By: Reyad Hasnain
Bangladesh is passing through a real inflection point. Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant prospect; it is already reshaping industries, rewriting job descriptions and rewarding the economies that move early. The question before Bangladesh is plain enough: will it allow this shift to happen to it, or will it help to shape the outcome?
To its credit, the budget offers a few welcome measures. The VAT exemption for freelancers and content creators is a meaningful nod to a fast-growing community of independent digital professionals. Skills development programmes have drawn attention as well. These steps matter and deserve recognition.
But recognition is not the same as a strategy.
The contrast abroad is instructive. India has put substantial public money behind its IndiaAI Mission, financing computing infrastructure, research networks and talent pipelines. Several economies in the Middle East are writing AI directly into their national economic plans. A number of smaller emerging economies are positioning themselves, quietly, to ride the next technological wave. Bangladesh, by comparison, has yet to publish a national AI roadmap backed by dedicated funding, a clear institutional home and timelines for which anyone can be held to account.
That gap is not merely a question of policy. It is a question of jobs.
Here lies the paradox. The digital economy is, in many respects, performing well. Exports of IT and IT-enabled services grew by close to 13 per cent year-on-year to around US$458 million in the first nine months of FY2024-25 — genuine momentum by any measure. And yet the graduate unemployment rate stands at 13.5 per cent, above the national average. Thousands of young people enter the labour market each year holding ICT qualifications, even as employers insist they cannot find the talent they need.
Something, plainly, is failing to connect.
The reason is that the work of the coming decade will not resemble the work of the last. Programming skills alone will no longer suffice. The workforce now being trained needs fluency in AI engineering, data science, cybersecurity and cloud systems, among other areas. This is not a charge against students or universities; it is simply where the world is moving, and the country’s education and training systems must move with it.
What, then, would a genuinely ambitious response look like?
It would begin with long-term fiscal certainty for the ICT sector. Investors, whether at home or abroad, do not make ten-year commitments on the strength of annual budget announcements. A stable, clearly stated commitment to tax support for technology services, extended across the next decade, would send a very different signal from the one on offer today.
It would include a National AI Fund — an instrument capable of financing university-led research, supporting Bangla-language AI tools and backing start-ups that tackle real problems in health, agriculture, education and financial services. These are not luxuries. They are the foundations of a competitive digital economy.
It would mean revisiting import duties on AI hardware and GPU-based computing infrastructure, the physical machinery on which AI development depends. As things stand, such barriers make advanced technology needlessly expensive and place it beyond the reach of many local innovators.
It would mean treating the start-up ecosystem seriously. Too many promising ventures fail in Bangladesh not because their ideas are weak, but because early-stage finance is simply unavailable at the moment it is needed. Public-private venture capital, tax incentives for angel investors and more sensible regulation could begin to change that.
And it would mean government leading by example, deploying AI across public services in health, education, agriculture and citizen delivery. The case here is not only efficiency. Doing so creates a market for local firms, builds domestic expertise and signals that the country is serious about the transition.
It is also worth resisting the easy fear that AI is simply coming to take everyone’s job. History offers little support for that telling. Every major technological shift has displaced some occupations and created others, often in ways nobody anticipated. The question has never been whether technology will change work — it always does — but whether workers are equipped to move with it.
Bangladesh has one of the youngest and fastest-growing workforces in the world. That is not a burden but an extraordinary asset, provided its young people are prepared for the economy that is actually arriving rather than the one that has already passed.
The FY2026-27 budget sends a positive signal. But signals are not enough when the window for action is closing. Nadia, and the hundreds of thousands of graduates like her, are not waiting for signals; they are waiting for a future they can walk into. Whether Bangladesh builds that future, or watches others build it first, will turn on the choices made not only in this budget but in the years immediately ahead.
The time to prepare is not next year. It is now.
The Author, Reyad Hasnain, is a policy analyst specializing in digital governance and public-sector reform.
