ROSE HALL, St James — The Caribbean is being urged to formulate a regional approach to regulations for data protection and artificial intelligence (AI).

According to Ben Rapp, CEO of Securys, a global data privacy company headquartered in Europe with offices in the Caribbean and the United States, the biggest challenge facing the region is a lack of harmonised regulation.

“I think one of the things that the Caribbean, as a regional entity, and particularly the Caribbean Community (Caricom), needs to think about is harmonising regulation, particularly data protection regulation now, and then whatever future AI regulation comes in,” Rapp stated via video chat Thursday from his office in France.

He was one of the panellists discussing the topic ‘AI in the Boardroom: Will Technology Make or Break Caribbean CEOs’ on the final day of the Caribbean Investment Forum (CIF) held at Montego Bay Convention Centre.

Rapp believes the harmonised approach he is suggesting will make it easier for countries within the region to manage the revolution that has come through digitalisation of data and, more recently, AI.

“The danger is, if we carry on, understandably, exercising individual country independence, to legislate separately will make it very difficult to operate at scale and for people even to scale their enterprises within the region, but more importantly, to focus on exports out to the rest of the world,” Rapp warned.

Looking more pointedly at the topic of AI, he explained that while he understood that there are countries with their own frameworks, it would be better to have something more wide-reaching.

“The policy prescription is for Caricom to look at regional-level, simple, straightforward, AI guidelines around legitimate uses of data, around assurance of fairness of treatment,” the Securys CEO stated.

“It’s really important that we have existing legislation in many Caribbean countries that incorporates provisions around automated decision-making. We need to see that being enforced or people will feel discriminated against by AI rather than empowered by it,” he added.

Rapp explained that such coordination at the regional level would provide better feedback for data being used, which would prevent challenges with how these systems are developed within the Caribbean.

“The danger at the moment is decisions being made in the boardroom, using conclusions drawn by AI from bad data. The challenge for the region is getting good data, because bear in mind that most of the training that’s been done with the large language models that we have has been done with data from outside the region,” he stressed.

“The understanding the models have of regional dynamics will not be that good, and they are prone to hallucinating because they dislike admitting that they don’t know things,” Rapp added.

He suggested that the region should therefore look at how benefits to be derived from the integration of AI can be used to bolster its offerings to the rest of the world.

“The important thing for the region is to see AI as an enabler, to give Caribbean human talent access to a bigger stage. I think that’s the fundamental,” he said.

“Also it’s building on the educational foundations, it’s building on the opportunity for knowledge export, and it’s focusing on having a level playing field and harmonised regulation against which to do that,” Rapp argued.

However, while he insisted that there are opportunities available for the Caribbean, he stressed that capacity-building is needed.

“We need that regulation, that legislative framework to be backed by an education programme of the sort that’s been described,” Rapp said.

“We have an MOU with the Jamaica Business Development Corporation to help their cohorts get regulatory compliance and make effective use of data. We need to expand on that kind of thing so that people understand how to use these tools safely and fairly and effectively,” he stated.

He insisted that when this is done, it will make the outcomes better for all involved.

“Crucially, when we talk about things like analytics, it’s not about being able to get an answer to a question quickly; that’s the obvious advantage of the technology,” said Rapp.

“It’s knowing what question to ask and knowing what to do with the answer, and we are not yet at a stage where it is appropriate for the AI to be doing that. We need to train people to ask the right questions and then do the right things on the basis of the answers they get,” he added.