A year ago last week, Hurricane Melissa came ashore as a Category 5 storm. The World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) put the damage at US$8.8 billion, about 41 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), and yet the economy shrank by only 1.7 per cent in the fiscal year to March 2026. We seemingly rose to the occasion.

However, in this piece, I want to talk about a different storm. It won’t show up on the Met Service radar. It shows up in quarterly earnings filings. In September, the NASDAQ-listed outsourcing firm Ibex reported that it had closed two of its four Jamaican delivery centres and cut 1,405 workstations, 37 per cent of its capacity here. It did so in a record year, with revenue up 15.4 per cent to US$644.1 million, while its chief executive spoke of a “new era of BPO [business process outsourcing], one powered by AI agents”. Nothing dramatic, just optimisation. This is not an alarm. It is me reading the clock out loud.

THE CLOCK, WITH NUMBERS ON IT

The “singularity” suggests a cinematic moment when the machines wake up. Entertaining, sure, but a reality nations will soon have to grapple with. And you don’t need it to lose your job. You only need a cheaper substitute for your tasks, and it is arriving on schedule.

Stanford’s 2025 artificial intelligence (AI) index found that running a model as capable as GPT-3.5 became more than 280 times cheaper in about 18 months. Gartner predicts that, by 2029, AI agents will resolve 80 per cent of common customer service issues without a human. The World Economic Forum expects 39 per cent of workers’ core skills to change by 2030.

Our outsourcing sector is a genuine national achievement, but its trend lines have turned. The Government reported 62,000 jobs in March 2024 and about 50,000 by March 2026, while the industry association’s own census puts the figure closer to 40,000. Local spending fell from about US$1 billion to roughly US$780 million in a year.

Yoni Epstein, president of the Global Services Association of Jamaica (GSAJ), says AI is not the cause and points to costs, Hurricane Melissa, and our historically low unemployment. I take him at his word, and I like his prescription: Chase a billion US dollars in annual foreign exchange, not 60,000 heads. The Government’s working group wants to shift the BPO-to-KPO (knowledge process outsourcing) mix from 80:20 to 60:40. Exactly the right instinct.

But, let’s consider the physics. Those buildings were designed for a world in which the scarce input was an English-speaking human in a nearby time zone. That input is being repriced. The Philippines, which employed 1.89 million people in IT-BPM in 2025, moved toward capability — global capability centres, health care, and finance. The BPO that survives is the one that sells judgement rather than minutes.

Meanwhile, tourism (US$3.79 billion in 2025), remittances(a record US$3.49 billion), and outsourcing (about US$780 million) add up to roughly US$8 billion, more than a third of GDP by my own reckoning. Every stream depends on decisions made somewhere else. Diversifying is not disloyalty.

YOU CAN’T PROMPT WHAT YOU CAN’T READ

AI’s interface is language. Judging whether an answer is right takes reading comprehension, numeracy, and the confidence to say, “That doesn’t look right.” Without the basics, AI doesn’t level the field. It tilts it.

Credit where it is due: 69 per cent of grade six students were proficient in mathematics in this year’s Primary Exit Profile (PEP), up from 57 per cent in 2023. And, Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) mathematics passes rose from 34.5 per cent in 2024 to 48.7 per cent this year. The flip side is that about three in ten 11-year-olds are not yet proficient, and more than half of CSEC mathematics candidates still don’t pass. My experience as an employer has made these numbers real, and the gaps tangible and experiential. Meanwhile, our adult literacy rate, usually quoted as 88.1 per cent, dates from 2014. We are planning an AI economy with a literacy statistic as old as the iPhone 6.

Then there is the leak in the bucket. More than 1.1 million Jamaican-born people were living abroad in 2020, almost 40 per cent of our resident population, and the World Bank estimates that 64.2 per cent of tertiary-educated Jamaicans had emigrated by 2010. Close to 5,800 Jamaican teachers received US J-1 visas in 2022, up from about 2,800 in 2017. We train our brightest at public expense and export them duty-free. AI and remote work could reverse that, since a Jamaican data scientist can now work for a London firm from Mandeville, but only if there is an ecosystem here worth staying for.

Small states show what is possible. Singapore gives citizens aged 40 and over a S$4,000 SkillsFuture credit for mid-career retraining. Oxford Insights’ 2025 index lifted Jamaica from 122nd to 99th of 195 countries, but our weakest score, “Development and Diffusion”, is 17.41 out of 100. As Minister Andrew Wheatley put it in June, “AI use is outpacing understanding.”

WHAT WE DO BEFORE THE NEXT HURRICANE SEASON

* Measure literacy again. Run a national adult literacy and numeracy survey by 2027, and repeat it. We cannot manage what we last measured in 2014.

* Fix the foundations. Scale AI-assisted tutoring in primary reading and mathematics, with teachers firmly in charge, and set a public goal of a 60 per cent CSEC mathematics pass rate by 2029.

* A BPO transition compact. The Government, the GSAJ, JAMPRO, and HEART should fund certifications for the 60:40 target (health-care revenue cycle, finance, cybersecurity, AI operations), turn idle floor space into training hubs, and pilot a SkillsFuture-style credit for displaced workers.

* Brain circulation, not just brain drain. Offer diaspora fellowships and remote work incentives, and negotiate partnerships so destination countries co-fund the nurses and teachers they recruit from us.

* Fund discovery and ship the plan. Publish a current research and development figure (the last is from 2002) with a path to 0.5 per cent of GDP, and release the National AI Policy with budgets and deadlines.

THE ASSET THAT DOESN’T BLOW AWAY

Hurricane Melissa reminded us that concrete and zinc can be flattened in an afternoon. A child who can read, reason, and write a good prompt cannot; and neither can a nurse who stays or an engineer who comes home because home finally makes sense. The machines are learning quickly. The only question that matters for Jamaica is whether we will learn faster.

Jermaine Duncan

Kemal Brown is executive chairman of Digita Global Group, a member of the Forbes Business Council, a global speaker, and the author of Mind Cures. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or grow@kemalbrown.com.