A call is be­ing made for the Caribbean’s bright­est minds in the sphere of tech­nol­o­gy to come to­geth­er to help the re­gion achieve its true po­ten­tial.

At the cen­tre of this push is Lily Dash, a Bar­ba­di­an-based tech en­tre­pre­neur, lawyer, and dig­i­tal cre­ator.

She has cre­at­ed Fu­ture Caribbean, a plat­form de­signed to har­ness the re­gion’s next gen­er­a­tion of en­tre­pre­neurs, in­no­va­tors and cre­atives for the glob­al AI and dig­i­tal econ­o­my.

“Fu­ture Caribbean is a glob­al agen­tic AI build-a-thon, so it’s a glob­al call for agen­tic tal­ent, AI tal­ent,” Dash ex­plained in an in­ter­view with the Busi­ness Guardian on Mon­day. She stressed that the plat­form is fo­cussed on po­si­tion­ing the Caribbean as a proac­tive builder in emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies rather than just a pas­sive con­sumer of the tech­nol­o­gy while lag­ging be­hind eco­nom­i­cal­ly.

In a meet­ing with tech en­thu­si­asts at The Worx, Wood­brook on Mon­day, Dash lament­ed that the Caribbean has strug­gled to en­hance its pro­duc­tiv­i­ty de­spite hav­ing new tools to over­come tra­di­tion­al bu­reau­crat­ic hur­dles in the re­gion.

“We’re op­er­at­ing way un­der our po­ten­tial. The Caribbean is a great op­por­tu­ni­ty re­gion, and we are op­er­at­ing at a frag­ment of our po­ten­tial. There’s glob­al cap­i­tal on the side­lines, on the out­skirts of the re­gion, just wait­ing to come in, but it can’t come in be­cause it can’t come in­to dys­func­tion,” she said, not­ing that AI-de­vel­oped tech so­lu­tions can be built for many of the ma­jor in­dus­tries of the Caribbean

“So think like agen­tic AI for tourism, agen­tic AI for the green en­er­gy, agen­tic AI for the blue econ­o­my and the oceans, agen­tic AI for health­care, dis­as­ter co­or­di­na­tion, mu­sic, and me­dia. And when I say agen­tic AI, it’s re­al­ly like smart sys­tems that self-ex­e­cute, that com­press time,” she said, “In the past, it would have cost us mil­lions and mil­lions and mil­lions of dol­lars to build these sys­tems, but now we can de­sign them in a week­end and build them in a week­end for pen­nies on the dol­lar com­pared to what it would have cost us be­fore. So, we are bring­ing to­geth­er a crit­i­cal mass of glob­al and re­gion­al ca­pac­i­ty. “

In March, while ad­dress­ing the Pub­lic Sec­tor Fo­rum, Guardian Group vice pres­i­dent ESG Shinelle Grant–Sealey ex­plained the po­ten­tial for a cru­cial pub­lic-pri­vate part­ner­ship based on da­ta shar­ing for dis­as­ter man­age­ment and cli­mate re­silience strate­gies in the Caribbean.

Dash ex­plained that a tech so­lu­tion built by Caribbean minds could be the miss­ing link in that re­gard.

“Imag­ine dis­as­ter co­or­di­na­tion, like the next gen­er­a­tion of dis­as­ter co­or­di­na­tion is go­ing to be able to look at the prop­er­ties be­fore­hand, util­is­ing satel­lite im­agery, look at the prop­er­ties the day af­ter, be able to de­ter­mine the size of that prop­er­ty and the ma­te­r­i­al that that prop­er­ty was built from, and be able to de­ter­mine the re­place­ment cost or the restora­tion cost of that prop­er­ty in re­al time,” she said.

Sim­i­lar­ly, she felt the re­gion’s is­sues with food se­cu­ri­ty al­so could be ad­dressed if the tech­nol­o­gy were ap­plied.

“Think about food se­cu­ri­ty. So, most of our food in the Caribbean is brought in from the US, 80 per cent, and why is that? It’s be­cause it’s eas­i­er to co­or­di­nate an or­der from the US than it is to co­or­di­nate an or­der from Guyana and Do­mini­ca, and oth­er places, and it’s more re­li­able,” she said. “So how do we use tech­nol­o­gy to help us co­or­di­nate that at scale to cre­ate smart sys­tems for food se­cu­ri­ty and food sys­tems. So the tech­nol­o­gy, we’re a unique po­si­tion in time, be­cause the tech­nol­o­gy is now so ac­ces­si­ble to us. All of these mod­els are so avail­able- like, I’m sure you’re us­ing AI on a reg­u­lar ba­sis; every­body can see the val­ue is that it’s ac­ces­si­ble.”

Dash, who had her tech awak­en­ing by dis­cov­er­ing cryp­to in­vest­ments while study­ing law at Hugh Wood­ing Law School in Trinidad, said there was ev­i­dence of vast tal­ent in tech across the re­gion in some of the biggest com­pa­nies around the world.

“We’re tap­ping in­to a lot of the tech­ni­cal tal­ent in the Caribbean as well. If we look un­der the hood of any large tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny in the world, whether that’s Nvidia, whether that’s Face­book, whether that’s Google, you’re go­ing to find a Trinida­di­an, you’re go­ing to find a Ja­maican, you’re go­ing to find a Bar­ba­di­an. We have a lot of our tal­ent work­ing at some of the largest tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies in the world, and they’re sign­ing up to be ad­vi­sors and to help ad­vise these com­pa­nies that will come out of this.”

Fu­ture Caribbean has on­ly come to life in the past three months, but Dash said the ini­tial re­sponse has been ex­treme­ly pos­i­tive as she has seen en­thu­si­asm from not just in­no­va­tors but the pri­vate sec­tor as well.

She said, “The whole ini­tia­tive is 12 weeks old, re­al­ly, six weeks pub­lic and six weeks pri­vate, 12 weeks, and in those 12 weeks, we have just amassed sup­port. I haven’t even de­vel­oped a pitch deck for this. Peo­ple are just like, I’m on board, re­sources. I’m in for this. We raised US$70,000 in cash and prizes, all just like do­nat­ed by the pri­vate sec­tor in the Caribbean, and al­so some al­lies from over­seas.”

She ex­plained that T&T in par­tic­u­lar, had shown ma­jor in­ter­est in the ini­tia­tive.

“Just a few days ago, I checked the met­rics on this, and the ma­jor­i­ty—the num­ber one source of site traf­fic was Trinidad,” she added

Dash ex­plained that Fu­ture Caribbean was al­so get­ting feed­back from promi­nent re­gion­al voic­es, such as econ­o­mists Mar­la Dukaran and Dr Justin Ram, to serve as ad­vi­sors.

She stressed that en­tre­pre­neur­ship re­mained cru­cial to de­vel­op­ment in the re­gion as most of the ma­jor glob­al economies and emerg­ing com­pa­nies have been born out of an in­de­pen­dent dri­ve.

“It’s the en­tre­pre­neurs that did that in the US. It’s the en­tre­pre­neurs that did that, and it’s the en­tre­pre­neurs that are go­ing to do it here,” she said, adding that Fu­ture Caribbean aimed to em­pow­er them to build “cat­e­go­ry-defin­ing com­pa­nies,” that can con­nect to glob­al mar­kets, by­pass­ing tra­di­tion­al gov­ern­ment-led in­te­gra­tion bar­ri­ers.