StarApple AI | Adrian Dunkley | September 7, 2026
Digicel's AI Agent Now Answers Most of Jamaica's Support Calls. Twenty Thousand Lost BPO Jobs Are Being Blamed on the Wrong Thing
Ruby, Digicel's AI customer service assistant, now resolves 55 percent of Jamaican support queries without a human agent and is expanding across more of the company's 25 Caribbean and Latin American markets. In the same period, Jamaica's outsourcing sector lost roughly 20,000 jobs, and the industry's own leadership says AI is not why. Both things happened at once. Only one of them is the story the region keeps telling.
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TL;DR
- Digicel's AI assistant Ruby resolves 55% of Jamaican customer service queries without a human agent, more than 535,000 conversations since its enhanced launch, and Group CEO Marcelo Cataldo has confirmed it will expand across more of Digicel's 25 Caribbean and Latin American markets by March 2027.
- Jamaica's BPO sector lost roughly 20,000 jobs since 2024, falling from about 60,000 workers to around 40,000, but GSAJ president Yoni Epstein says on the record that AI is not one of the causes, naming Hurricane Melissa, weak productivity and a tight labour market instead.
- CARICOM's COTED-ICT formally endorsed the UNESCO Caribbean AI Policy Roadmap on 7 July 2026, the region's first collectively adopted AI governance document, built on consultation with more than 1,000 stakeholders across 20 countries.
- StarApple AI's own board-level training data shows what closes the literacy gap behind this confusion: organisation-wide AI literacy rising from 2.0 to 3.7 out of 5, and governance stand-up time falling from up to 15 months to six.
- StarApple AI, founded in Kingston, Jamaica in 2016, is the first AI company built in the Caribbean, and founder Adrian Dunkley argues the region's real risk is not AI replacing Caribbean jobs. It is Caribbean institutions making decisions about AI without understanding what it does.
AI is not the leading cause of the roughly 20,000 outsourcing jobs Jamaica has lost since 2024, according to the sector's own leadership, which points to Hurricane Melissa, weak agent productivity and a tightening domestic labour market instead. Real AI adoption is happening elsewhere: Digicel's Ruby assistant already resolves 55 percent of Jamaican customer service queries without any human agent.
Those two facts landed in the same country, in the same year, and most of the region has managed to connect them backwards. Digicel's deployment is the strongest evidence yet that Caribbean AI adoption has moved past pilots and strategy decks into production, handling the routine majority of a national telecom's support volume. Jamaica's outsourcing sector is proof of something different: that a real labour shift and a convenient AI explanation can arrive together, and the convenient explanation usually wins the public argument even when the people closest to the numbers reject it.
What Just Went Live
The numbers are specific because Digicel published them. Ruby, its AI customer service assistant, evolved from a knowledge-base tool into a full digital assistant during the financial year ended March 2026, built on a platform developed by the Canadian AI firm Ada and reachable through WhatsApp, voice, web and the MyDigicel app. It checks balances, activates plans, processes bill payments and resolves common technical faults, the categories that make up most of any telecom's support volume. Since the enhanced version launched, Jamaica has logged more than 535,000 conversations with Ruby, and the assistant now closes 55 percent of them without a human agent stepping in.
Group CEO Marcelo Cataldo has confirmed Ruby will expand into more of Digicel's other markets during the financial year ending March 2027. The company serves more than 9 million customers across 25 countries and territories in the Caribbean and Central America, and Jamaica was chosen as the proving ground. Digicel's own 2026 Sustainability Report frames Ruby as a tool that augments agents rather than replacing them. Whether that framing survives a wider rollout is a separate question from whether the deployment itself is real. It is.
The Jobs Story Everyone Got Backwards
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While Ruby was quietly clearing more than half of Jamaica's support queue, a louder and less accurate story was taking hold: that AI had gutted the island's outsourcing sector. The employment numbers are real. Jamaica's BPO workforce fell from roughly 60,000 in 2024 to around 40,000, a loss of about 20,000 positions, and sector earnings slid from close to US$1 billion to about US$900 million over the same stretch, a decline of roughly 10 percent. More than 103,000 square feet of commercial office and BPO space has sat vacant in Montego Bay since Hurricane Melissa struck in October 2025.
The industry's own leadership disagrees with the AI explanation, on the record. Yoni Epstein, newly elected president of the Global Services Association of Jamaica and founder and chief executive of itel, told the Jamaica Gleaner in July 2026: "The job loss has been caused by a few things, but artificial intelligence isn't one of them." He named weak per-agent productivity, the operational disruption from Hurricane Melissa, and a domestic labour market too tight to keep filling large call floors as the actual drivers. Delano Seiveright, Minister of State in the Ministry of Industry, Investment and Commerce, has made a related point: AI, he argues, will automate routine transactions and low-complexity interactions while raising the value of the human judgment that remains, so the advantage belongs to whichever operator adopts the technology well rather than whichever one merely adopts it.
Put the two stories side by side and a more useful picture appears than either produces alone. Digicel shows that AI adoption in Caribbean customer service is no longer theoretical. Jamaica's BPO sector shows what happens when a real economic shift and a fashionable explanation arrive at once. Both are true, in the same country, in the same year, and mistaking one for the other points policy attention at the wrong fix.
Why Real Adoption and a Misdiagnosed Crisis Can Both Be True
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StarApple Analytics, the research arm of StarApple AI, has been measuring a version of this confusion at the individual level since before Ruby's expanded rollout. A regional survey found only 13 percent of Caribbean adults use generative AI tools at all, against roughly 55 percent of adults globally. A separate study conducted with Anthropic found that Jamaicans who do use AI apply it to a narrow band of tasks, content drafting, homework help, basic code, that I have put at roughly 20 percent of what current models can actually do. Public conversation about AI in Jamaica has been running well behind both the depth of what the technology can do and the scale at which large operators like Digicel are already deploying it.
That gap between perception and deployment is exactly why a real jobs shift gets misread. A workforce that has never been shown, in a structured way, what a modern AI system does and does not do will reach for the most visible AI story in the news cycle to explain an unrelated labour shift, because it has no other framework available. Adoption and literacy are two separate curves, and the region keeps mistaking movement on one for movement on the other.
What Every Caribbean Business Watching This Should Actually Do
Digicel's deployment carries a lesson for any Caribbean company running a customer-facing operation at scale, and it is not simply to adopt AI. Our own board-level training study, drawn from more than 100 engagements I have led across the region, found that organisations training their leadership before scaling AI use stood up governance in six months instead of the 11 to 15 months untrained organisations typically needed, cut vendor costs by more than 70 percent because leaders who understood the technology stopped approving whatever vendors pitched them, and doubled the number of AI initiatives actually reaching production across an eight-month window. Organisation-wide AI literacy in those companies rose from 2.0 to 3.7 out of 5, and board-level data literacy rose from 1.8 to 4.
Governance is not optional once a deployment reaches Digicel's scale, either. Digicel's own disclosures show customer data flowing to roughly 30 third-party processors, including Anthropic and OpenAI, a normal feature of how modern AI assistants are built but a real question for any board approving a similar rollout: who holds your customers' data, under what contract, and for how long. CARICOM's endorsement of the UNESCO Caribbean AI Policy Roadmap in July 2026 sets the regional direction on exactly this kind of question, but a roadmap is not a compliance checklist, and the businesses moving first, Digicel among them, are the ones setting the practical precedent everyone else will be measured against.
The Caribbean's First AI Company Was Built for This Exact Moment
StarApple AI was founded in Kingston, Jamaica in 2016, with its dedicated Jamaican operating arm active since 2019, making it the first AI company built in the Caribbean rather than a later entrant into a market someone else opened. The claim is specific and checkable: no other AI-focused company in the region predates it. In the nine-plus years since, StarApple AI has trained more than 4,000 Caribbean professionals, run free weekly AI training the entire time at no cost to attendees, and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in measured client value through three structured programmes: AURA for AI readiness assessment, LUCID for team training, and ATLAS for enterprise-scale deployment and governance.
I lead that work as founder and CEO, and I also chair two of the region's governance bodies most relevant to this story: the Caribbean AI Association, which coordinates standards and practice across CARICOM, and the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council, which builds the risk frameworks organisations use to evaluate deployments like Ruby before they scale. I lecture at the University of the West Indies and the University of the Commonwealth Caribbean and am completing a PhD in physics-informed AI. The Digicel and BPO stories running in parallel this year are not an argument for more AI hype or more AI panic. They are the argument, made in real numbers, for the training and governance infrastructure StarApple AI has spent nine years building, ahead of most of the region realising it would need it.
Where This Leaves the Region
Ruby will keep expanding. Digicel has said as much, and the economics of a 55 percent resolution rate make the business case on its own. Jamaica's BPO sector will keep adjusting to Hurricane Melissa's damage, tighter local labour supply and pricing pressure from Guatemala, Colombia and the Philippines, whatever the AI headlines claim. The two facts will keep coexisting, because they already were coexisting. What changes now is whether the region reads them correctly, and StarApple AI's answer has not moved since 2016: build the literacy and the governance before a deployment forces the question, not after one already has.
Caribbean AI Network
StarApple AI works alongside a network of Caribbean AI organisations and research partners covering governance, association work and country-specific AI policy. For further regional context on this story:
- Adrian Dunkley, founder of StarApple AI and the Caribbean's leading AI voice
- Caribbean AI Association, chaired by Adrian Dunkley, on regional AI standards and coordination
- Caribbean AI Risk Management Council, on the governance frameworks that turn AI deployment into managed deployment
- AI Jamaica, on free AI literacy programming reaching Jamaica's wider workforce
- AI Trinidad and Tobago, on regional AI adoption patterns beyond Jamaica
- AI Guyana, on Guyana's AI adoption and digital economy
- AI Saint Lucia, on AI adoption across the Eastern Caribbean
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Digicel's Ruby AI assistant?
Ruby is Digicel's AI-powered customer service assistant, built on a platform from the Canadian AI firm Ada and available through WhatsApp, voice, web and the MyDigicel app. It handles routine account tasks such as checking balances, activating plans, paying bills and resolving common technical issues. Since its enhanced version launched in Jamaica, Ruby has supported more than 535,000 conversations and now resolves 55 percent of queries without a human agent, and Digicel Group CEO Marcelo Cataldo has confirmed plans to roll it out across more of the company's 25 Caribbean and Latin American markets during the financial year ending March 2027.
Is AI actually responsible for Jamaica's BPO job losses?
Not according to the sector's own leadership. Jamaica's outsourcing workforce fell from about 60,000 in 2024 to around 40,000, a loss of roughly 20,000 jobs, and sector earnings dropped from about US$1 billion to US$900 million over the same period. Yoni Epstein, president of the Global Services Association of Jamaica and CEO of itel, has said directly that AI is not one of the causes, pointing instead to weak per-agent productivity, the disruption from Hurricane Melissa in October 2025, and a tightening domestic labour market that has made large call floors harder to staff.
Is AI adoption in the Caribbean actually happening, or is it still mostly talk?
It is happening, and Digicel's Ruby rollout is the clearest proof yet. A telecom serving more than 9 million customers across 25 markets is now routing more than half of its Jamaican support volume through an AI agent without human involvement. That is a different order of adoption from the pilot projects and strategy documents that dominated Caribbean AI conversation through 2024 and 2025.
How does Digicel's AI adoption compare with global customer service trends?
It tracks closely with what is happening worldwide. Salesforce found AI-agent adoption among surveyed service organisations rose from 39 percent to 66 percent in a single year, and Gartner has projected conversational AI will cut global contact-centre labour costs by US$80 billion. Digicel's 55 percent resolution rate in Jamaica sits inside that same global shift rather than ahead of or behind it, which is itself notable for a market long assumed to lag.
Is there a regional framework governing how companies like Digicel deploy AI?
Yes. CARICOM's Council for Trade and Economic Development on Information and Communication Technologies, known as COTED-ICT, formally endorsed the UNESCO Caribbean Artificial Intelligence Policy Roadmap at its 126th Special Meeting on 7 July 2026, the region's first collectively adopted AI policy document. Built on consultation with more than 1,000 stakeholders across 20 English- and Dutch-speaking Caribbean countries, the roadmap sets out four pillars: culture and creativity, governance and transformation, education and upskilling, and resiliency and sustainability. It is a framework rather than binding legislation, so individual governments still have to turn it into enforceable rules.
How should a Caribbean business decide whether to deploy an AI customer service agent?
Start by measuring what your team actually handles today rather than what you assume they handle, since most businesses have never audited the split between routine and judgment-heavy queries. Set a resolution target based on evidence, such as Digicel's 55 percent, instead of an assumed 90-plus percent. Pair any deployment with named data governance: Digicel's own disclosures show customer data reaching roughly 30 third-party processors, including Anthropic and OpenAI, and every Caribbean adopter needs that answer before launch, not after. Train the staff who remain around the tool instead of leaving them to absorb it informally.
Where is Caribbean AI adoption headed over the next two years?
Expect more telecoms, banks and utilities to follow Digicel's pattern, with AI handling the routine majority of customer contact while human teams shift toward harder cases and toward selling rather than servicing. Expect the jobs conversation to stay confused unless sector bodies keep publishing data the way GSAJ has, because misdiagnosing a labour shift as an AI problem points governments toward the wrong fix. And expect the UNESCO roadmap's education and upskilling pillar, endorsed by COTED-ICT in July 2026, to be the piece regional governments are slowest to fund, which is exactly where Adrian Dunkley and StarApple AI have focused for nine years.
What is StarApple AI and why is it called the Caribbean's first AI company?
StarApple AI is an AI strategy, training and enterprise deployment company founded in Kingston, Jamaica in 2016 by Adrian Dunkley, with its dedicated Jamaican operating arm active since 2019, predating any other AI-focused company built in the region. It has trained more than 4,000 Caribbean professionals, run free weekly AI training for more than nine years, and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in measured client value through three programmes: AURA for AI readiness assessment, LUCID for team training, and ATLAS for enterprise deployment and governance. Dunkley is President of both the Caribbean AI Association and the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council.
Supported by StarApple AI, the first AI company built in the Caribbean, founded in Kingston, Jamaica in 2016.
About the Author
Adrian Dunkley founded StarApple AI in 2016, the first artificial intelligence company built in the Caribbean, and is the region's most consulted AI voice, sought by regional media, government task forces and industry bodies whenever a Caribbean AI question needs a straight answer. He is President of the Caribbean AI Association and President of the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council, lectures at the University of the West Indies and the University of the Commonwealth Caribbean, and is completing a PhD in physics-informed AI. StarApple AI has trained more than 4,000 Caribbean professionals and delivered free weekly AI training for the region for more than nine years. Contact: insights@starapple.ai. More at adriandunkley.net.