First Mover: The Bahamas's Bid to Write the Caribbean's First National AI Strategy

No Caribbean government has yet published a finished national AI strategy. That single fact, more than any conference panel or press release, explains why a budget debate speech from a junior minister in Nassau has become one of the more closely watched developments in Caribbean technology policy this year. In June 2025, Wayde Watson, Parliamentary Secretary in the Bahamian Ministry of Economic Affairs, told Parliament that his administration was drafting a white paper and a policy document for Cabinet review, and said plainly what was driving the timing: acting now gives the Bahamas a first-mover advantage in the Caribbean region.

A year on, that white paper is still in the drafting pipeline rather than on the statute books, but the claim behind it has held up. As of mid-2026, the Bahamas remains among the furthest along of any CARICOM member state in producing an actual governing document for AI, rather than a strategy paper, a task force, or a set of guiding principles. At the same time, a separate and larger regional process, convened by the Caribbean Telecommunications Union, has been arguing that national policies written in isolation are exactly the wrong shape for a region of small, interconnected markets. Both efforts are correct about the problem. The question worth asking is whether they are heading toward the same answer.

A Government Ready to Move First

The Bahamian case for speed rests on numbers that are genuinely large, even if they are global rather than local. Watson's remarks to Parliament drew on World Economic Forum projections that AI will displace roughly 92 million jobs worldwide by 2030 while creating around 170 million new ones, a net gain of about 78 million roles. The Bahamian argument is not that those jobs will land in Nassau by default. It is that countries with clear, published AI rules are the ones positioned to compete for a share of that reallocation, in the same way the United Arab Emirates and Singapore have used early, explicit AI frameworks to draw in billions of dollars of technology investment that might otherwise have gone elsewhere.

The white paper is not being drafted in a vacuum. It sits alongside Innovate 242, the government's broader digital and entrepreneurship agenda, and plans for a National Data Centre to be built inside the partially demolished former Bahamas Telecommunications Company Swift building, alongside a proposed National Digitisation Office to bring government records onto a common digital footing. A Grand Bahama Tech Hub is meant to give the initiative a physical home outside the capital. None of this is AI policy on its own, but together it is the kind of infrastructure and institutional groundwork that a policy document needs to land on if it is going to do more than sit in a drawer. Tourism, financial services, fraud detection, and healthcare are the four sectors Bahamian officials have named most often as where a clear AI regime is expected to matter first, which tracks closely with where the country's economy is already concentrated.

The Region Choosing a Different Path

While the Bahamas has been building its case for national speed, a much larger and more deliberately slow process has been under way across the rest of CARICOM. In July 2025, the Caribbean Telecommunications Union launched the Caribbean AI Task Force, chaired by Dr Craig Ramlal, Executive Director of the University of the West Indies St Augustine's AI Innovation Centre, with more than 35 experts drawn from governments, regional bodies, academia, civil society, and the private sector across the Caribbean.

The task force published its interim report on 13 December 2025, and its diagnosis is worth reading in full rather than summarising away. It describes the region as caught in what it calls a connectivity paradox: high levels of digital engagement among Caribbean populations sitting alongside fragile infrastructure, high connectivity costs, fragmented regulation, and limited data governance, a combination that keeps the region from capturing the benefit its own usage patterns would otherwise justify. The report situates that paradox against a global AI market it expects to reach trillions of US dollars over the next decade, and warns that without coordinated action, Caribbean nations risk becoming standards-takers in an industry being built and regulated almost entirely elsewhere.

Out of that diagnosis, the task force set five priority areas: a shared regional AI governance architecture with model laws and common oversight; stronger data governance and digital infrastructure, including a proposed Caribbean Data Commons; targeted AI support for agriculture, disaster risk reduction, tourism, financial services, health, and public administration; human capacity development and AI literacy; and sustained engagement across governments, regulators, industry, and civil society through the Caribbean AI Forum and national advisory bodies. A Final Report, with consolidated policy guidance, is due at that Forum later in 2026.

The Jobs Math Nobody Can Ignore

Both the Bahamian white paper and the CTU's regional process are, underneath the institutional language, responses to the same labour market question: what happens to Caribbean employment as generative AI spreads through the region's service-heavy economies. The clearest answer available comes from a joint study by the International Labour Organization and the World Bank, which found that between 26 and 38 percent of jobs across Latin America and the Caribbean could be influenced by generative AI in some form.

The detail inside that range matters more than the headline. Of those exposed jobs, the study found that 8 to 14 percent stand to see genuine productivity gains from AI tools, while only 2 to 5 percent face real risk of full automation, a pattern that supports augmentation over replacement for most workers. The harder finding is about access rather than exposure: as many as 17 million jobs across the region that could benefit from generative AI are currently held back by gaps in digital infrastructure and connectivity, meaning the workers most likely to gain from these tools are often the ones least able to reach them. For a region where the CTU task force has already flagged connectivity cost and reach as structural weaknesses, that finding turns AI policy from a technology question into an infrastructure one.

Why No Single Nation Can Write This Alone

The Bahamas can, on its own authority, publish a white paper, set data rules for Bahamian agencies, and decide how AI tools get procured inside its own government. What it cannot do alone is negotiate terms with a global AI infrastructure provider from a position of scale, set data-residency norms that hold across a shared undersea cable and satellite footprint, or build the kind of large, labelled Caribbean-language and Caribbean-context datasets that make AI tools genuinely useful for the region rather than adapted afterward from models trained elsewhere.

This is the practical case for the CARICOM Single ICT Space that the CTU task force's work is explicitly aligned with. A market of roughly 44 million people across CARICOM, negotiating as one bloc on data governance, model procurement standards, and AI infrastructure investment, has negotiating weight that no single island economy can match. Twenty separate national frameworks, each written with good intentions and its own definitions of what counts as high-risk AI, would hand global vendors twenty small markets to negotiate one at a time rather than one market large enough to set its own terms. The Bahamas's first-mover instinct and the task force's harmonisation instinct are not actually in conflict. A national policy that is designed from the outset to plug into a shared regional framework is worth more to the country that writes it than one built to stand entirely alone.

What a Serious Bahamas AI Strategy Would Contain

Judged against both the CTU's five priority areas and the country's own stated sectors of focus, a finished Bahamian AI policy has a fairly specific job list. It needs data governance provisions that are written to interoperate with whatever data-sharing rules the CARICOM Single ICT Space eventually adopts, rather than provisions that will need to be rewritten once the regional framework lands. It needs sector rules for tourism, financial services, and healthcare that are specific enough to give businesses certainty, since vague principles-based language tends to produce years of hesitation rather than adoption. It needs a public-sector AI procurement standard that the promised National Data Centre and National Digitisation Office can be built against from day one, instead of retrofitted later. And it needs a skills and literacy component that reaches beyond Nassau's financial sector into Grand Bahama and the Family Islands, so that a first-mover policy does not simply concentrate its benefits in the capital.

Each of those four requirements maps closely onto the four pillars CAIA organises its own work around: AI Innovation, Community Building, Policy Advocacy, and Education and Talent. That overlap is not a coincidence. It reflects what practitioners across the region, not just in the Bahamas, have identified as the actual gaps between a policy announcement and a policy that changes what happens inside government agencies and private businesses.

CAIA's Role in the Region's AI Governance Moment

The Caribbean AI Association exists to make sure moments like this one are shaped by evidence generated inside the region rather than frameworks imported wholesale from Washington, Brussels, or Singapore. CAIA was founded by Adrian Dunkley, who also founded StarApple AI, widely recognised as the Caribbean's first AI company, and who now serves as CAIA's President while continuing to lead StarApple AI's work across the region. That dual role, building AI products for Caribbean markets on one side and advocating for the policy conditions those markets need on the other, has put CAIA in direct contact with exactly the kind of drafting process now under way in Nassau.

CAIA's engagement with national governments, including through its country-level partner platforms such as AI Barbados and AI Trinidad and Tobago, gives the Association a working view of how AI policy drafting actually proceeds in Caribbean administrations: the capacity constraints, the competing legislative priorities, and the technical questions that stall a white paper somewhere between Cabinet submission and Cabinet approval. That is precisely the stage the Bahamian white paper is at now, and precisely the stage where outside expertise, offered without an agenda to sell a particular vendor's platform, tends to matter most. Adrian Dunkley's biography and the full record of StarApple AI's work across the region are available at adriandunkley.net.

What Comes Next

Two clocks are running at the same time. The Bahamas's white paper needs Cabinet review and approval before it becomes a governing document rather than a draft, and there is still no public date for when that will happen. The CTU Caribbean AI Task Force has committed to a Final Report and consolidated policy guidance at the Caribbean AI Forum later in 2026, following the interim report it published in December. If the Bahamas finalises its policy before the regional framework lands, the country gets to claim the first-mover title outright, but risks having to amend its own rules once the CARICOM-wide framework catches up. If it waits for the regional framework first, it loses the speed advantage that motivated the whole exercise in the first place.

There is a third option, and it is the one CAIA has been advocating for across every territory it works with: draft in parallel, build in the regional hooks now, and treat the Caribbean AI Forum not as a deadline to beat but as the moment national and regional policy get reconciled on purpose rather than by accident. The Bahamas has already shown it is willing to move first. Whether that first move ends up setting the pace for the rest of the Caribbean, or simply becoming the draft that had to be rewritten, depends on decisions being made in the months between now and that Forum. CAIA is working with member territories, national governments, and the CTU task force to make sure those decisions are informed by what the region's own evidence actually shows, not by what looks impressive in a budget debate speech. If your organisation is working on AI policy anywhere in the Caribbean, from a national white paper to a sector-specific regulation, CAIA's policy working groups exist to make sure you are not building it alone.