Dot-Com passed us by. AI doesn’t have to

If we embrace AI with focus and ambition, it could unlock opportunities on a scale we have never seen before.

When the dot-com boom hit in the late 1990s, Nepal simply wasn’t ready. We lacked not just knowledge and business readiness, but also the very fundamentals like electricity, internet and computing infrastructure. The internet only reached Nepal in 1994 through experimental projects using low-bandwidth satellite connections. While companies in the West were building e-commerce platforms and riding the wave of online innovation, Nepal was still at a stage where internet access was limited to a handful of institutions. By the early 2000s, when businesses in the US and Europe had already begun deploying enterprise solutions like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), accounting and procurement systems, we barely knew such tools existed.