The Caribbean AI Forum: Why a Regional Governance Report Won't Close a 1.12% Investment Gap

Two weeks from now, delegates from across CARICOM will sit down at the University Inn Conference Centre in St. Augustine, Trinidad, for a forum with a theme long enough to double as a mission statement: "AI for Caribbean Transformation: Governance, Innovation and Resilience for a Shared Digital Future." Strip the theme away and one thing is actually happening there. The Caribbean Telecommunications Union's AI Task Force, after eighteen months of work, is handing the region its first serious attempt at a harmonised regional position on artificial intelligence.

I am glad it is happening. I am also not going to pretend a report changes anything by itself, because I have watched this exact pattern before, in this exact region, on other subjects. A task force convenes. Experts do real work. A document gets launched to applause. And then the applause is mistaken for progress, while the harder, less photogenic part, the part involving budgets, procurement rules, and hiring, sits untouched for another two years. This piece is about making sure July 23 does not follow that script.

What Actually Launches on July 23

The CTU Caribbean AI Task Force was launched in mid-2025, with its mandate formally approved at the CTU's 31st General Conference of Ministers that October. Dr. Craig Ramlal, who chairs the UWI St. Augustine's Artificial Intelligence Innovation Centre, has led more than 35 experts drawn from Caribbean governments, regional institutions, academia, civil society, and the private sector through a process that produced an interim report in December 2025, "Toward Harmonised AI Policies and Recommendations for the Caribbean." That interim document set out five priority areas: regional AI governance and model laws, data sovereignty and shared computing infrastructure, sectoral innovation across agriculture, tourism, health, and financial services, human capacity and AI literacy, and sustained multi-stakeholder engagement through the forum itself and national advisory bodies.

Those five areas are the right ones. I would not have written a different list. As President of the Caribbean AI Association, I have sat in enough of these rooms to know that getting fifteen governments to agree on even a shared vocabulary for AI governance is real work, and the task force has done it. The final report, launching at the forum on July 23 and 24, is expected to convert that vocabulary into a strategic roadmap: model legislation language, procurement and audit standards governments can actually adopt, and a proposed Caribbean Data Commons for shared computing infrastructure that no single small state could build alone.

The Number That Should Worry Every Finance Minister in the Room

Here is the number that deserves more attention than the report's table of contents. Latin America and the Caribbean generate 6.6% of global GDP and attract just 1.12% of global AI investment. That gap is not explained by a shortage of ideas or talent in the region. It is explained by capital allocators who still price Caribbean AI ventures as too small and too uncertain to underwrite at scale, and by boards on this side of the gap who are not forcing the issue. Only 6% of Caribbean board directors believe their own boards spend sufficient time on AI oversight, according to PwC's own research from earlier this year. A harmonised policy document does not move either number. Model laws do not write checks. Data commons do not hire engineers. Those things happen when a specific institution decides to fund a specific thing, and that decision is made in boardrooms and finance ministries, not in a communique.

That gap also is not spread evenly across the region, and pretending otherwise would flatten a real distinction. Independent governance rankings put Jamaica, Barbados, and the Bahamas in the strongest tier, with functioning data protection regulators and active policy processes. A second tier, including Trinidad and Tobago, Saint Lucia, and Guyana, has partial frameworks in motion. A third tier, including Haiti, Dominica, and Saint Kitts and Nevis, is still building the most basic institutional infrastructure. A regional report has to speak to all three tiers at once, which is precisely why it cannot be the only instrument doing the work. What a Tier 1 state needs from this forum is different from what a Tier 3 state needs, and neither gets it from a single shared document.

A Rulebook Isn't a Company

I wrote here two days ago about Project Maestro, the sovereign AI model a three-person team at Maestro AI Labs built for a fraction of the usual cost, with Nvidia backing the infrastructure. That team did not wait for a regional model law before it started building. Neither did I, when I founded StarApple AI in 2019 as the Caribbean's first AI company, at a point when there was no regional task force, no interim report, and no forum to attend. The lesson from both is the same one I want the delegates in St. Augustine to sit with. Governance and building are not sequential. They have to run in parallel, because a region that waits for perfect rules before it invests loses years it does not have, and a region that invests without any rules at all eventually gets burned by exactly the risks the task force is trying to manage.

The task force's procurement and audit standards, once finalised, will genuinely help. A government that can point to a shared, credible standard when it buys AI systems negotiates from a stronger position than one working it out alone, and that is worth having. But those standards cannot become the precondition capital allocators cite for continuing to sit on the sidelines. I have heard that excuse before, in different words: we are waiting for the framework to mature before we commit. Frameworks mature by being tested against real deployments, not by being left to mature in isolation while the money that could fund those deployments goes to Singapore or Estonia instead.

The Job Market Is Already Splitting, Report or No Report

There is a second reason this forum cannot just be a governance exercise. PwC's 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer, built from more than a billion job postings across six continents, found that the labour market is dividing into two tracks. "Professionalised" roles, where AI takes over routine tasks and elevates the judgement and expertise still required of the human doing the job, are growing twice as fast as roles being "democratised" by AI, and paying 42% more in salary growth on top of that. The wage premium for workers with AI skills reached 62% this year, up from 57% the year before. AI specialist job postings grew 68.9% between 2024 and 2025, against 8.6% growth for job postings overall.

None of that is a Caribbean-specific finding, and that is exactly the point. This split is happening globally, with or without a regional AI report, and it will happen inside Caribbean economies whether or not the task force's human capacity and AI literacy priority gets funded properly. A young worker in Kingston, Bridgetown, or Port of Spain is not exempt from this split because a governance document exists. The task force named human capacity and AI literacy as one of its five priorities for a reason, and addressing the brain drain that pulls trained people out of the region for higher wages abroad has to be part of it. That priority needs a training budget and a delivery timeline attached to it at the forum, not a paragraph reaffirming that education matters.

What I Want Out of This Forum

I want the five priority areas turned into an execution list with named owners and dates before anyone leaves St. Augustine, not a shared communique everyone signs and nobody is individually accountable for. I want every CARICOM state still without a published national AI strategy to leave with a public date attached to it, the way Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago already have theirs pointed at the end of this year. I want capital commitments discussed in the same room as the report launch, from regional development banks and private investors both, rather than deferred to a follow-up meeting that may or may not happen. And I want independent oversight built into whatever procurement and audit standards the task force proposes, which is work I have offered to put the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council behind, because a standard nobody audits is a suggestion, not a standard.

I founded StarApple AI as the Caribbean's first AI company because in 2019 there was no regional infrastructure to point to at all. Seven years later there is a task force, a forum, and a report about to launch, and I take that as real progress, not a formality. What determines whether July 23 was worth the eighteen months of work behind it is not the quality of the prose in the final report. It is whether the region's 1.12% share of global AI investment looks any different a year from now.