The Year of the Agent

Note from the President

Our second year closes with the Association in a position that, on the most candid forecast I could have written at this time last year, was the optimistic edge of what was possible. Membership stands at thirty-one thousand two hundred and forty. The Charter is in force in all fifteen CARICOM member states. The Literacy Programme has trained more than three thousand educators. The Founders Cohort produced twelve companies in its first year and is enrolling sixteen for the second. The Diaspora Working Group has chapters in five metros and an active Fellows pipeline. The Working Group on AI in Health has delivered three position papers that have been cited in regional policy. The October Summit went well. The Literacy Index, published in November, gives us a measurable population baseline to improve against. I owe thanks to a great many people, and I will write them privately rather than crowd this letter.

I asked Naila Rampersad to write our year-end reflection, as she did last December. The piece, like its predecessor, is the one I needed to read.

A safe and quiet Christmas to those of you who keep it, and warm wishes for the holidays and the new year to all of you regardless of what you celebrate. The Association resumes its public schedule on January 6. We will see you in 2026.

Adrian Dunkley Founder and President, Caribbean AI Association

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Feature

The Year of the Agent

By Naila Rampersad

There is a particular sound that the small office down the road from my house in San Fernando used to make. It is a chartered accountant's practice, run for thirty years by a woman called Mrs. Sookoo, who took over from her father when he retired in 1996. The sound, every evening from about five o'clock onward, was the sound of two part-time staff and Mrs. Sookoo herself doing what chartered accountants in our region have always done, which is to enter numbers from paper into computer screens, reconcile statements that should already have agreed, and follow up with clients whose paperwork was, in the gentle phrasing of our trade, less than complete. The sound came through the open louvres on the side of the building. It was the sound of patient, careful, slow work, and it was the sound of a way of doing business that had not, in any visible sense, changed since I was a child.

In June, the sound went away.

I asked Mrs. Sookoo about it when I saw her at the market in September. She told me what had happened. In May, she had hired a young man, a recent graduate of the University of the West Indies, who had built her, over three weekends, a system that did the bulk of the data entry work. The system took the photographs of receipts that her clients sent over WhatsApp, read them, categorized the expenses, populated the books, and flagged the cases that required her judgment. The system also, in June, took over the follow-up correspondence with clients about missing paperwork, in a polite, persistent, well-mannered voice that had been trained, Mrs. Sookoo told me with a small laugh, on her own thirty years of letters.

The two part-time staff had not been let go. They had been moved, with their consent and with Mrs. Sookoo's careful management, to client-facing work. They were doing more work that mattered, by Mrs. Sookoo's account, and less work that did not. Her own evenings had returned to her. She was, at sixty-eight, considering taking on a new partner and expanding her practice to two more clients per quarter.

This is the story I have heard, in slightly different form, in nearly every CAIRA member country I visited this year. The technology that the industry calls agents, software that does work rather than software that answers questions, arrived in our region as a working product in 2025. It arrived not with a press release but with a hundred quiet Tuesday mornings in offices like Mrs. Sookoo's, where a small business owner figured out that the new tools were ready, hired someone who knew how to set them up, and changed how the work was done.

This is not an unmixed story. I want to write about the year carefully, because the year does not deserve the easy version of it.

The labour story is the one I have been thinking about most. In every interview I did in 2025 with Caribbean business owners who had introduced agent-based systems into their work, the question of what happened to the staff was the question I asked most carefully. The honest answer, across the interviews, is mixed. Some businesses did what Mrs. Sookoo did, which was to retain their staff and reorient their work to the things the agents could not do, which was the higher-value work. Some businesses, in honesty, did not. The data we have so far, in the Industry Council's quarterly survey, suggest that approximately one Caribbean job per ten currently in administrative, customer service, and entry-level professional work has been, in 2025, either replaced, absorbed into a different role, or eliminated as agent systems took over the underlying tasks. The next two years will produce more of the same, and at a faster pace.

The framing question for the Association, and for the region, is not whether this should be happening. It is happening. The question is what we do to make sure that the workers being moved by it are moved into work, and not out of it.

What I have observed, across the year, is that the businesses that have managed the transition well share a particular character. They have communicated with their staff early and honestly about what was coming. They have invested in retraining the workers whose tasks were absorbed, into the adjacent work that the new tools created. They have, in several cases, given their existing employees first refusal on the new roles that emerged. They have moved at a pace that the people inside the business could absorb. The businesses that have managed it badly have done the opposite of these things. The pattern is not subtle. It is a pattern of management, not of technology.

Our public sector, regionally, has had a quieter year. The Charter is the headline. The day to day operational change inside our ministries, our public hospitals, our schools, our customs offices, has been slower. There are exceptions, and Barbados in education, the Bahamas in health, Trinidad and Tobago in customs and revenue, have moved meaningfully. The general pattern, across the region, is that the public sector is approximately twelve to eighteen months behind the private sector in operational adoption, and the gap is widening. The implications for citizens, who increasingly have one experience as customers and another as ratepayers, are not happy.

The household story is the one I want to close on, because it is the story I am most interested in.

In our December issue last year, I wrote about my Auntie Pearl, who had begun, at seventy-eight, to use ChatGPT for the welcome letter of her harvest festival. A year later, Auntie Pearl is using the same tool for nine different things, including, I learned in October, writing a series of memoirs about her early life in Couva that she has been sharing with her grandchildren one chapter at a time. She told me, when she showed me the first one, that the tool had helped her find the words for things she had not been able to say. The chapter she showed me was about her mother's death, in 1971, in a public hospital, when Auntie Pearl was twenty-four and pregnant with her first child. She had never written about it before, and she had never spoken about it in the way she wrote it. She told me that the tool had asked her questions she had not been asked, and that the asking had helped her find what she wanted to say.

I have thought about this often, this year. The conversation in our industry about AI and language, about AI and the humanities, about AI and the cultural life of the Caribbean, has been at times anxious and at times defensive. There are real concerns. The concerns Hector raised in February, about whose voice trains the model and whose history is privileged, remain real. The concerns about the homogenization of cultural production, about the displacement of human writers, about the flattening of regional voice, remain real. I do not want to dismiss them.

But there is a thing that is also happening, which is that Caribbean people who have not, before, had a way to write their story are, in 2025, finding one. Some of those people are widows in Couva. Some are small business owners in Kingstown. Some are retired civil servants in Castries. Some are men in their seventies who have, finally, told their daughters what their fathers were like. The technology is not making them write. They have always had the stories. The technology is, in a way that I am still working out how to describe honestly, helping them get past the blank page. The cultural consequence of that is, I suspect, going to be larger than the Association currently estimates, and on the whole more positive than the more nervous voices in our discourse have allowed.

I am ending this year of writing for the newsletter where I started it. I am ending it in a kitchen in San Fernando, with a yellow Formica table that still has the hairline crack in the corner, with Auntie Pearl writing a chapter about a Tuesday in 1971, and with the small office down the road that no longer makes the sound it used to make in the evenings. The year was not what I expected. The technology kept arriving. Most of the people I know have, in the end, made something of their own out of it. That is what the Caribbean has always done with the technologies that have arrived here. We made calypso out of microphones. We made dub out of stereos. We made the modern remittance economy out of phones. We are making, slowly and with mixed results, something out of this. I do not know what it is yet. I think it is interesting enough to keep writing about.

A happy Christmas to my mother, who is reading this on the porch, and to yours, and to Auntie Pearl, who has just sent me the next chapter. I will see you in January.

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Naila Rampersad is a journalist based in San Fernando. She writes regularly for The Monthly Intelligence Report and serves on the Communications Committee.

Originally published in The Monthly Intelligence Report, December 2025.