Jamaica’s next major economic disruption may arrive not through a financial crisis or natural disaster, but through a software update. Artificial intelligence (AI) is moving beyond answering questions and drafting documents. Increasingly, autonomous systems can manage conversations, analyse records, coordinate processes, and undertake sequences of work previously assigned to people. For a small, open economy that earns foreign exchange by supplying services to the world, this is not a distant technological curiosity; it is an immediate development challenge.

Will Jamaica use this transition to build more productive businesses, better-paying jobs, and stronger domestic capabilities? Or will we become more efficient consumers of foreign technology while growing numbers of workers struggle to remain economically relevant?

The answer depends less on the sophistication of the machines we purchase than on the capabilities of the people and institutions that deploy them. That is the central insight of the Resource Induced Poverty Reducing Economic Condition (RIPREC) framework, which I developed to examine why some countries convert economic resources into lasting prosperity while others remain trapped in poverty.

In an earlier commentary, I set out RIPREC’s warning about the divergence between technological progress and human capital development. The advance of increasingly autonomous AI now demands something more — a practical national response.

BPO sector at a crossroads

Jamaica’s global digital services industry offers an early test. For years its growth rested substantially on an English-speaking workforce, proximity to North American customers, and an ability to deliver labour-intensive services competitively. Those advantages created real opportunities. They are now being challenged by technology that can handle routine calls, process documents, and support customers at scale.

Industry reporting in July 2026 showed that the sector’s spending in the Jamaican economy fell from approximately US$1 billion to US$780 million in the fiscal year ended March 2026, alongside the loss of roughly 5,000 jobs. These figures describe local spending, not the value of service exports. Even so, the contraction is a serious warning about the sector’s economic footprint.

AI is not the sole explanation. Rising operating costs, staff turnover, international competition, the relocation of contracts, and other disruptions have also placed pressure on the industry. Sector leaders, nevertheless, see opportunities to recover momentum by shifting towards higher-value services and greater productivity. Both realities deserve attention. The industry retains considerable potential, but its traditional business model is under strain.

A major international labour market study published in 2025 estimated that roughly one in four jobs worldwide has some exposure to generative AI. Its central finding was that transformation, rather than outright replacement, is the more likely outcome for many occupations. Exposure is not a forecast of unemployment. Yet that distinction offers limited reassurance if transformed jobs require substantially fewer workers or skills that displaced employees have no realistic opportunity to acquire.

The response cannot simply be to tell call-centre workers to learn AI. Jamaica needs credible pathways from routine service delivery into specialised problem resolution, AI-supported analytics, quality assurance, cybersecurity, compliance, and the supervision of automated systems. Employers should help shape the training, offer practical experience and show whether participants actually secure sustainable employment.

Jamaica must compete increasingly on the value it creates, not merely on the affordability of its labour.

What the RIPREC steady state requires

RIPREC rests on a deceptively simple proposition: Sustained, poverty-reducing development depends on progress in technological capability, human capital, and institutional effectiveness that is sufficiently strong and mutually reinforcing. When technology advances far beyond people’s ability to use it productively, exclusion and displacement become more likely. When skills advance without the technology or productive opportunities to match, underemployment and the loss of talent can follow.

The RIPREC steady state is not a frozen endpoint, nor does it require technology and human capital to grow at identical rates. It describes a dynamic condition in which skills, productive technologies and effective governance develop in ways that sustain broad-based economic progress. Faster technology adoption, by itself, does not demonstrate that this condition has been achieved.

The questions that matter are more demanding: Are Jamaican workers becoming more productive and better rewarded? Are local firms moving into more sophisticated activities? Are new opportunities reaching beyond a narrow technological elite? Are productivity gains helping to reduce poverty and widen economic participation?

Without answers to those questions, an AI strategy could generate impressive adoption figures while failing the more demanding test of national development.

Education — an engine of adaptation

Education is the most consequential long-term response. But genuine reform must go beyond adding a few AI lessons to an already crowded curriculum. Strong literacy, numeracy, and subject knowledge remain indispensable. Students must also learn to reason independently, interrogate evidence, recognise errors, and use digital tools without surrendering their judgement.

From primary school onwards, age-appropriate computational thinking and digital literacy should strengthen, rather than displace, foundational learning. At secondary and tertiary levels, data analysis, practical problem-solving, ethics, and interdisciplinary applications should become more prominent. Economists should understand how automated systems reshape markets; engineers should appreciate governance and social consequences; business graduates should be equipped to evaluate both the promise and the limitations of AI.

Teachers and lecturers also need sustained professional development, practical resources, and dependable support. Curriculum reform without preparing educators is not reform; it is an announcement.

The existing workforce cannot be an afterthought. A mid-career employee displaced by automation may need a short, credible, employer-recognised route into new work — not another multi-year qualification. Training providers, universities, community colleges, and businesses should jointly develop modular programmes tied to demonstrable labour market demand. Success should be measured by completion, job placement, earnings and career progression, not enrolment alone.

The question of ownership and the AI dividend

If Jamaica chiefly imports automated platforms, displaces local workers, and sends much of the resulting profit abroad, greater efficiency need not produce a comparable improvement in household welfare. Conversely, if Jamaican entrepreneurs build competitive businesses with AI, workers acquire complementary skills and access to technology widens, the gains can be more broadly shared.

Public policy must therefore support affordable digital infrastructure, stronger local enterprise capabilities, responsible access to data and technology, and practical assistance for small and medium-sized businesses. Opportunities exist in agriculture, tourism, logistics, professional services, and public administration. The goal is not technological self-sufficiency at any cost, but a greater domestic capacity to create, adapt, and retain value.

Governance matters just as much. Systems influencing employment, education, finance, or public services need appropriate safeguards for privacy, transparency, accountability and meaningful human oversight. Public trust is not an obstacle to innovation; it is one of the conditions that makes innovation sustainable.

Turn national AI policy into measurable results

A draft national AI policy has been targeted for November 2026. That ambition is welcome, but a policy will be judged by its implementation: Who is accountable, what resources are committed, and will results improve people’s lives?

I propose a national RIPREC alignment agenda built on four commitments

1) Monitor how AI is changing employment, productivity, wages, and demand for skills, while distinguishing automation from other causes of industry decline.

2) Connect publicly supported retraining to employer-validated opportunities and published employment outcomes.

3) Help businesses move beyond purchasing AI services towards developing higher-value products and capabilities.

4) Strengthen practical support for workers whose livelihoods are disrupted.

None of this necessarily requires another large bureaucracy. It requires coordination across existing economic, educational and labour-market structures, clear responsibilities, and transparent reporting.

An annual AI and human capital alignment scorecard could provide that discipline. It should track job transitions, real earnings, productivity, digital skills, locally generated technological value, and the reach of retraining programmes. Such a scorecard would not prove that a RIPREC steady state had been reached. Its value would lie in making the promise of technology-led development measurable, visible, and open to public scrutiny.

The AI revolution will neither automatically impoverish Jamaica nor automatically enrich it. The outcome will depend on the quality of our choices. We can remain largely passive purchasers of increasingly autonomous technologies, or we can develop the skills, businesses, and governance needed to use them as instruments of national advancement.

The prophecy is not destiny. Jamaica’s task is to turn a warning into a national programme of action.

Dr Denarto Dennis is an economist, quantitative researcher, associate professor in quantitative methods and economics, and consultant statistician. His work focuses on judicial statistics, sustainable development, human capital, and data-driven economic and institutional transformation.