Sardar Yasir Ilyas Khan, President, Islamabad Chamber of Commerce & Industry (ICCI) has said that the technology-based solutions are the way forward to spur the economic growth, therefore,  the universities should give more focus to artificial intelligence in order to harness its power for achieving shared prosperity and boosting growth. He said this while speaking as chief guest after inaugurating the Artificial Intelligence TechVerse 2021 (AI Ideas Challenge and AI Expo Lab2Market Event), which was organized by the National Centre of Artificial Intelligence (NCAI), Pakistan at National University of Science and Technology (NUST) Islamabad. Prof. Dr. Yasar Ayaz, Chairman NCAI, Lt. Gen. (Retd) Javed Mahmood Bukhari Rector NUST and others were present at the occasion.
Sardar Yasir Ilyas Khan said that the greater focus on harnessing the power of AI would help Pakistan to achieve the goals of ending poverty and boosting shared prosperity. He said that the emerging markets are already using basic AI technologies to solve critical development challenges while AI based solutions will help our private sector to embrace new business models, develop new ways of delivering services and increase market competitiveness. He said that encouraging youth to take up research and education in the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics would enable Pakistan to emerge as one of the fastest growing economies in terms of IT-based entrepreneurship. He assured that ICCI would cooperate with universities in motivating the private sector to embrace AI solutions for improving business efficiency and productivity.
Speaking at the occasion, Lt. Gen. (Retd) Javed Mahmood Bukhari Rector NUST said that his university has already taken initiatives to nurture and develop AI discipline in its students so that they could benefit from the most secure and advanced solutions in order to improve the value of their academic programmes.  Dr. Yasar Ayaz, Chairman, National Center of Artificial Intelligence said that NCAI is the latest technological initiative of the Government of Pakistan, specifically designed to lead innovation, scientific research, training and educational activities in the area of artificial intelligence and its closely affiliated fields. He said that NCAI provides a prestigious platform to unveil the cutting edge technologies based on AI. He said that NCAI has developed as a consortium model consisting of 6 prominent public sector universities with nine specialized labs spread across the five major cities of Pakistan and is headquartered at NUST, Islamabad. The central aim of NCAI is to facilitate the researchers in the field of AI; help them establish and grow the AI industry following international trends and seek solutions to the indigenous problems through AI.