admission into a prestigious profession. Yet a closer look suggests that Pakistan’s legal industry may be one of the starkest examples of unregulated, exploitative internship practice in the country, and one uniquely ill-placed to defend it, given that the profession exists to interpret and enforce the very laws it is quietly sidestepping. The scale of the problem has been documented, if informally. Lawyers who have surveyed the profession describe junior associates at reputed firms completing unpaid stints stretching from three months to two years, often working full days while technically still “training.” The practice persists despite Pakistan’s Apprenticeship Ordinance, 1962, which was designed precisely to regulate structured on-the-job training and guarantee apprentices certain minimum protections. Law firms and chambers, however, rarely register their interns as apprentices under this law, leaving them in a legal no-man’s-land: neither students, nor employees, nor apprentices in the statutory sense. This gap is compounded by the profession’s own regulator. The Pakistan Bar Council and provincial bar councils set the rules for enrolment, requiring aspiring advocates to complete a period of pupillage under a senior lawyer before they can be licensed. But neither the Legal Practitioners and Bar Councils Act, 1973, nor the rules made under it, mandate that this pupillage be paid. In effect, the very body responsible for admitting new lawyers to practice has built an unpaid apprenticeship requirement into the licensing process itself a far cry from professions such as medicine, where house officers, despite their own well-documented grievances, at least draw a government stipend during mandatory training. The consequences fall unevenly. A law graduate from a well-off Lahore or Karachi household, who can rely on family support for rent and daily expenses, can afford to spend two years being trained for free at a top-tier firm. A graduate from Multan or Turbat, or from a household with no such cushion, effectively cannot. Since access to the most prestigious firms is widely understood to run through personal connections and informal referrals rather than open, merit-based recruitment, the unpaid pupillage system quietly filters out precisely those graduates for whom a legal career could be most transformative. What is marketed as a meritocratic apprenticeship is, in practice, a wealth test dressed up as professional training. Female interns face a related but distinct set of risks. The relative informality of chamber culture, combined with the absence of any real institutional oversight of unpaid interns’ working conditions, leaves young women particularly exposed to harassment with limited recourse. The Protection against Harassment of Women at the Workplace Act, 2010, and its 2022 amendment, extended coverage to a wider range of workplace relationships, but enforcement inside small chambers as opposed to large corporate firms with formal HR departments remains largely theoretical. An unpaid intern hoping for a reference or a permanent position has every incentive to stay silent. None of this is to say every senior lawyer who takes on unpaid interns is acting in bad faith; many genuinely believe, as the profession has long insisted, that pupillage is an investment in the intern’s own future. But belief is not evidence, and there is little data testing whether unpaid pupillage produces better lawyers than a modestly paid one would, or whether firms would truly stop training juniors if a stipend were required. Given how heavily law firms already rely on interns for substantive work, it seems more likely that a minimum stipend requirement would simply formalize the value interns already provide. The fix does not require reinventing the wheel. The Pakistan Bar Council could amend its enrolment rules to require a minimum stipend during pupillage, as some foreign bar associations already do. Firms above a certain size could be required to register interns under the Apprenticeship Ordinance, bringing them within existing protections. And bar councils could extend meaningful, monitored harassment complaint mechanisms to chambers of every size, not just the handful of firms large enough to run their own HR departments. A profession built on the promise of equal treatment before the law owes its own newest entrants rather more consistency between what it argues in court and how it treats them at their desks.