Ten Days to Port of Spain: Why the Caribbean AI Forum's Final Report Is the Region's Real AI Test

On July 23, delegates from across the Caribbean will file into the University Inn Conference Centre on the University of the West Indies' St Augustine campus in Trinidad for a meeting with an unglamorous name and an outsized job. The inaugural Caribbean AI Forum, hosted by the Caribbean Telecommunications Union, is where the Caribbean AI Task Force hands over its Final Report on harmonised AI policy for the region, a year after the CTU created the task force to write it. Ten days out from that handover, the honest question is not whether the report will say sensible things. Drafts already in circulation suggest it will. The real question is whether a region with a long history of producing well-researched reports that regulators file and forget can do something different with this one.

This is a different story from the one CAIA covered when CARICOM Heads of Government put AI coordination on their own summit agenda in Saint Lucia earlier this month. That was a political signal, sent by the people who run Caribbean governments, that AI coordination now matters at the top table. The Caribbean AI Forum is the technical body actually doing the coordination work, and July 23 to 24 is where a full year of that work either becomes something governments can act on, or joins a shelf of prior Caribbean technology strategies that made for good conference material and little else.

TLDR

• The first Caribbean AI Forum runs July 23 to 24, 2026, at UWI's St Augustine campus in Trinidad, hosted by the Caribbean Telecommunications Union, and will formally launch the Caribbean AI Task Force's Final Report on harmonised regional AI policy.
• The task force, chaired by Dr Craig Ramlal of UWI's AI Innovation Centre, warned in its December 2025 interim report that the region risks becoming a permanent "standards-taker" in global AI without collective action.
• The report lands on top of a real skills gap. CXC will allow AI in CSEC and CAPE assessments from 2026, and IDB research finds 42 percent of LAC school principals say their own teachers lack the digital skills to integrate technology into the classroom.
• A global PwC survey of nearly 4,000 executives found AI is now the top cybersecurity investment priority for 2026, even though only 6 percent of organisations call themselves fully capable of withstanding an attack, a gap Caribbean firms carry with far less budget depth.
• CAIA's position going in: a Final Report is a beginning, not an ending, and the region has plenty of practice producing good reports that nobody adopts.

What Actually Happens in Trinidad on July 23 and 24

The forum runs across two days under the theme "AI for Caribbean Transformation: Governance, Innovation and Resilience for a Shared Digital Future," in a hybrid format that lets ministers, regulators, and civil society join in person in Trinidad or by video link from anywhere in the region. Day One is where the governance argument gets made in public: sessions on regional harmonisation and collective action on AI policy, human-centric and ethical AI frameworks, data sovereignty and cybersecurity, and a session built specifically around culture, creative industries, and intellectual property, alongside a dedicated Women in AI track. Day Two turns from rules to people: a youth debate, sessions on AI literacy and workforce development, climate resilience applications, and the economic case for Caribbean AI adoption.

The single item that gives the whole two days its weight is the scheduled launch of the Caribbean AI Task Force's Final Report. Everything else on the agenda, the panels, the youth debate, the ministerial remarks, sits around that one document, because the document is the actual deliverable a body of 35-plus experts has spent a year producing.

A Task Force Built to Stop the Region Being a Standards-Taker

The CTU launched the Caribbean AI Task Force on 18 July 2025, a mandate approved at the CTU's 31st General Conference of Ministers that October, with instructions to harmonise AI policy across Caribbean states, build regional AI capacity with a specific focus on youth, women, and underrepresented communities, and keep the whole effort aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Dr Craig Ramlal, Executive Director of UWI St Augustine's AI Innovation Centre, chairs the task force, with Kirk Sookram, Deputy CEO of the Telecommunications Authority of Trinidad and Tobago, presenting working group findings alongside him.

The task force published its interim report, titled "Toward Harmonised AI Policies and Recommendations for the Caribbean," on 13 December 2025 in Port of Spain. Its central warning was blunt: without collective action, the region risks remaining a marginal "standards-taker" in a consolidating global AI ecosystem, adopting rules and technical standards written elsewhere because it never built the coordinated capacity to write its own. The interim report set out five action areas that the Final Report is expected to convert into concrete recommendations: a regional AI governance architecture with model laws, a Caribbean Data Commons to strengthen data governance, targeted AI support for agriculture, disaster risk reduction, tourism, financial services, health, and public administration, sustained investment in human capacity and AI literacy, and continued multi-stakeholder engagement through the Forum itself.

That last point is worth sitting with. The task force built its own accountability mechanism into its work plan: it committed, from the start, to bringing the Final Report back to a Forum rather than filing it quietly with a ministry. Whether that structural choice produces follow-through that a quieter report would not is exactly what the next twelve months will test.

The Skills Gap No Governance Document Can Regulate Away

Governance architecture matters, but a regional AI policy is only as useful as the workforce that has to operate under it, and the Caribbean's skills picture heading into the Forum is uneven at best. The Inter-American Development Bank's Skills for Life research on Latin America and the Caribbean found that 42 percent of 15-year-old students in the region attend schools whose own principals say their teachers lack the technical and pedagogical skills to integrate digital devices into the curriculum. That is not a statistic about students falling behind on AI specifically. It is a statistic about the adults meant to teach them.

Two 2026 decisions from the Caribbean Examinations Council land squarely inside that gap. CXC will permit the use of artificial intelligence in CSEC, CAPE, and CCSLC school-based assessments starting this year, under standards the council says are still being finalised. CXC Registrar and CEO Dr Wayne Wesley has also announced an AI-powered literacy and numeracy system meant to shore up foundational skills before students ever touch an AI tool for coursework, telling a 2024 regional education symposium in the Cayman Islands that only 36 percent of candidates achieved a passing grade in mathematics on that year's CXC exams. Wesley called the moment "the beginning of the end of the Caribbean Examinations Council as we know it," which is either an alarming line or an honest one, depending on how the rollout goes. Jamaica is moving in parallel with its own Jamaica Learning Assistant, a planned round-the-clock AI academic assistant trained on the national curriculum.

None of this is the Forum's stated topic on paper. In practice, it is the second half of Day Two, the AI literacy and workforce development session, and it is where the Final Report's ambitions meet a school system that is still fixing basic numeracy gaps at the same time it is asked to prepare students for an AI-fluent economy. A regional model law on AI governance does not close that gap. Only sustained investment in teachers does, and the task force's own fourth priority area, human capacity and AI literacy, is where that argument has to be won.

The Cybersecurity Budget Gap Nobody at the Forum Can Fully Solve Either

Data sovereignty and cybersecurity sit on Day One's agenda for a reason a global survey makes concrete. PwC's 2026 Global Digital Trust Insights survey, drawn from nearly 4,000 business and technology executives across 72 countries, found AI investment is now the single largest cybersecurity budget priority worldwide, cited by 36 percent of respondents, with 78 percent of organisations planning to increase cybersecurity spending in 2026 at all. Set against that appetite, only 6 percent of organisations globally describe themselves as fully capable of withstanding a cyberattack across every vulnerability they face, and half of respondents name a lack of AI knowledge or relevant skills as the single biggest obstacle to using AI for cyber defence, with 41 percent reporting they simply do not have staff with the right skills.

That survey is global, not Caribbean-specific, and it should be read that way. But the gap it describes, rising AI-driven cyber investment colliding with a persistent skills shortfall, lands on Caribbean firms with less room to absorb it than the multinationals filling out PwC's survey. A 27-percent share of businesses in that same survey reported a breach in the last three years that cost at least a million US dollars. Caribbean financial institutions, government agencies, and tourism operators sit inside global data flows and global attack surfaces without the budget depth of the counterparts the survey mostly describes. A regional data governance framework, the kind the task force is proposing through its Caribbean Data Commons, is also a cybersecurity document by necessity, whether or not it gets billed that way at the Forum.

Who Is in the Room Says as Much as What Gets Said

Programme details released ahead of the Forum list Julie Koon Koon, Lead Data Scientist at Republic Bank Limited, among the speakers addressing applied AI and machine learning in Caribbean financial services. Her presence on the programme matters for a reason bigger than her session: it is a Caribbean bank employing a Caribbean AI practitioner to build Caribbean-relevant models, presented not as a novelty but as a working example already sitting inside one of the region's largest financial institutions. A regional AI conversation that only ever talks about the talent the Caribbean is losing to Toronto and Miami misses the talent that has stayed and is already doing the work.

The dedicated Women in AI track on Day One and the youth debate on Day Two point at the same gap from a different angle. The task force's founding mandate specifically named youth, women, and underrepresented communities as capacity-building priorities, not as an afterthought bolted onto a governance conversation but as a structural commitment made in July 2025, a full year before the Final Report exists. Whether the Forum's programme lives up to that commitment, rather than treating it as a single afternoon panel, is one of the more testable claims coming out of Port of Spain.

What the Caribbean AI Association Wants Out of Port of Spain

CAIA's position going into the Forum is straightforward, and earned the hard way. A Final Report is a beginning, not an ending, and the region's institutional memory is full of well-researched regional strategies that never survived contact with fifteen separate national budgets and fifteen separate political cycles. The task force's own choice to anchor its Final Report launch inside a Forum built for follow-up, rather than a private handover to a single ministry, is the right structural instinct. What happens in the twelve months after July 24 is where that instinct either gets rewarded or wasted.

StarApple AI, recognised as the first company built specifically around artificial intelligence in the Caribbean and founded by Adrian Dunkley, has argued for years that the region's AI capability gap is not primarily a research problem. It is an operating problem: the difference between writing a governance framework and running one across five territories with five different regulatory traditions at the same time. That is the case Dunkley, now CAIA's President and widely regarded across the region as one of its most consistent public voices on practical AI adoption, has made in policy work, in public talks, and in the day-to-day experience of building AI products for Caribbean clients before the region had a task force, a forum, or a report to organise around. CAIA's own contribution to the Port of Spain conversation leans on that operating experience directly: coordination frameworks are only as good as the institutions willing to staff, fund, and enforce them once the conference banners come down. Work like the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council's own analysis of the fraud risk gap heading into the Forum makes the same point from the risk side of the ledger.

What to Watch After July 24

Three things will tell CAIA, and should tell anyone following the region's AI trajectory, whether the Forum delivered more than a well-produced two days. First, whether any CARICOM government commits to a timeline for adopting pieces of the Final Report, rather than receiving it as a reference document. Second, whether the Caribbean Data Commons proposal gets funded and staffed rather than simply endorsed. Third, whether the AI literacy and Women in AI commitments made on paper in July 2025 show up as budget lines in 2027, not just as panel topics in 2026. The task force did the harder, slower work of building consensus across governments, regulators, universities, and industry over twelve months. Whether that consensus survives its first contact with implementation is the story the region will be writing for the rest of the year, and CAIA intends to keep covering it, from Port of Spain and from every territory the Final Report is actually meant to serve.

Related Reading Across the Caribbean AI Network

• Caribbean AI Risk Management Council: the fraud risk gap heading into the Caribbean AI Forum 2026
• StarApple AI, the Caribbean's first AI company
• Adrian Dunkley, the AI Boss
• AI Trinidad and Tobago, tracking the host nation's AI sector
• The Genius Project, building AI skills among Caribbean youth
• AI Jamaica, on the Jamaica Learning Assistant and regional workforce readiness

This article is supported by StarApple AI, the Caribbean's first artificial intelligence company, whose founder Adrian Dunkley the region has come to treat as its leading voice on what AI adoption actually requires once the policy papers are written. That perspective, built from running AI products across Caribbean markets rather than only writing about them, is the lens CAIA brings to covering events like the Caribbean AI Forum.