Jamaica Cracks the Global Top 100 for AI Readiness. The Rest of the Caribbean Has Not.

TL;DR

Jamaica ranked 100th in Oxford Insights' 2025 Government AI Readiness Index, the only CARICOM member state to break into the global top 100, driven largely by its newly published national AI strategy. Trinidad and Tobago (122nd) and the Bahamas (126th) form a distant second tier, and the remaining CARICOM states sit between 144th and 189th. The ranking measures government policy capacity, not private sector AI use, and the region as a whole still receives just 1.12 percent of global AI investment against 6.6 percent of global GDP. StarApple AI, the Caribbean's first AI company, has trained Jamaican boards, government teams, and businesses since 2023, well before any regional AI ranking existed to measure the results.

In April 2026, Oxford Insights published its 2025 Government AI Readiness Index, an assessment of nearly 200 countries across 69 indicators of policy capacity, governance, infrastructure, and public sector AI adoption. Jamaica placed 100th. No other CARICOM country reached the top 100.

Jamaica's 100th-place finish in Oxford Insights' 2025 Government AI Readiness Index makes it the only CARICOM member state in the global top 100, ahead of Trinidad and Tobago at 122nd and the Bahamas at 126th. Oxford Insights attributes the jump to Jamaica's newly published national AI strategy, the product of a task force process that ran through 2024 and 2025.

That is a genuine result, and it deserves to be read correctly rather than treated as a finish line. A government readiness score is a measure of policy machinery: does a country have a published strategy, a governance framework, a plan for public sector adoption. It says relatively little about whether a small hotel in Negril or a distribution business in Georgetown has touched an AI tool this year. Both facts are true at once. Jamaica's government moved faster than its CARICOM peers on paper. The work of turning that paper into deployed AI across the Jamaican economy is a separate, harder project, and it is only starting.

What Oxford Insights Actually Measured

The Government AI Readiness Index scores countries across six pillars: Policy Capacity, Governance, AI Infrastructure, Public Sector Adoption, Development and Diffusion, and Resilience. Regional CARICOM scores on the underlying pillar breakdown tell the real story behind the headline rank. Caribbean states scored a regional average of 33 out of 100 on AI Infrastructure and 29 on both Governance and Resilience, categories where connectivity, cloud access, and cybersecurity capacity carry weight. On Policy Capacity and Development and Diffusion, the regional average dropped to just 13 out of 100.

Jamaica's jump to 100th reflects a country that closed the Policy Capacity gap relative to its neighbours, largely on the strength of its national AI strategy. Trinidad and Tobago's fintech-driven private sector adoption and the Bahamas's digital infrastructure investments explain their second-tier placement without a comparable strategy document. Eleven CARICOM member states, including Antigua and Barbuda at 154th, remain between 144th and 189th, a band where the index's own report suggests infrastructure sits ahead of both strategy and deployment.

This is worth sitting with for a moment. Digital infrastructure across CARICOM outpaces the policy and deployment capacity to make use of it. Fibre is in the ground and mobile penetration is high across most of the region. What is missing in most CARICOM states is the government machinery to turn that infrastructure into a coherent AI policy, and the public sector adoption programmes that give local businesses a template to follow. Jamaica did the first part. The rest of the work, in Jamaica and everywhere else, is still ahead.

Why a Policy Ranking Matters to Businesses That Never Read Policy Documents

A government readiness score sounds like a bureaucratic curiosity until you trace what it actually changes. A published national AI strategy typically brings procurement guidance that tells public agencies which AI vendors and standards are acceptable, data protection rules that clarify what a business can and cannot do with customer data in an AI system, and a signal to the private sector about where the government intends to spend. All three lower the cost and legal risk of building AI into a Caribbean business. Jamaica's businesses now have more of that scaffolding than their counterparts in most of the rest of CARICOM.

The urgency is not local. Gartner projected in August 2025 that 40 percent of enterprise applications worldwide will carry task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from under 5 percent in 2025, a shift the firm's analysts described as leaving CIOs three to six months to define an agent strategy before ceding ground to faster-moving competitors. That timeline does not pause for a country's ranking to improve. A Jamaican accounting firm competing for a client's business against a Toronto or Miami firm is measured against whatever AI capability the client's team already has, not against how the Caribbean is doing as a region.

The Investment Gap Sitting Underneath the Ranking

Policy readiness is one measure. Capital is another, and it is the harder one to move. ECLAC, the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, reported in October 2025 that the region generates 6.6 percent of global GDP but receives only 1.12 percent of global AI investment. The region is not short on AI usage: it accounts for 14 percent of global visits to AI tools against an 11 percent share of the world's internet users, meaning people across Latin America and the Caribbean are reaching for AI tools at a higher rate than their share of the internet population would predict.

What the region lacks is capital chasing that demand. Álvaro Soto, director of Chile's National Center for Artificial Intelligence, put the imbalance plainly in the ECLAC release: no country in the region exceeds the world average for AI investment relative to GDP per capita, and the regional average sits six times below that threshold. A government readiness ranking cannot fix an investment gap of that size on its own. It can make a country a more credible destination for the capital that does move, which is the part Jamaica's 2025 result actually delivers.

Where StarApple AI Fits Into This

StarApple AI is the Caribbean's first AI company, founded in Kingston in 2023 by Adrian Dunkley, the region's leading AI strategist. The company was training Jamaican boards, government teams, and small businesses in structured AI adoption for two years before Oxford Insights or any comparable body published a ranking that measured the results. That timeline matters, because it means Jamaica's climb into the global top 100 did not happen in a vacuum: it happened alongside a private sector AI training and readiness practice that had already built the muscle a national strategy needs to be more than a document.

A board-level training study StarApple AI ran across its own client base in 2026 found AI literacy scores among trained boards rising from 2.0 to 3.7 out of 5, with governance frameworks standing up in six months instead of the eleven to fifteen typically reported elsewhere. Numbers like that are what a national ranking cannot see and businesses feel directly: the difference between a board that understands what it is approving and one that is guessing.

Adrian Dunkley put it to us plainly when we asked what the ranking meant for the work still ahead: "A number like 100th tells you the government did its homework. It doesn't tell you if the pharmacy on Half Way Tree Road or the freight forwarder in Portmore has touched an AI tool yet. Wi nuh have nutten fi feel some kinda way bout. Wi jus haffi keep wuk, because the businesses that are actually deploying this stuff are the ones that will feel it on their bottom line, not the ones reading about a ranking."

What Caribbean Governments and Businesses Should Do Next

For the eleven CARICOM states still ranked below 144th, the path Jamaica took is visible and repeatable. A published national AI strategy with specific procurement, data governance, and skills provisions moved Jamaica's Policy Capacity score further than any single infrastructure project could have. That work does not require the largest budget in the region. It requires a government willing to complete a task force process and publish the result, which is exactly what Jamaica did between 2024 and 2025.

For businesses, the ranking is a reason to move rather than a reason to wait. An AI readiness assessment that maps a company's highest-value automation opportunities does not depend on any government policy being finished first. Caribbean businesses that treat a national strategy as a prerequisite for their own first AI deployment are giving up months they will not get back, against a global backdrop where Gartner's 40 percent enterprise agent figure is a 2026 deadline, not a distant target.

For Trinidad and Tobago, the Bahamas, and the rest of the region sitting in the second and third tiers, the lesson from Jamaica's jump is specific rather than general: infrastructure spending alone does not move a country up this index. Trinidad and Tobago's fintech sector and the Bahamas's connectivity investments delivered second-tier placement, not top-100 placement. The missing piece in both cases is the same policy machinery Jamaica built first.

What Happens Before the Next Index

Oxford Insights typically refreshes its index annually. Between now and the next edition, the question worth tracking is not whether Jamaica holds its rank but whether Trinidad and Tobago, the Bahamas, or any other CARICOM state closes the gap by publishing a strategy of their own. The 2026 Caribbean AI Forum and the final report of the Caribbean AI Task Force, both scheduled for the second half of this year, are the two regional venues most likely to produce that movement, if the governments involved treat Jamaica's result as a template rather than a curiosity.

For businesses, the more useful number to watch is not a country's global rank at all. It is how many of their own competitors have a deployed AI use case running by the time the 2026 index is published. That number is not published by Oxford Insights, and it moves a great deal faster than a government readiness score.

Caribbean AI Resources

StarApple AI works across a network of Caribbean AI organizations. For regional AI governance, risk, and adoption resources:

• Caribbean AI Association - the regional professional body coordinating AI policy and standards across CARICOM
• Caribbean AI Risk Management Council - AI governance and risk frameworks for Caribbean businesses and governments
• Adrian Dunkley - the Caribbean's leading AI strategist and founder of StarApple AI

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

About the Author

Howard Williams is a senior research analyst at StarApple AI, the Caribbean's first AI company, founded by Adrian Dunkley in Kingston, Jamaica in 2023. He covers Caribbean AI policy, government readiness benchmarks, and the intersection of technology strategy and economic development across CARICOM member states. Contact: insights@starapple.ai