CTU Caribbean AI Task Force 2026 Final Report
An ISOC LIVE Summary
Toward Harmonized AI Policies and Recommendations for the Caribbean
Caribbean Telecommunications Union (CTU) Caribbean AI Task Force Final Report - July 23 2026
The CTU Caribbean AI Task Force’s final report argues that AI is diffusing into a landscape of profound structural asymmetry: the benefits concentrate geographically and economically, while the risks — algorithmic bias, socioeconomic exclusion, erosion of information integrity — distribute universally. Caribbean citizens, firms and public institutions are becoming intensive users of AI systems without proportional influence over their design, deployment, governance or value capture. The report characterizes the region as caught in a “high-intent but low-capacity equilibrium,” where policy ambition is outpaced by infrastructural realities, fragmented data governance and human capital attrition.
The economic stakes are set out plainly. The global AI market is projected to expand from approximately USD 189 billion in 2023 to USD 4.8 trillion by 2033. AI integration could contribute up to USD 0.5 trillion to the Latin American and Caribbean economy by 2030, a potential 5.4% boost to regional GDP. Yet despite generating 6.6% of global GDP, the LAC region captures just 1.12% of global AI investment. Within the Caribbean sub-region the deficit is sharper still: AI-native enterprises number in the single digits, and the region operates overwhelmingly as a consumer of imported technology rather than a producer of localized innovation.
Rather than advocating that individual Caribbean states compete in frontier-model development, the report argues the region’s task is to determine the terms under which external models, platforms, infrastructure and standards enter it. The report is the product of a one-year mandate established by resolution at the CTU’s 31st General Conference of Ministers, drawing on more than 35 nominated members from governments, multilateral organizations, the private sector, academia and civil society. An interim version was released in Port of Spain in December 2025 and circulated for regional review; this final report consolidates that feedback and was launched at the 1st Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Forum (CAIF 2026) on 23 July 2026.
The connectivity paradox. Approximately 75% of the population of Caribbean small island developing states used the Internet in 2023, and Internet use across SIDS grew at 8.4% annually between 2014 and 2023, exceeding the global rate of 6.7%. On most other measures the foundations remain fragile. Broadband prices in Latin America and the Caribbean exceed 5% of gross national income per capita, well above the 2% affordability target. An ITU study reported that between 75 and 85% of Latin American and Caribbean traffic, including locally generated content, passed through Miami. No Caribbean state appears among the world’s leading publicly ranked high-performance computing systems — and the report treats a further problem as distinct and arguably more consequential: the region is largely absent from the datasets used to track global AI infrastructure at all. A country ranked last is still a counted observation; a country that does not appear is not part of the analytical frame.
Four governance deficits. Adapting the diagnostic framework of the UN High-Level Advisory Body on AI, the report identifies four interrelated gaps:
The representation gap. Caribbean states are functionally absent from the forums writing global AI rules, yet those rules apply to the region by default through trade agreements, cross-border data-flow regulations and non-negotiable platform terms of service. Absence from the rule-writing table does not grant exemption from the rules; it eliminates sovereign influence over their design and enforcement.
The coordination gap. CARICOM is the only regional bloc of comparable standing without a collective AI governance instrument. The EU operationalizes a binding AI Act, the African Union a Continental AI Strategy, and six Caribbean states are signatories to the Latin American Declaración de Santiago — but no CARICOM-wide instrument exists. At this fragmented scale, no single member state commands the leverage to demand data sovereignty or algorithmic auditing from multinational providers.
The implementation gap. Where high-level commitments do exist, they frequently remain aspirational, lacking costed roadmaps, institutional ownership, legislative sequencing and monitoring mechanisms. As of early 2026, no CARICOM member state has a standalone adopted national AI strategy in force. In the 2023 Oxford Insights assessment, every Caribbean country except the Dominican Republic scored zero on the AI “Vision” dimension. Jamaica rose from 122nd to 93rd in the 2025 index, the highest CARICOM placement and the only one in the global top 100; the remainder sit between 122nd and 189th.
The research gap. Research-to-commercialization is the one link in the AI value chain that cannot be procured, harmonised or imported from elsewhere. The Startup Genome CARIBEquity assessment mapped 154 validated technology startups across 15 Caribbean countries and placed all 15 ecosystems in its earliest “Activation Phase,” characterized by limited startup experience and gaps in capital, mentorship and ecosystem connectivity.
Inclusion and labour exposure. Speech and language models perform measurably worse on Caribbean English and Caribbean Creoles than on the dialects they were built around. The report cites AI-generated deepfakes deployed in Ireland’s 2025 presidential election and the Netherlands’ 2025 general election campaign, and notes the World Economic Forum ranks misinformation and disinformation as the second-most severe global risk over a two-year horizon. A joint ILO–World Bank analysis estimated that 26–38% of employment across the LAC countries studied was exposed to generative AI; a March 2026 ILO brief found approximately 29% of female-dominated occupations exposed, against 16% of male-dominated occupations, and identified Caribbean and Pacific SIDS among economies where more than 40% of women’s employment was exposed. Jamaica’s global-services and BPO sector alone accounts for roughly 60,000 jobs.
Seven pillars. The recommendations are organized around seven thematic pillars, each carrying a single numbered recommendation with lettered sub-items.
Pillar 1 — Data, Digital Infrastructure & Compute. Harmonized data-protection and cross-border data-flow frameworks; shared distributed compute modeled on small-state approaches rather than single large facilities; climate-hardening of infrastructure investment; open standards over proprietary lock-in.
Pillar 2 — Governance, Ethics & Standards. A regional framework anchored in the UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence, adopted unanimously by all 193 UNESCO member states in November 2021, setting minimum standards for algorithmic transparency, risk classification and public-sector procurement. The binding constraint is legal: eleven of fifteen CARICOM states have enacted data protection legislation, but Dominica, Haiti and Montserrat have none, Suriname’s remains in draft, and implementation varies widely among the rest.
Pillar 3 — Economic Transformation, Innovation & Industry. Sequencing from MSME adoption toward higher-value innovation, with a staged research-to-commercialization pathway that channels a defined share of commercial returns back into upstream research.
Pillar 4 — Talent & Skills. A tiered pipeline from mass AI literacy through practitioner training to specialist research scholarships, alongside transition pathways for workers in exposed occupations.
Pillar 5 — Public Sector AI. Procurement and service delivery as the proving ground for governance standards, beginning with low-risk domains. The report insists AI cannot be deployed responsibly on immature digital foundations: member states should first advance interoperable DPI, digital identity, data exchange and payments.
Pillar 6 — Natural Disaster & Climate Resilience. AI-enabled multi-hazard early warning led by CDEMA. Caribbean countries experience roughly ten times the global average monetary cost of climate-related damage and twenty times the global average number of climate events.
Pillar 7 — Regional Leadership, Trade & Global Interoperability. The pillar addressing what the report calls the single most consequential gap it identifies. The UN General Assembly’s 2025 resolution established the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI and the Global Dialogue on AI Governance; the Panel was seated in February 2026 and the Global Dialogue held its first substantive session in Geneva in July 2026, creating a near-term forum in which CARICOM can register a coordinated position.
The report concludes that the choice before the Caribbean is not whether AI will transform the region, but whether that transformation occurs primarily on terms established elsewhere. Institutional anchors already exist — UWI’s Artificial Intelligence Innovation Centre, alongside capacity at the University of Trinidad and Tobago, the University of Guyana, Anton de Kom University of Suriname and the University of Technology. What is missing is the financing architecture to convert that starting point into a functioning pipeline. Implementation, the report argues, must now become the region’s priority.
RESOURCES
1st CTU Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Forum (CAIF 2026) — two-day hybrid forum, 23–24 July 2026, where the Final Report was launched
Caribbean Telecommunications Union — convenor of the Task Force under the CARICOM Single ICT Space mandate
CTU Caribbean AI Task Force launch announcement — the one-year mandate that produced this report
Artificial Intelligence Innovation Centre — UWI St. Augustine centre chaired by Task Force chair Craig Ramlal
Caribbean People Shaping Caribbean AI — UWI Today profile of the AIIC and Ramlal’s regional agenda
UNESCO Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence — the normative anchor for the report’s Pillar 2 framework
Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Policy Roadmap — UNESCO prior work built on 1,000+ stakeholder consultations
UN High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence — source of the four-gap diagnostic framework adapted in Chapter 3
Technology and Innovation Report 2025 — UNCTAD source for the AI market and patent-concentration figures
Building Islands of Innovation — Startup Genome on the CARIBEquity assessment of 15 Caribbean ecosystems