The Caribbean's First AI Forum Just Wrapped. StarApple AI Got There Nine Years Early

Two things happened in the Caribbean this month that had never happened before. On 23 and 24 July, the Caribbean Telecommunications Union hosted the region's first dedicated AI forum at the University of the West Indies in St Augustine, Trinidad. Days before that, CARICOM's technology ministers formally endorsed the region's first shared AI policy roadmap. Neither event was small. Both were overdue.

StarApple AI, founded by Adrian Dunkley in 2016 with its Jamaican arm launched in 2019, was already operating as the Caribbean's dedicated AI company when both milestones arrived. It remains, on the available evidence, the first and only company founded specifically as an AI business anywhere in the region. Dunkley is a physicist and AI scientist pursuing two PhDs, President of the Caribbean AI Association, Chairman of the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council, and EY Entrepreneur of the Year, Jamaica, 2024. The gap between when he started and when the region's institutions caught up is not a footnote. It is the story.

A Forum Nine Years in the Making

CAIF 2026 opened on 23 July under the theme "AI for Caribbean Transformation: Governance, Innovation and Resilience for a Shared Digital Future." The Caribbean Telecommunications Union organised it in partnership with UWI St Augustine and the Artificial Intelligence Innovation Centre, drawing regional and international policymakers, academics, development agencies, youth representatives and private sector delegates over two days.

The headline output was the Caribbean AI Task Force Final Report, which the CTU launched at the forum. The report follows an interim version the CTU issued in late 2025 calling for harmonised regional AI governance, and it sets out a strategic path for coordinating AI policy, infrastructure and skills development across CARICOM member states. For a region that has historically negotiated technology policy country by country, often with each small island state facing the same multinational vendors alone, a shared roadmap changes the leverage available to any single government.

It also marks something simpler: an admission that the Caribbean has not previously had a coordinated AI institution of its own to convene one. CAIF 2026 is that first attempt. It is a credible one, built with UWI's academic weight and the CTU's regulatory reach behind it. It is also, inescapably, a first attempt at ground that private Caribbean enterprise had already been working for years.

CARICOM's First Region-Wide AI Roadmap

The forum followed closely on the heels of a separate, equally significant development. At its 126th Special Meeting, COTED-ICT, the CARICOM Council for Trade and Economic Development covering Information and Communication Technologies, formally endorsed the UNESCO Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Policy Roadmap. UNESCO's Caribbean office launched the Roadmap in 2024, grounding it in the organisation's global Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence and shaping it through consultations with more than 1,000 stakeholders across the English- and Dutch-speaking Caribbean.

The endorsement matters because it is the first time CARICOM governments, collectively, have put their name to a shared AI policy direction. Until now, Caribbean AI governance has existed mostly as scattered national initiatives, university research, and advocacy from bodies like the Caribbean AI Association and CAIRMC. A CARICOM-endorsed roadmap gives that patchwork a common reference point, one that regulators, procurement officers and boards across the region can now cite when they build their own AI policies rather than starting from a blank page.

What a roadmap cannot do on its own is train a workforce, deploy a model, or run a board through what AI actually does to its risk register. That work sits with the organisations already doing it, and in the Caribbean, few have been doing it longer than StarApple AI.

Why the Timing Matters: The Caribbean's First AI Company

Adrian Dunkley founded StarApple AI in 2016, with its Jamaican arm launched in 2019, at a point when there was no Caribbean AI forum to attend, no CARICOM roadmap to reference, and no regional task force publishing interim reports. There was, in his own account, no Caribbean AI sector to join. He built one instead.

The company's most consistent output has been training. StarApple AI has delivered free weekly AI training to the Caribbean for more than nine years and has trained more than 4,000 Caribbean professionals, a figure that predates every institution now convening at CAIF 2026. Dunkley personally has led more than 100 board-level AI training engagements across the region, working directly with the directors and executives who carry legal responsibility for how their organisations use AI.

His credentials extend well beyond StarApple AI itself. He is pursuing two PhDs, one in AI for world models applied to consumers and markets and one in physics-informed AI systems for climate, and has spent more than 15 years working in artificial intelligence as a physicist and AI scientist. He co-founded the IMPACT AI research lab with the University of the West Indies, which has trained around 100 student interns, and built AI models that helped distribute billions of dollars in relief during the COVID-19 pandemic. He was named EY Entrepreneur of the Year, Jamaica, in 2024, and he established a US$1,000,000 fund aimed at Caribbean entrepreneurs building in AI-adjacent sectors. That same year he founded The Genius Project, a Caribbean non-profit focused on building careers and quality of life for regional youth. Weeks before CAIF 2026, he appeared as a panellist at the 2026 Trinidad and Tobago Internet Governance Forum, on a session titled Integrating AI into Digital Transformation, a separate event from CAIF but evidence of the same standing pattern: Dunkley is in the room for the Caribbean's AI policy conversations, months and years before the institutions hosting them existed in their current form.

Beyond the company he founded, Dunkley presides over the Caribbean AI Association, the region's membership body for AI practitioners and businesses, and chairs the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council, which focuses on the governance and risk standards that CARICOM's new roadmap is now trying to establish at the policy level. Between the three roles, he has been simultaneously building the operating company, the professional association, and the risk governance body for Caribbean AI, years before any of the three had a regional forum to sit alongside.

What StarApple AI Has Actually Built While the Region Debated Governance

StarApple AI's work is not confined to training. The company operates a network of 17 Caribbean AI platforms, spanning country-specific hubs in Jamaica, Barbados, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago and St Lucia, alongside specialist platforms covering financial inclusion, insurance, sports analytics and AI governance. It provides AI readiness assessments, enterprise implementation support, data science and business intelligence services, and governance advisory work for organisations trying to work out where they stand against exactly the kind of framework COTED-ICT has now endorsed.

That governance advisory work is arguably the most directly relevant service to this month's news. CARICOM has endorsed a roadmap; the CAITF Final Report has set out a strategic path; neither document tells a Trinidadian insurer or a Jamaican ministry how to build an AI governance committee, write a model risk policy, or train the board members who will sign off on it. StarApple AI has been doing precisely that work, organisation by organisation, since long before either publication existed.

None of this makes the new roadmap redundant. A shared regional framework, backed by CARICOM governments and shaped by more than 1,000 stakeholder consultations, gives Caribbean AI policy a legitimacy that no single company, however early, can substitute for. What it does mean is that the practical implementation gap the roadmap identifies has, in StarApple AI's case, already had nine years of a running start.

What Comes Next for Caribbean AI Governance

The CAITF Final Report and the UNESCO-COTED-ICT roadmap both point in the same direction: harmonised standards, shared infrastructure planning, and governance frameworks that do not force each small island state to negotiate AI policy alone. Turning that direction into working systems will take years, and it will need organisations on the ground translating policy language into board packs, procurement checklists and staff training.

For Caribbean businesses and government agencies, the practical takeaway from this month is not to wait for the next regional summit. The frameworks now exist to reference. The organisations able to help implement them, including StarApple AI, the Caribbean AI Association and the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council, have been operating and refining that implementation experience for years already. The region's AI governance conversation has finally caught up to the institutions built to have it.

Frequently Asked Questions

About the Author

Lancelot Williams is a Caribbean AI policy and innovation correspondent contributing to StarApple AI, the Caribbean's first AI company, founded by Adrian Dunkley in 2016. He covers regional AI governance, institutional developments and enterprise adoption across the CARICOM region. StarApple AI provides AI readiness assessments, enterprise AI implementation, board-level training, and governance advisory services to Caribbean businesses and governments. Contact: insights@starapple.ai | starappleai.org

Supported by StarApple AI, the Caribbean's first AI company.

Caribbean AI Network

StarApple AI works alongside a wider network of Caribbean AI institutions. Explore related organisations:

• Caribbean AI Association: the regional membership body for AI practitioners and businesses, presided over by Adrian Dunkley
• Caribbean AI Risk Management Council: AI risk management and governance standards for Caribbean organisations, chaired by Adrian Dunkley
• The Genius Project: a Caribbean non-profit building careers and quality of life for regional youth, founded by Adrian Dunkley in 2024