THE Caribbean’s fragmented approach to data-sharing could undermine the region’s ability to develop and use artificial intelligence (AI), with experts warning that limited access to data could constrain its participation in the AI economy. The issue was highlighted at the Caribbean Development Bank’s inaugural Caribbean Evaluation Space 2026, during the plenary “AI, Data, and Power: Shaping the Future of Evaluation in the Caribbean”.

While the Caribbean has significant amounts of data, experts say the region has a culture of keeping information within individual countries and organisations rather than sharing it more widely. Craig Ramlal, executive director of the Artificial Intelligence Innovation Centre at The University of the West Indies, St Augustine Campus, said this needs to change.

“We confuse what data privacy is and what it should be used for,” Ramlal said.

The Caribbean’s data-sharing problem has implications beyond privacy. AI systems depend on data, and limited access to regional datasets can constrain research, evaluation and the development of AI systems that reflect Caribbean economies and populations. The AI Innovation Centre has been pushing an open-data initiative since 2012, but the initiative has yet to be approved. An interoperability framework is also needed to allow countries and organisations to work across different data and technology systems, experts said. The global AI market is projected to reach between US$3 trillion to US$4.8 trillion by 2033. While Latin America and the Caribbean account for 6.6 per cent of global GDP, the region captures just 1.12 per cent of global AI investment. There is no separate data showing how much of that investment is being captured by the Caribbean.

VASSEN…you need to be investing in knowledge capacity. If I were advising Government, I’d think of some programme to try to motivate young professionals in the tech sector to take up interest in jobs in government and give them the right opportunities to take up that work.

The region is also facing a shortage of skilled workers needed to build and implement the technology. A survey of 2,500 Caribbean businesses found that 60 per cent of those struggling to implement new digital technologies cited a lack of skilled IT workers as the number one reason, with brain drain contributing to the shortage. That skills gap is also emerging in the evaluation space.

“Nowadays all of our evaluations in one way or another have some AI components,” said Jos Vaessen, chief evaluation officer and senior advisor at the World Bank Independent Evaluation Group.

He argued that governments need to build the capacity to attract technology professionals into the public sector.

“You need to be investing in knowledge capacity. If I were advising Government, I’d think of some programme to try to motivate young professionals in the tech sector to take up interest in jobs in government and give them the right opportunities to take up that work,” he said.

That means evaluation units will increasingly need data science expertise, while the wider region will need to strengthen its capacity to research, govern and deploy AI. The AI Innovation Centre’s task force has identified six recommendations, including equitable access to AI resources, frameworks to manage AI-driven economic disruption, capacity development, funding for AI research, support for niche industries that could benefit from AI and earn foreign exchange, and regional agreements covering data sharing, standardisation and legal frameworks.

For Ramlal, however, the priority is moving beyond these recommendations.

“We are not a region of report writers and talkers; we want to be a region that actually does something,” he said.

Ramlal said 2023 marked the point when the Caribbean began looking more seriously at AI, with 2026 expected to bring stronger policies and 2027 envisioned as the year implementation begins.