Zulfiqar Ahmad
ISLAMABAD: Chitral is better known for its mountains and Kalash culture than for producing technology executives.
Yet from this remote corner of the country, Bakhtawar Salik has built a career that has taken her to the senior ranks of one of the country’s biggest telecommunications companies.
At 34, Salik has been appointed as vice president for Business Intelligence (BI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) at Telenor Pakistan. Her rise, however, did not begin with artificial intelligence, or even with technology.
After earning a BBA from the National University of Sciences and Technology (NUST), she joined Nielsen in 2014.
Two years later, she moved to Telenor as an executive in business analysis.
She then spent several years at Ufone, working in pricing and commercial roles, before returning to Telenor in 2022 as a senior manager in pricing.
From there, her work increasingly shifted towards analytics, business intelligence and, eventually, artificial intelligence.
Ejaz Ahmad, vice president and head of cybersecurity architecture at U Microfinance Bank, described Salik’s appointment as “a huge success story,”
“Reaching a VP role at Telenor is a big deal. It takes exceptional ability to get there,” he added.
What makes the story compelling is that there was no dramatic leap from business graduate to AI leader.
Instead, Salik accumulated knowledge across different parts of the business, with each role preparing her for the next.
Business analysis taught her how organisations use information to make decisions. Pricing brought her closer to customers, markets and revenue.
Analytics took her deeper into data, while business intelligence showed how data could inform management.
By the time artificial intelligence became central to her work, she had already spent years learning how businesses make decisions and where technology could make them better.
Salik has spoken of continuous learning as central to navigating such a career. Addressing female engineering students at NUST, she described the technology industry as a “hyper change environment” in which “no existing skill set is truly enough”.
What matters, she said, is “a constant openness to add to our personal skill stack”, together with the grit to keep showing up.
Her experience offers a useful counterpoint to the assumption that technology leadership is reserved for engineers and computer scientists.
The machinery behind AI may be highly technical, but the value it creates depends on understanding the problems a business is trying to solve.
That is particularly true in telecommunications. Operators deal with vast amounts of information about customers, usage, pricing and network performance.
AI can help identify patterns and make predictions, but those tools are useful only when they are applied to the right questions.
Salik’s career has given her an unusual vantage point from which to ask those questions. She understands the commercial side of a business as well as its data and technology.
Her journey also carries significance because of where it began. Chitral is far removed from Islamabad and the country’s other corporate centres.
Moving from Chitral to NUST and then into senior corporate leadership required not only education, but the ability to navigate professional worlds that were geographically and culturally distant from her home.
That makes her achievement relevant beyond the technology sector. For young women in places such as Chitral, professional success can appear to belong to another world. Salik’s career offers evidence that the distance can be crossed.
It also shows why careers rarely need to be perfectly planned. Salik has described a career as “less of an accident and more of a mindful sequence”.
Her own path suggests that the sequence becomes clearer in retrospect. A job taken to learn one skill can provide the foundation for an opportunity that did not exist when the journey began.
As artificial intelligence reshapes companies and industries, that ability to learn and adapt may prove as important as technical expertise itself.
Salik started out analysing businesses. She now helps lead how one of Pakistan’s major telecom companies uses intelligence, data and AI.
The journey from Chitral to that position was not a single breakthrough. It was the cumulative result of education, experience and the decision, again and again, to learn what came next.