Prime
Smart Soft Studios integrates AI directly within the products
Abdullah Khalid, Founder & CEO, Prime Coworking and Smart Soft Studios
PROFILE
Abdullah Khalid is the Founder & CEO of Prime Coworking and Smart Soft Studios in Lahore. Smart Soft Studios develops web, mobile, and AI-driven products, while Prime Coworking provides a solar-powered workspace in Ethad Town, Raiwind Road, with soundproof offices and 24/7 biometric access. Created to address infrastructure challenges during his software team’s growth, Prime Coworking now hosts software companies and international remote teams, including night-shift operations for US and UK clients. Abdullah focuses on using AI across both businesses, training his operations team in AI-powered marketing, SEO, and daily operations rather than expanding staff.
Introduction Paragraph
The Flare panel engaged in a conversation with Abdullah Khalid, the Founder and CEO of Prime Coworking and Smart Soft Studios. In this interview, he explained that Smart Soft Studios started as a compact software group focused on web, mobile, and AI initiatives for clients in need of a competent technical collaborator, avoiding the need to establish an internal engineering team.
Q&A Section (Question & Answer)
Here is the question & answer session with Abdullah Khalid:
Flare: What inspired you to start Smart Soft Studios, and how has it evolved?
Abdullah Khalid: Smart Soft Studios began as a small software team handling web, mobile and AI projects for clients seeking a capable technical partner without building an in-house engineering team. As we grew, we needed a workspace designed for software teams, with reliable power during load-shedding, quiet private rooms and infrastructure supporting night shifts and US/UK hours. This gap led to Prime Coworking in Ethad Town on Raiwind Road. What started as a space for our own team has grown into a coworking business serving software companies and remote teams with similar needs.
Flare: What technology areas, products, or services are your current focus?
Abdullah Khalid: Smart Soft Studios focuses on web, mobile and AI-driven product development, working out of Prime Coworking itself. Prime Coworking, the more mature and fully operational of the two businesses, is a coworking space built around solar-backed power, soundproof private offices, 24/7 biometric access and fiber WiFi, with membership ranging from day passes to shared desks, dedicated desks, private offices and full private floors — attracting software teams like Razestet and TheFutureSense, along with businesses running US/UK-hours night-shift operations.
Flare: What are the challenges facing Pakistani technology startups and software companies today?
Abdullah Khalid: Power reliability tops the list — load-shedding is disruptive and expensive enough that solar-backed power is a core part of what we sell, which tells you how large a tax it is on productivity across the sector. Second is the cost and unpredictability of maintaining a professional, secure physical base for a growing team — capital that’s better spent on product and people than on office buildout, which is exactly the gap coworking spaces like ours exist to fill. Third is talent retention against remote, international offers that Pakistani companies often can’t match on compensation alone.
Flare: How do you recruit, develop and retain skilled technology talent?
Abdullah Khalid: We lean heavily on referrals and a small, trusted network rather than mass hiring, and we invest in giving people real ownership over their work rather than treating them as replaceable seats. On the operations side, we’re actively training our community manager, Laila, to run day-to-day operations and marketing using AI as a force-multiplier — a concrete example of how we think about building lean, capable teams rather than simply adding headcount to solve every problem.
Flare: What role are AI, cloud technologies and automation playing in your current and future strategy?
Abdullah Khalid: AI is already operational for us, not aspirational. We’ve built a set of AI prompt templates baked with our pricing, amenities and tone, and we’re training our team to run day-to-day operations, SEO and marketing using AI as the primary tool — with the goal of that approach eventually letting a lean team run what would traditionally need a much larger one. On the Smart Soft Studios side, AI is embedded directly into the products we build for clients, and we expect that to only deepen over the next few years as AI-native development becomes the default rather than the exception.
Flare: What opportunities do you see for Pakistani technology companies in international markets?
Abdullah Khalid: We see this firsthand at Prime Coworking — a meaningful part of our membership is US/UK-timezone remote teams who need a secure, professional Lahore base to employ Pakistani talent without opening a full local office themselves. Pakistan offers a young, English-speaking technical talent pool at a cost structure that’s highly competitive globally, and the credibility of Pakistani-built software and services continues to grow internationally as more teams deliver reliably for overseas clients.
Flare: What policy, regulatory or ecosystem improvements would most help Pakistan’s IT and startup sector?
Abdullah Khalid: More reliable power infrastructure would be the single biggest unlock — we’re literally solving this ourselves with solar power at Prime Coworking, which says something about the scale of the gap. Beyond that, easier and cheaper international payment rails for freelancers and small tech firms, and clearer, more predictable tax policy for IT exports, would remove a lot of friction that currently pushes talented people towards working for foreign companies directly instead of building here.
Flare: What are your principal growth targets and plans for the next three to five years?
Abdullah Khalid: For Prime Coworking, we’re focused on growing membership across our existing space, expanding private office and floor inventory to meet demand from growing software teams, and continuing to deepen our SEO and content strategy so the business scales without proportionally scaling headcount. For Smart Soft Studios, the plan is to grow our client base in AI-driven product development and take on more ambitious, longer-term engagements rather than one-off projects.
Flare: What advice would you give to young Pakistani entrepreneurs globally building competitive tech businesses?
Abdullah Khalid: Build the thing you personally need first — Prime Coworking exists because we couldn’t find the workspace our own team needed, and that authenticity is what makes a business defensible. Don’t wait for infrastructure or ecosystem support to be perfect before you start; work around the gaps, the way we did with solar power. And use AI aggressively to stay lean — it’s a genuine advantage for smaller Pakistani companies competing against much larger, better-funded international players.
