Cayman Independent is pleased to introduce Inside AI, a new monthly column by Tamsin Deasey-Weinstein, a globally recognised AI thought leader and future-of-work strategist who leads the AI Intelligence pillar of the Cayman Islands Digital Transformation Task Force. The column will explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping business, skills and the workplace, with a particular focus on what those changes mean for the Cayman Islands.
A King, a friar, OpenAI’s chief financial officer and Jensen Huang walk into a country house in Scotland… it’s not AI, it’s real.
About thirty people spent last Thursday behind closed doors in an Ayrshire country house, at the invitation of the one and only King Charles, talking about artificial intelligence. Nvidia, Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic were there, along with Britain’s AI minister and a Franciscan friar who advises the Vatican on AI. It was quite a party list.
They were not discussing productivity, chips, or the race with China. They were discussing shared principles to guide AI. Not towards capability and efficiency for once, but towards using AI to uphold human dignity and contribute to the flourishing of people and the planet. Pretty important, you would think.
Nvidia sent its chief executive and Google DeepMind sent its founder for the meeting with the King. OpenAI sent its chief financial officer. Anthropic, whose own chief executive had spent the previous weekend publicly asking the industry to slow down, sent representatives that were not household names. To me, this sent quite a message.
Meanwhile, in the actual economy something else was happening that hit the headlines. The preceding Tuesday morning, around 2,500 Oracle staff found their Slack access cut off at 4am and an email waiting at 6am from Oracle Leadership telling them that today was their last working day, as part of a broader organisational change. This is the same company that has already shed about 21,000 people, 13% of its workforce, in a single financial year yet had spent $55.7 billion on AI infrastructure. Quite appropriate when the summit was discussing using AI for human flourishing and dignity.
So how are these linked and why are they important for all of us? Firms in Cayman are using AI now, and the question is not only how to use it but also what we should be measuring as success. I believe that everyone should be using AI but the success metric has to be human success.
In a country this size even machine-learning decisions must be human led. Oracle may be able to lose 2,500 people but we cannot lose fifteen without everyone knowing their names by Friday and an impact being felt on the community. If it doesn’t benefit humankind then what are we doing it for?
I am not against AI augmentation or implementation. I have spent years arguing that AI is a force for good, and I still think a small island that gets this right ends up ahead of places fifty times its size. Our size is our advantage as we are small and nimble. But we must be asking not ‘what can AI do for my company or my country’ but what can it do for my people.
We spend a great deal of time asking what AI can do but almost nobody asks what we want more of and works backwards. For our country to truly be successful with AI implementation we must implement and govern with our people at the heart.
