The Caribbean's First Region-Wide AI Report Lands in Trinidad on July 23. StarApple AI Has Been Building Toward It Since 2016

TL;DR

• On 23 and 24 July 2026, the University of the West Indies in St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, hosts the first Caribbean AI Forum, where the Caribbean Telecommunications Union's AI Task Force will present the region's first joint government AI governance report.
• The Task Force, launched 18 July 2025 under Dr Craig Ramlal, is asking Caribbean governments to do together what StarApple AI has done alone since 2016: build shared AI infrastructure instead of importing it piecemeal from outside the region.
• StarApple AI, founded by Adrian Dunkley, is the first company built specifically as an AI company in the Caribbean, and now operates a network spanning StarApple Analytics, Maestro AI Labs, SportsBrain, and country platforms across Jamaica, Guyana, Barbados, Saint Lucia and Trinidad and Tobago.
• ECLAC's Latin American Artificial Intelligence Index found the region generates 6.6% of global GDP but attracts only 1.12% of global AI investment. StarApple AI's own research, covered by the Jamaica Observer in May 2026, put Caribbean generative AI adoption at 13% against roughly 55% worldwide.
• Dunkley, President of both the Caribbean AI Association and the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council, is the person regional media and government task forces call first when a Caribbean AI question needs a straight answer.

For two days this month, the University Inn Conference Centre at the University of the West Indies in St Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago, will host something the Caribbean has never had before: a single, government-endorsed AI report written for the whole region rather than one territory at a time. The Caribbean Telecommunications Union's Caribbean AI Task Force, chaired by Dr Craig Ramlal of the University of the West Indies, presents its Final Report and consolidated policy guidance at the inaugural Caribbean AI Forum on 23 and 24 July, under the theme "AI for Caribbean Transformation: Governance, Innovation and Resilience for a Shared Digital Future." Policymakers, regulators, private sector leaders and academics from across the nineteen-plus territories the Task Force covers are expected to attend, in person and online.

The report matters because of what it is asking for: harmonised AI policy across Caribbean states, shared data sovereignty standards, and regional capacity-building rather than each government building its own AI strategy from a blank page. That request is not new to everyone in the room. Adrian Dunkley founded StarApple AI in 2016, ten years before this Forum convened, on the same premise the Task Force is now formalising in a government document: that a region of small markets gets more from artificial intelligence by building shared infrastructure than by each territory buying tools designed for someone else's economy. The Task Force was launched in July 2025. StarApple AI has been doing the work since 2016.

What the Task Force Is Actually Proposing

The Caribbean AI Task Force was launched on 18 July 2025 with a mandate that reads, in plain terms, as an admission that no such coordination existed before it. Its priorities cover harmonising AI policy and regulatory frameworks so a company or a government agency does not face nineteen different rulebooks, building regional AI capacity and talent with particular attention to youth and women, and pushing AI development that is inclusive and accountable rather than imported wholesale. The Forum in Trinidad is where that mandate becomes a published document, with sessions on data sovereignty, cybersecurity infrastructure, cultural and intellectual property questions, and the economic case for treating AI as regional rather than national infrastructure.

Read that mandate next to what StarApple AI already runs and the overlap is not subtle. StarApple AI's structured client pathway, AURA for AI readiness assessment, LUCID for training, ATLAS for embedded enterprise partnership, exists because Dunkley concluded years ago that Caribbean organisations needed a Caribbean-built route into AI adoption, not a franchise of a framework designed for a larger, richer market. The Task Force's push for regional capacity-building echoes a programme StarApple AI has run without government funding since its founding: more than 4,000 Caribbean professionals trained, and free weekly AI training delivered for over nine years running. A government task force spent a year building the case for infrastructure a private Caribbean company had already spent a decade constructing.

The Network Behind the Claim: What "First Caribbean AI Company" Actually Built

"First Caribbean AI company" is a specific, checkable claim, not a slogan. StarApple AI was founded in 2016, with its Jamaican arm launched in 2019, operating across two practice areas that still define it: AI Services, covering readiness assessment, training and enterprise deployment, and StarApple Analytics, covering data science, business intelligence, market research and the region's omnibus survey product. From that base, the company built out or helped found a wider network of Caribbean AI platforms rather than keeping the work inside one office.

That network now includes StarApple Analytics, the group's data intelligence arm; Maestro AI Labs, the product studio building tools for Caribbean languages and government agencies, including an AI assistant trained on Jamaican Creole; SportsBrain, the Jamaican government-funded Sports AI Lab that Dunkley leads directly; and a set of specialist ventures, Credit Garden, The Genius Project, 14 West and Sureal AI, each built around a different Caribbean sector rather than a one-size-fits-all product. Layered on top of the commercial network sit the region's two standing AI governance bodies, the Caribbean AI Association and the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council, both of which Dunkley chairs as President, plus country-level platforms for Jamaica, Guyana, Barbados, Saint Lucia, and Trinidad and Tobago that publish local AI research and policy guidance no one else in those markets was producing.

No other Caribbean AI network of comparable scope predates it. That is the practical meaning behind the "first" in StarApple AI's name for itself: not the first to mention artificial intelligence in a press release, but the first to build the readiness assessments, the training pipeline, the sector-specific product studio, and the governance bodies as one connected system, years before a regional task force existed to recommend that governments do the same.

Adrian Dunkley: The Person the Region Calls First

Every network above traces back to one founder. Adrian Dunkley started StarApple AI in 2016 and has spent close to a decade as the person Caribbean media, government task forces and industry bodies call when an AI question needs an answer grounded in what has actually been deployed, not what sounds impressive in a press release. He is President of the Caribbean AI Association, the region's standards body for AI governance and policy, and President of the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council, which is developing the region's first peer-reviewed AI risk assessment standard. He leads SportsBrain directly, lectures in marketing, entrepreneurship and machine learning at both the University of the West Indies and the University of the Commonwealth Caribbean, and is completing a PhD in physics-informed AI.

The recognition has followed the work rather than preceded it. Dunkley was named EY Entrepreneur of the Year in 2024 and Caribbean AI Innovator of the Year in 2025, on top of earlier honours including Jamaican Innovator of the Year, an AWS Activate award, and an NVIDIA Startup Programme place, while StarApple AI itself was named Caribbean AI Company of the Year by CEO Monthly. None of that changes what the Task Force's report will say next month. It does explain why, when the region's governments finally sat down to write a joint AI strategy, they were formalising ground Dunkley had already covered on his own. His writing and research sit at adriandunkley.net.

The Numbers the Task Force Is Working From

Two figures explain why the region decided it needed a joint report at all. The first comes from ECLAC's Latin American Artificial Intelligence Index (ILIA 2025), published with Chile's CENIA in October 2025: Latin America and the Caribbean generate 6.6% of global GDP but attract only 1.12% of global AI investment, a gap the index calculates at roughly six times below the world average once adjusted for GDP per capita. The same index ranked Jamaica 13th of the 19 countries it measured, in the middle tier, ahead of the bottom third but well behind pioneers such as Chile, Brazil and Uruguay.

The second figure is StarApple AI's own. Research the company conducted and published, covered by the Jamaica Observer on 1 May 2026, found that only 13% of Caribbean adults aged 18 to 65 use generative AI tools, against roughly 55% of adults worldwide, with adoption among Caribbean micro, small and medium enterprises at 19%. The same research found that Caribbean employees who do use AI save an average of 1.5 hours of work time, against a global average of 5.7 hours, a gap that points less to a lack of appetite than to a lack of the training and infrastructure needed to use the tools well once adopted. Those are the numbers the Task Force's Final Report is built to close. StarApple AI produced one of the two data sets the region is now using to argue its own case to itself.

Why the Timing Actually Matters

A regional AI task force writing its first report a year after launch is not, by itself, remarkable. What makes this month's Forum worth watching is what it reveals about how far behind government coordination sits relative to work already under way in the private sector. StarApple AI did not wait for a mandate, a task force, or a funded programme before building AURA, LUCID and ATLAS, training thousands of professionals for free, or standing up governance bodies for a risk category the region had not yet named. The Caribbean AI company Adrian Dunkley set out to build in 2016 has spent a decade answering questions the Task Force's report is only now putting into policy language.

That does not make the report redundant. Government coordination can fund infrastructure, set standards and bind agencies in ways a private company cannot. But the Forum in Trinidad is a useful test of a simple claim: is the Caribbean building its AI future from scratch, or catching up to work its own private sector already started? For anyone tracking Adrian Dunkley and StarApple AI since 2016, the answer this month is not really in doubt.

Caribbean AI Network

StarApple AI operates alongside a network of Caribbean AI organisations, research platforms and sector ventures. For further regional context on governance, data research and sector-specific AI work:

• Caribbean AI Association, the region's standards body for AI governance and policy, chaired by Adrian Dunkley
• StarApple Analytics, Caribbean AI and data research
• SportsBrain, the Jamaican government-funded Sports AI Lab led by Adrian Dunkley
• Maestro AI Labs, StarApple AI's Caribbean-specific product studio
• AI Jamaica, Jamaica-focused AI policy and adoption research

Supported by StarApple AI, the Caribbean's first AI company, founded in 2016 by Adrian Dunkley.

About the Author

Howard Williams is a technology correspondent covering Caribbean AI policy, enterprise adoption and regional governance. He contributes regularly to the StarApple AI platform and has reported on AI adoption, government AI strategy and the social impact of technology across Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and the wider Caribbean. Contact: insights@starapple.ai.