An­drea Perez Sobers

Caribbean coun­tries risk be­ing left be­hind if they con­tin­ue to treat ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence as a talk­ing point in­stead of a de­vel­op­ment pri­or­i­ty, ac­cord­ing to Lib­er­ty Caribbean CEO Inge Smidts.

Mark­ing this year’s In­ter­na­tion­al Girls in ICT Day, Smidts said the re­gion has to move quick­ly from ex­per­i­men­ta­tion to re­al-world use.

“AI must be­come a re­gion­al de­vel­op­ment pri­or­i­ty to un­lock new pos­si­bil­i­ties across our economies. This can­not be some­thing we ob­serve from the side­lines,” she said.

Her warn­ing comes as Lib­er­ty Caribbean, op­er­a­tor of Flow, Lib­er­ty Busi­ness and BTC, push­es for faster up­take of AI tools across busi­ness and so­ci­ety.

Smidts ar­gued that ac­cess to tech­nol­o­gy is no longer enough, and that gov­ern­ments and com­pa­nies need to show mea­sur­able gains from dig­i­tal in­vest­ment.

“We must move be­yond sim­ply pro­vid­ing ac­cess and fo­cus on en­abling re­al, mea­sur­able out­comes,” she said, point­ing to the need for skills, tools and op­por­tu­ni­ties that trans­late in­to pro­duc­tiv­i­ty.

She added that coun­tries which ap­ply AI re­spon­si­bly, and in­clude more peo­ple in the process, will be bet­ter placed to grow.

The is­sue of in­clu­sion fea­tured heav­i­ly in this year’s ac­tiv­i­ties, held un­der the theme “AI for De­vel­op­ment: Girls Shap­ing the Dig­i­tal Fu­ture.”

Flow Trinidad part­nered with re­gion­al stake­hold­ers on the ‘Tech4Girls: Make AI Work for You’ ini­tia­tive, tar­get­ing young women across Trinidad and To­ba­go and the wider Caribbean.

The two-day hy­brid pro­gramme ex­posed par­tic­i­pants to emerg­ing AI con­cepts, in­clud­ing Re­trieval-Aug­ment­ed Gen­er­a­tion (RAG), while al­so fo­cus­ing on lead­er­ship, brand­ing and dig­i­tal re­silience.

Rober­ta Nor­man-Reverand, di­rec­tor of tech­nol­o­gy op­er­a­tions at Flow, told par­tic­i­pants they have a role to play in shap­ing the sec­tor.

“You are not here by ac­ci­dent. You are here be­cause the fu­ture is be­ing built right now, and you be­long at the cen­ter of it,” she said.

Lib­er­ty Caribbean said its broad­er strat­e­gy is to build out con­nec­tiv­i­ty while al­so de­vel­op­ing lo­cal tal­ent pipelines, par­tic­u­lar­ly among women and un­der­served com­mu­ni­ties.

Smidts said the re­gion’s next phase of growth will de­pend on how well it con­verts dig­i­tal ac­cess in­to eco­nom­ic out­put, warn­ing that de­lay will car­ry a cost.

“We must build this fu­ture in­ten­tion­al­ly, with full rep­re­sen­ta­tion of our so­ci­eties at the cen­tre,” she said.