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The Caribbean must build at the speed of thought

Jamaica’s Prime Minister and CARICOM chair, Dr Andrew Holness, has urged the region to embrace artificial intelligence and modern technology or risk being left behind. The case he has put to Caribbean audiences deserves a serious hearing across CARICOM.

Caribbean Innovation Report

Dr Andrew Holness has handed the Caribbean a phrase to measure itself against. “This is the era of getting things done at the speed of thought,” the Jamaican Prime Minister told the opening of the International Building Expo in Georgetown. “We must move with speed and intent to ensure that we are not left behind by the changes in technology and that we don’t miss out on the opportunities created.”

As chair of CARICOM, Dr Holness has put the same argument to the region’s heads of government. He has called for “a competitiveness agenda anchored in logistics, connectivity, digital and AI-enabled transformation, and clean energy,” one that lets Caribbean economies “scale within the single market even as each state advances its own development strategy.” Regional institutions, he added, “must reduce their bureaucracy and increase their speed.”

His case rests on productivity. Addressing a technology showcase in Kingston, Dr Holness put a number on the problem. “Seventy percent of our economy is on services,” he said. “It means that if our economy is to grow, the services that we give must either expand or the quality and sophistication of the service must improve.” For decades, he added, the country had hidden from the question.

Dr Holness presents artificial intelligence as the answer, and frames it as a route to better-paid work. “The solution is for us to use the technology to increase the level of training and skills in our society, so that our people can take on higher-order tasks, which bring higher-order pay,” he said, calling AI “an advantage for us if we embrace it and use it in the right way, not as a displacement of labour.” Innovation Report has reported on a Jamaica-based AI task force working to embed that approach across Caribbean higher education.

This is the era of getting things done at the speed of thought. Dr Andrew Holness, Prime Minister of Jamaica

That ambition needs infrastructure, and Jamaica has begun to build it. The country is establishing a National AI Lab at the University of Technology, and Dr Holness wants more of them. “We need them right across the country, including in our primary schools, so that more children can become native to AI,” he said. Dr Kevin Brown, president of UTech Jamaica, has described the lab as “a centre of excellence” that will let Jamaicans “design AI-based solutions for industry, healthcare, agriculture, finance and education,” and help the country become a producer of technology rather than a consumer of it. The regional prize is a young population, whom Dr Holness has called “key drivers and consumers of technological advancement” with “immense potential to contribute meaningfully to our development goals.”

The investment is starting to follow the argument. In Trelawny, Jamaica, the EcoVista smart city is one of the developments Innovation Report has tracked as investors reassess the region’s higher-education and infrastructure opportunity. Dr Holness’s point is that the Caribbean cannot afford to let such projects move at the old pace. “If our economies are to scale, we must scale our ambitions,” he told CARICOM leaders.

Dr Holness frames this as a test the region can pass together. “Caricom endures because it adapts,” he told the heads of government. “It survives because we remain committed to the idea that small states can achieve big things when we work together.” Whether Caribbean governments match that ambition, by funding the labs, rewriting the approval systems, and teaching AI in primary schools, is a matter of will rather than capacity.