CARICOM Just Named AI a Regional Priority. Here Is What a Real Common Strategy Requires

Giovanni Francesco Castiglione, A Congress of Animals, 1641–1710. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, public domain.

Every July, CARICOM Heads of Government meet, agree a list of priorities, issue a communiqué and go home. This year's meeting in Saint Lucia, chaired by Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre, put one new item on that list: a coordinated regional approach to artificial intelligence.

The item came as a direction, not a plan. Its position matters, though. It sits beside the four problems that have defined the region's agenda for a generation, and each of them needs shared data and shared systems that no single small state can build alone.

What the summit decided

The 51st Regular Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government ran under the theme "Regional Partnership and Strategic Cooperation." Martinique's Associate Membership took effect on 16 June 2026. It became CARICOM's seventh Associate Member, and French Guiana became the eighth during the summit. Heads also agreed to seek an Advisory Opinion from the Caribbean Court of Justice under Article 212 of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas on the process for reappointing the Secretary-General.

Discussions covered CSME implementation, climate finance, reparations, food and nutrition security, public health, community financing, border issues, and developments in Haiti and Cuba. The priorities named were regional unity, advancing the CSME, food and nutrition security, violent crime and illegal firearms, transport links, access to climate finance, and a coordinated regional approach to AI.

Why one regional approach costs less than fifteen

I have built AI in this region since 2011. A country of 300,000 people that funds and secures its own AI infrastructure pays the full fixed cost alone. The same country buying into a system a dozen neighbours also use pays a fraction of it, and gets a system tested on more data.

The CSME shows what happens without shared infrastructure. The single market has been in place since 2006, yet free movement of goods, services, capital and labour is still partial, largely because each country runs its own customs system, business registry and credential checks. If each member state commissions its own AI pilot, the region will repeat that pattern.

The region already has a model that works. The OECS Pharmaceutical Procurement Service has pooled medicine purchasing for Eastern Caribbean states since the 1980s, and small states pay less as one buyer. AI systems can be bought the same way.

Crime and firearms: pooled data finds the routes

Illegal firearms move through the region in small volumes across many ports, airports and informal landings. No single country's customs and intelligence unit sees enough of that traffic to find the pattern. A route that looks like noise in one country's data can be clear once four or five neighbours' data is combined.

A shared model trained on customs scans, seizure records and shipping manifests could flag repeat routes, unusual cargo and matching timing. The model is the easy part. The hard part is the legal agreement that allows governments to pool that data in the first place. A "coordinated regional approach" should produce that agreement before anything else.

Food security needs regional data to train useful models

Most member states are too small to train a useful model for crop yields, pest outbreaks or food price shocks: one island does not have enough years, acreage or variation in its data. Pooled regional data on crops, weather and markets makes the problem workable.

A shared platform would also let one country's early signal protect its neighbours. A drought pattern in Guyana's interior or a pest outbreak in Belize could trigger a warning to farmers and importers in Saint Vincent or Dominica before prices move.

Climate finance: faster damage evidence

Parametric insurance through CCRIF pays on measured triggers such as wind speed and rainfall. Other disaster and loss and damage finance depends on damage assessments, which take weeks or months when done house by house. AI assessment of satellite and drone images can shorten that to days for a first estimate.

A regional platform would learn from more storms than any one country has recorded, and funds such as the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage could take evidence from one verified pipeline instead of fifteen reporting formats.

Four languages from the first release

CARICOM already works across English, French and Haitian Kreyòl through Haiti, and Dutch through Suriname. Martinique and French Guiana add two more French-speaking territories, which makes multilingual support a requirement for any shared system, not an upgrade for later.

Twenty years ago, multilingual government services would have meant a translation department in every capital. Today's translation models make it cheap, provided the requirement is written into the technical standard before anything is bought.

"CARICOM named the right priority in Saint Lucia. The test was never the wording on the list. It is whether the next summit finds a working system, or the same paragraph, one year older." Adrian Dunkley, AI Boss

Where this could fail

The familiar pattern is a priority named at a summit, a working group formed, a report tabled eighteen months later and a new list at the next summit. The weakest point in my own argument is the data-sharing agreement. Crime and customs data are politically sensitive, several member states still lack working data protection regimes, and no attorney general will sign a blanket clause. If that agreement stalls, the firearms and food security systems stall with it, however good the technology.

What CARICOM should do in the next twelve months

1. CARICOM Secretariat: name one accountable lead for the AI priority, working with the University of the West Indies and regional AI practitioners, and publish a delivery timeline for review at the next Heads of Government meeting.
2. Attorneys general, through the Legal Affairs Committee: draft a data-sharing agreement with narrow, listed uses, starting with firearms and customs data, where the case for pooling is strongest.
3. Ministers of finance: set up a joint procurement vehicle on the OECS pharmaceutical model so Dominica or Saint Kitts and Nevis pays the same unit price as Jamaica or Trinidad and Tobago.
4. Regional technical bodies such as the Caribbean Telecommunications Union: publish a common technical standard, including mandatory English, French, Dutch and Haitian Kreyòl support, before any vendor is selected.
5. CARICOM IMPACS: run a first pilot on pooled seizure and shipping data from three or four willing member states and report results within a year.