I just spent the last 30 days on the road away from Canada to Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Abu Dhabi, Oman, Dubai spending time with founders from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Myanmar, and every corner of the global south.
Every single one of them was cautiously optimistic about the future. Smiling. Talking growth. Common thread..”next year will be bigger.”
What I wasn’t ready for was the silent storm gathering right behind their rose colored glasses.
These are not small shops. These are mid sized and large, home grown, generational businesses the ones that have fed families for 30/40 years, built on sweat, relationships, and cheap, loyal hands. The owners hear all the buzzwords “AI”, “agents”, “automation” but you can see it in their eyes: they’re too proud, too shy, or too damn busy to admit they have no clue what’s actually about to hit them. They all have an IT Guy as well perhaps the biggest dis service of them all…
You’d have to be living under a rock the size of Al Naslaa to still believe AI is just for Silicon Valley kids or some self proclaimed traditional tech resources.
Because right now, while you’re reading this over your morning Teh tarik or late night coffee, AI is refactoring everything we do, in near real time and for those of us running traditional businesses across Pakistan, the Gulf, South Asia and beyond. The ones built on honest sweat, inexpensive labour, and 18-hour days, the shift doesn’t just feel unfair.
It feels inevitable.
We grew up knowing one truth: the cheapest, most reliable asset was always another pair of hands. A loyal worker who never says no. But that era just ended.
The new truth is simpler, and brutally powerful: Compute is the new labour. And digital FTEs, full-time employees that never sleep, never ask for a raise, never unionize, never fall sick are now the cheapest, smartest, most scalable workers on the planet. Also its not fantasy, its not coming, its actually here. What operators wished for in the global south and what the west capitalized on, labour and intelligence arbitrage can now be powered by energy and silicon.
That’s not theory. That’s the edge staring every founder in the face from Karachi to Riyadh to Kulalumpur.
And if you’re still running your business the 1995 way… brother, the rock is about to roll over you.
The brutal part? Most of us are still running our businesses exactly the way our fathers and grandfathers did only the margins are thinner and the customers are more impatient.
You know the drill:
- 40 people in accounts doing data entry
- Three supervisors walking the factory floor with clipboards
- Your best salesman spending half his day replying to the same WhatsApp questions
- Inventory that mysteriously “disappears” every quarter
- Your large conglomerate non functional when the top three people are out sick
All that cheap labour you thought was your moat? It’s now your biggest cost centre and your slowest bottleneck. One more thing, all those 60 some thing board members that every one banked on as being experienced, is the single largest bottleneck to modernization and scale outside of the CEO. The ones that see it, will win, the ones who are too proud of their legacy will likely not live to tell the story to the next generation.
So what do you actually do? (especially if you are in charge)
First, map your business like your survival depends on it (because it does)
Take one process , just one, and write down every single step on a single sheet of paper. Who touches it? How long does it take? Where does it break? Where is the human being doing donkey work that a computer could do in 3 seconds?
I’ve sat with owners and distributors, traders in Riyadh, and manufacturers in Dhaka who told me “our process is too complicated for AI.”
After we mapped it on one A4 sheet, they went quiet. Because 60-70% of the steps were pure repetition that any cheap LLM can now handle perfectly.
Mapping isn’t sexy. It feels like homework. But it is the difference between “AI is hype” and “wait… we can actually save x1000 USD a month on this one process?”
Do it wrong and you’ll waste six months and six figures on shiny tools that solve nothing. Do it right and you suddenly see the 3-4 places where AI will give you unfair leverage. The tech bros building atop OpenClaw and taking victory laps on twitter, have zero to nothing in common with what is required by these businesses but if either party understood the other, the value un lock would be 1000x. If you asked your self what OpenClaw is, you are not going to win this alone.
Second, prioritize like a man who only has one bullet left
You cannot AI-ify your entire company in one go. Anyone who tells you that is selling you something, that you should not be buying.
Pick the process that is:
- Bleeding you the most money/time right now
- Customer-facing or directly hits gross margin
- Stupidly repetitive (the sweeter the better)
For a garments exporter in Karachi it might be quality inspection or packing list generation. For a trading house in Jeddah it might be lead qualification and first response on WhatsApp/Email. For a pharma distributor in Dhaka it might be stock forecasting so you stop over-stocking or stock-outs.
One process. One win. Then the next.
This is where most founders die , they try to boil the ocean and end up with nothing but a big invoice and a sad pilot that “showed promise.”
And here’s the part nobody wants to hear…
All this fancy agentic AI, autonomous agents, 40% productivity jumps everyone is drooling over?
They only work if you already have the intelligent infrastructure underneath.
Digital transformation didn’t die. It just grew up.
It used to be “let’s put everything on the cloud and buy some software.” Now it’s about building the actual foundation so AI doesn’t hallucinate your orders, leak your customer data, or collapse when traffic spikes.
I wrote a longer piece on exactly this (because I keep seeing the same mistake with ambitious leaders who want to run before they can walk):
→ Why Digital Transformation Isn’t Dead. It’s the Foundation for AI Mastery
Read it when you have 7 minutes. It will save you from the expensive graveyard of dead AI pilots.
The uncomfortable truth
If you keep doing business the 2015 way in 2026-27, someone younger, hungrier, and less afraid of compute is going to eat your lunch in your own city.
They won’t have your legacy costs. They won’t have your 400-person payroll. They’ll just have better systems, faster decisions, and happier customers who never wait.
But here’s the other truth the one that should excite you, not scare you:
You already have the relationships. You already have the market knowledge. You already have the cashflow and the respect in the industry.
All you’re missing is the new operating system.
And that operating system doesn’t require you to become a coder or hire 10 PhDs from Stanford.
It starts with one mapped process. One smart pilot. One small MVP that actually pays for itself in 60-90 days.
That’s it.
If this piece made you pause and think “shit… we should probably do something before next quarter,” then good. That was the entire point.
I’ve been helping founders & CEOs exactly like you, from family-run textile groups in Punjab to trading companies in Ajman , to domestic FMCGs and Diversified Conglomerates across Thailand, run their first 2-3 AI pilots without the usual drama, hype, or six-figure consulting bills. But you have to have the humility to know and understand that you need to really get behind this now. When you do…
There will be no long decks. No 18-month roadmaps. Just real, boring, profitable wins that compound.
If that sounds like what you actually need (instead of another inspirational LinkedIn post), drop me a message. Tell me one process that’s quietly killing you right now. Because we both know you know this!
We’ll map it together and tell you honestly whether a small AI pilot makes sense and what the ROI could look like.
No pressure. Just two founders talking straight. Or you could be talking to your family and partners and shareholders telling then why you didn’t make it after having a legacy of many decades. Lets avoid that conversation, all it needs is smarter tooling and a fresh look at how to embrace the change vs not.
Because the rock is already rolling and you are standing in the way.
The only question left is: are you going to get out of the way… or learn to steer it?
