The Business Incubation Center (BIC) at the University of Peshawar organised the fourth session of its Cohort 3 programme on October 29, 2026, at 2:00 PM. The session, titled AI as Your Co-Founder, is the first part of the programme’s AI for Startups series and falls under Phase 2 of the programme, which focuses on validating and building. It was led by Waleed Paracha, Regional Director at Arfa Karim Technology Incubation Center, who acted as trainer for the startup teams taking part.
The session was designed to show founders how artificial intelligence tools can support the early work of building a company. Participants were set to explore how AI can assist with market and competitor research, how to write effective prompts, how to analyse customer interviews, how to create content and proposals, and how to use these tools for business planning. The programme also placed weight on fact-checking, which reflects a common concern among founders that AI-generated information has to be verified before it is relied on in a business decision. For early-stage teams with small staff and limited budgets, tools of this kind can speed up work that would otherwise take days, provided the output is checked carefully.
A practical workshop formed part of the session, in which each startup team used AI to prepare a market research brief for its own venture and then verified three key facts from it. The exercise gave participants hands-on experience in applying the tools to their own businesses instead of working with general examples, and it tested their ability to separate reliable information from unsupported claims. The announcement did not say how many startups are in Cohort 3, which AI tools were used in the workshop or whether any follow-up sessions in the AI for Startups series have been scheduled, so those details are not covered here.
The session was organised by the Business Incubation Center at the University of Peshawar, which describes its mission as empowering innovators. By inviting a regional director from another technology incubation center to lead the training, BIC is drawing on expertise from within the wider incubation network, which is a common way for centers in Pakistan to widen the support available to the startups in their programmes.
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