AI Readiness in the Caribbean: A National Stocktake for the Next Five Years

The Caribbean is being asked to make decisions about artificial intelligence that will shape the next twenty years of regional life, and most of our governments are making them with one hand tied behind their backs. They lack in-house technical capacity. They lack baseline data. They lack the institutional muscle that wealthier states have spent five years building. They are also, in places, moving faster and smarter than they get credit for. The picture is mixed, and unless we measure it honestly we cannot improve it.

This piece sets out the framework CAIA uses to assess AI readiness across the Caribbean, where the region stands on it today, and the priority actions that close the gap. It is the companion to our piece on AI literacy. Literacy describes what citizens can do. Readiness describes whether the country around them is set up to make that capability productive.

The Five Pillars of Readiness

The CAIA Caribbean AI Readiness Index measures every member country on five pillars. They are not equal in weight, and they interact with each other, but together they describe whether a country can absorb AI as a productive technology and protect its public from its risks.

Infrastructure. Power, connectivity, and compute. A country with unreliable electricity, expensive mobile data, and no domestic compute capacity cannot run modern AI workloads at scale, no matter how good its policy framework looks on paper. The Caribbean has made real progress on connectivity through CANTO and bilateral fiber projects, but power reliability remains uneven, and most countries rely entirely on hyperscaler clouds for compute.

Data. Whether the country has the datasets that AI systems need to be useful, in the form they need to be useful, with the legal frameworks to use them. Caribbean health, education, justice, and economic datasets exist in fragments across ministries, often in formats that cannot be combined and behind data protection laws written in a different era. Modern AI is data hungry. Without serious data infrastructure, the region cannot train Caribbean models or evaluate foreign ones against Caribbean realities.

Talent. The supply of people who can build, deploy, govern, and audit AI systems. This is not just computer scientists. It is data engineers, machine learning operations specialists, AI product managers, AI lawyers, AI ethicists, and most importantly the public sector officers who buy and oversee these systems on behalf of citizens. Talent supply is the readiness pillar where the Caribbean's diaspora matters most. We have the people. We do not always have them resident.

Governance. The laws, regulations, standards, and oversight bodies that determine what is allowed, what is required, and what is recompensed when things go wrong. Most Caribbean countries have data protection laws of varying quality, but very few have AI specific governance. The risk is not over regulation. It is regulation by default, where decisions about facial recognition in public spaces, AI in lending, AI in hiring, and AI in justice get made through procurement without ever reaching a parliamentary debate.

Adoption. The extent to which AI is actually being used by businesses, governments, and households to do useful work. This is the demand side of the equation. A country can score well on infrastructure, data, talent, and governance and still get little economic return if its firms and ministries do not put AI to work. Caribbean adoption rates are rising fast in tourism, financial services, and BPO, slowly in health and education, and almost not at all in agriculture and the public service.

The Caribbean Picture in 2026

The CAIA Index ranks twenty Caribbean states and territories on each pillar and aggregates to an overall score. The 2026 leaders are the Cayman Islands, Bermuda, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Bahamas. Each leads for a different reason. Cayman and Bermuda lead on infrastructure and governance, helped by mature financial sectors that have already worked through analogous regulatory questions on cryptocurrency and digital assets. Barbados leads on talent and on a thoughtful national AI policy framework. Trinidad and Tobago leads on adoption in energy and financial services. The Bahamas leads on the speed at which its public sector has begun adopting AI internally.

The middle tier of Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Saint Lucia, Antigua and Barbuda, and Grenada have strong individual scores on talent or adoption but uneven governance and infrastructure. Guyana is the country to watch. It is rising fast on the back of oil-funded public investment, but the institutional capacity to absorb that investment well is the binding constraint. Suriname, Belize, and several smaller OECS members are mid-tier with the right ambitions but limited resources. Haiti, Saint Vincent, and Dominica face the steepest climb, mostly on infrastructure and public sector capability rather than talent or ambition.

The whole region is improving year over year. The 2026 average score is 18 percent higher than the 2024 baseline. Connectivity gains explain most of that, with governance gains a distant second.

The Five Highest Leverage Actions

From the CAIA practice, working with member governments and employers across the region, five actions matter more than any others over the next five years.

First, build public sector AI capability. Place trained AI practitioners inside Caribbean ministries through fellowships, secondments, and direct hires. Without this, ministries will continue to sign contracts and pass laws written by external parties whose interests do not match the public's. A regional Caribbean AI Public Service Fellowship would be the highest impact regional initiative this decade.

Second, modernize data infrastructure. Pass updated data protection legislation where it is missing, create cross-ministry data sharing agreements with proper safeguards, fund the unglamorous work of cleaning and standardizing the datasets the region needs to run AI on its own affairs. This is not exciting. It is the precondition for everything else.

Third, set procurement standards. Every Caribbean government should require that AI systems bought with public money meet minimum transparency, bias testing, and audit standards. CAIA publishes a model procurement clause that any small Caribbean state can adopt without standing up a large policy team. Procurement is regulation by another name, and it is regulation small states can do well.

Fourth, deepen sectoral adoption where the Caribbean has real comparative advantage. Tourism, financial services, and BPO are the obvious three. Energy, especially in Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana, is the fourth. Health, where the workforce shortage is acute and the data foundations are weak, is the most consequential. Sectoral playbooks beat horizontal policy in the early adoption years.

Fifth, invest in the literacy and skills pipelines that feed everything else. Readiness without literacy is a country with infrastructure no one knows how to use. The Caribbean AI Literacy Programme and the work of CXC, UWI, UTech, the University of Suriname, and the University of the West Indies feed every other readiness pillar.

What Regional Coordination Looks Like

The Caribbean is twenty something jurisdictions sharing a sea and several centuries of history. AI policy fragmented across twenty jurisdictions, each writing its own data protection law, its own AI act, and its own procurement standards, would be a disaster of duplication. Coordination through CARICOM, the OECS, and the Caribbean Telecommunications Union prevents that. CAIA's role is to provide the technical substrate that those political bodies can adopt: model legislation, common standards, joint training, shared infrastructure. We are not a regulator. We are a regional public good.

The OECS Commission's work on a common digital agenda is the strongest model of what regional coordination looks like in practice. The CARICOM Single ICT Space, despite stalling for years, remains the right vehicle for a wider regional approach. Both deserve more political support than they currently receive.

The Honest Truth About Where We Are

The Caribbean is not behind in any technical sense. Our talent, our institutions, and our governments are capable of competing on this terrain. What we lack is sustained political attention and the institutional muscle to convert that attention into outcomes. Readiness is fundamentally a political project. It requires ministers who keep showing up to AI meetings after the press release goes out. It requires permanent secretaries who carve out budget for it. It requires private sector leaders who hire local AI talent rather than outsource the work. And it requires a citizenry that has reached enough literacy to hold its representatives to account on the decisions they make.

None of that is unfamiliar territory. The Caribbean has built modern central banks, world class universities, and credible regulators across multiple sectors against harder odds. AI readiness is the same problem in a new domain. We know how to do it. The next five years are about whether we choose to.

CAIA exists to make that choice easier. The Readiness Index, the model legislation, the public service fellowship, and the sectoral playbooks are all in the hands of any member country that wants to use them. The work is in front of us. Let us get on with it.