The Caribbean risks being left behind by the rise of agentic artificial intelligence (AI) unless governments, businesses and institutions move quickly to participate in the technology shift rather than observe it, according to the founder of a regional technology initiative.
Lily Dash, founder of Future Caribbean, warned that the window for meaningful engagement with agentic AI is open but will not remain so indefinitely.
She added that the economic consequences of inaction are acute for a region already characterised by low growth and elevated inflation.
“Agentic AI represents one of the largest technology shifts we have seen, with the potential to affect virtually every industry and every area of government,” Dash told Cayman Independent.
“The question for Cayman businesses, investors, developers and institutions, and really for the entire Caribbean, is: how quickly can we implement this technology to compress time across our industries and ministries, while simultaneously creating new technologies here that can be exported to the world?”
Dash pointed to the underlying economic conditions that make delay costly.
“For a region where many economies are growing at around one per cent, while inflation can be closer to four per cent, it is extremely costly not to be all-in on innovation,” she said.
Her warning extends beyond government to the private sector and the region’s technology talent pool.
Dash argued that the Caribbean has historically lost its best technologists to better-resourced markets for the same reasons it loses elite athletes – the infrastructure, capital, mentorship and opportunities required to reach full potential do not exist at home.
The economic consequences of that pattern in technology, she said, are far greater than in sport.
Future Caribbean is running a Global Agentic AI Buildathon to begin addressing that gap.
It draws more than 450 builders from around the world to develop technologies across 10 tracks directly relevant to the region, including disaster management, finance, healthcare, green energy and food systems.
Cayman Enterprise City joined the initiative as a founding financial sponsor in May, and a number of buildathon participants are already entering the CEC accelerator programme.
Dash framed the initiative as a wholesale effort to position the Caribbean as an active participant in the agentic AI moment rather than a late adopter of technologies developed elsewhere.
“Our fragmentation, which has historically been treated purely as a disadvantage, can become part of our competitive advantage,” she said.
“If we can build technology that operates successfully across islands, jurisdictions, currencies, regulatory systems and distributed populations, we are building for a very large portion of the world.”
Dash was direct about the stakes. “The objective is not for the Caribbean to consume the next technological wave,” she said. “It is for us to help build it.”
