The Caribbean Wrote Its AI Rulebook in a Year. Nobody Has Said Who Enforces It

Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn), Arnold Tholinx, Inspector (reverse copy), n.d.. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.

On July 7, 2026, CARICOM's Council for Trade and Economic Development on Information and Communication Technologies (COTED-ICT) endorsed the UNESCO Caribbean AI Policy Roadmap at its 126th special meeting. Sixteen days later, the CTU's Caribbean AI Task Force presented its final report at the first Caribbean AI Forum at UWI St Augustine, under the theme "AI for Caribbean Transformation: Governance, Innovation and Resilience for a Shared Digital Future."

I welcomed both. If AI rules are written entirely in Washington, Brussels and Beijing, the Caribbean will spend the next decade complying with standards it had no hand in. Two serious regional efforts in one month is progress. What neither provides yet is a way to hold a government to them.

What the two documents contain

The interim report set five priority areas:

• a regional governance architecture with model laws and oversight;
• data governance built around a proposed Caribbean Data Commons;
• AI support for agriculture, disaster risk reduction, tourism, financial services, health and public administration;
• investment in skills and AI literacy;
• continuing consultation through the Forum and national advisory bodies.

It also named a "connectivity paradox": Caribbean people use mobile and social media heavily, while the networks underneath are expensive, fragile and regulated differently in each territory.

The final report condensed this into seven recommendations: AI governance, digital infrastructure, economic transformation, skills development, climate resilience, public sector innovation, and a unified Caribbean voice in global AI governance.

What was said at the Forum

Dr Ramlal said at the Forum that "The Caribbean cannot afford to remain on the sidelines of the AI revolution," and had earlier warned that individual islands lack the reach to compete alone. I tell boards the same thing: CARICOM's 15 members acting as 15 small markets will lose to a region that acts as one.

• Sandrea Maynard, UWI Pro Vice-Chancellor: AI "requires a coordinated approach involving governments, academia and the private sector."
• Nigel Cassimire, CTU Deputy Secretary-General: AI "must be harnessed to reduce our vulnerabilities and amplify our strengths," with standards, governance, capacity development and sustainable financing deciding whether it is.
• Graeme Thomson, World Digital Governance: "Sovereignty and cooperation are not opposites. Only together can we educate a regional workforce." He urged governments to be "rule makers, not rule takers."
• Eric Falt, UNESCO Regional Director, on the Roadmap: "The Caribbean should not simply consume AI technologies developed elsewhere, but should help shape how AI is governed."
• Dickon Mitchell, Prime Minister of Grenada, at COTED-ICT: "the rules governing digital trade, AI, and data are evolving rapidly, often without the meaningful participation of Small States."

Professor Rose-Marie Belle Antoine, UWI St Augustine's Campus Principal, reminded the Forum that her campus hosted the Caribbean's first AI conference in 1989. Two separate processes, one from UNESCO's ethics work and one from a year of CTU technical work, reached nearly the same conclusions independently.

Neither document binds a government

COTED-ICT's endorsement is a political signal from CARICOM's ICT ministers and changes no law in any member state. The model AI law is a template. When the Forum closed, no CARICOM parliament had committed to a date for adopting it.

Both documents describe what good governance should include: risk-based oversight, data sovereignty protections, sector rules for agriculture, health and finance, and investment in skills. Neither can make a government pass any of it, and neither sets a deadline that would let anyone check in twelve months whether a given country met a given commitment.

The people who wrote them are not to blame. Consensus across more than a dozen governments, several languages and institutions with no shared regulator was always going to produce a framework before a law. Timing is the concern. The UNESCO Roadmap took two years to go from launch to endorsement, while the technology changes every six months.

What board training shows about deadlines

Through StarApple AI I have led more than 100 board-level AI training engagements in the Caribbean. A 2026 study of those engagements, which I have written about on this site, found that boards with structured AI literacy training set up formal AI governance in 6 months, against 11 to 15 months for boards without it.

The trained boards left with a dated checklist, and a dated checklist can be checked at the next meeting. The regional documents need the same thing: a body that records whether each government has met each requirement by a set date.

Some of that capacity already exists. The Caribbean AI Association has spent two years building literacy and standards material that governments and companies can use without starting from scratch. The Caribbean AI Risk Management Council is building an audit and risk-certification layer that would let a regulator check an institution against a model law. Neither can force a parliament to legislate. Both can make it cheaper for a willing government to act. I chair the Council, so weigh my view of its usefulness with that in mind.

What CARICOM, the CTU and governments should do next

1. CARICOM heads of government: put a funded budget line for the Caribbean Data Commons in the next regional budget cycle, with a named host institution. It was a priority in December 2025 and still has no money attached.
2. COTED-ICT: set a public date, within 18 to 24 months, by which each member state reports where its own AI legislation stands, and publish the reports.
3. The CTU and the CARICOM Secretariat: give the "unified Caribbean voice" recommendation a standing office with a mandate to represent the region in global AI forums between reports, not a task force that disbands when its report is delivered.
4. National ICT ministries: map the model AI law against existing data protection and telecoms laws within six months, and list which clauses need new legislation and which can be done by regulation.
5. Company boards: do not wait for national law. Adopt a one-page AI standard now, aligned with the Roadmap's principles, so the change is small when legislation arrives.

"The Caribbean has shown, twice in one month, that it can write good rules together. The next test is one government meeting one of them by a date someone can check." - Adrian Dunkley, the AI Boss