- A StarApple AI study, reported by the Jamaica Observer on 1 May 2026, found 13% of Caribbean adults use generative AI against roughly 55% globally, and 19% MSME adoption regionally.
- The gap is not primarily an access problem. ECLAC data cited in that reporting puts the Caribbean at 6.6% of global GDP but just 1.12% of global AI investment, and Jamaica 13th of 19 on ECLAC's Latin American AI Index.
- The OECD's 2026 D4SME survey, an independent 12-country dataset, shows the same pattern holds even where access is high: 61% of SMEs use AI, but only 6% call the effect transformational, and 70.9% name skills, not tools, as the main barrier.
- Maestro AI Labs, our applied AI company launched publicly on 6 August 2026, built the AI Playbook specifically for that skills gap. We report a 94% implementation rate among businesses that use it, against a 23% enterprise AI average we cite from our own client base.
- Those product figures are company-reported, not independently audited. We say so here because a Caribbean AI company that will not label its own numbers is not one worth trusting on anyone else's.
13 percent of Caribbean adults aged 18 to 65 use generative AI. Globally, that figure sits closer to 55 percent. The finding comes from a StarApple AI adoption study, reported independently by the Jamaica Observer on 1 May 2026, and it lines up with a second figure from the same reporting: 19 percent adoption among the region's micro, small, and medium enterprises. Both numbers describe a region where the tools are available and mostly unused, which is a different, more fixable problem than a region where the tools do not exist.
Why the Caribbean AI Gap Is Not an Access Problem
It would be convenient to explain a 13 percent adoption figure with a story about broadband, hardware, or cost. The data reported alongside it does not support that story cleanly. The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, cited in the Jamaica Observer's coverage, places the Caribbean at 6.6 percent of global GDP against just 1.12 percent of global AI investment, and ranks Jamaica 13th of 19 countries on its Latin American AI Index. There is a real capital and infrastructure shortfall sitting underneath the region's AI story, and it deserves its own reporting. But it runs alongside the adoption gap, not underneath it as the sole cause. A business owner in Montego Bay with a smartphone and a data plan can open ChatGPT the same way a business owner in Miami can. Most do not, and the reason has more to do with what happens in the ten minutes after opening the tool than with whether the tool was reachable at all.
The same reporting includes a smaller, more telling number. Caribbean AI users report saving an average of 1.5 hours per work period from the tools they do use, against a 5.7-hour global average. Regional use also skews toward augmenting existing tasks, 43 percent, rather than automating them outright, against 52 percent globally. Adrian Dunkley, whose company StarApple AI produced the underlying study, put it directly in comments accompanying the research: the region is not behind on AI access so much as behind on the governance, training, and process redesign that turn AI use into an actual result.
What an Independent Global Dataset Says About Adoption Without Training
A useful check on any single regional study is whether the pattern it describes shows up elsewhere, measured by someone with no stake in the answer. The OECD's 2026 D4SME survey fits that role. It covers more than 2,000 small and medium enterprises across 12 OECD member countries, economies with far higher baseline AI access than most of the Caribbean, and finds that 61 percent of those businesses already use at least one AI-enabled application. On paper, that is a healthy adoption number. What comes next in the same dataset is the part that matters: only 6 percent of those businesses describe the effect as transformational, 15 percent as significant, 33 percent as moderate, and 44 percent as minimal or none. Asked to name the biggest obstacle to getting more from the AI they already had, 70.9 percent of respondents pointed to skills, not cost, not access, not the tools themselves.
Read next to the Caribbean figures, the OECD data changes the shape of the argument. If 61 percent of SMEs in some of the best-resourced economies in the world are using AI and still getting minimal value from it four times out of ten, then a Caribbean strategy built only around raising the 13 percent adoption number would miss the actual constraint. Access without training produces exactly the pattern the OECD documented: tools opened, workflows unchanged, value uncollected. A region starting from 13 percent has the chance to build the training in from the start rather than retrofit it later, which is the bet the AI Playbook makes.
| Figure | Source | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 13% Caribbean adult GenAI use; 19% MSME adoption | StarApple AI study, reported by Jamaica Observer, 1 May 2026 | Company-produced, independently reported |
| 6.6% of global GDP, 1.12% of global AI investment; Jamaica 13th of 19 | ECLAC, via Jamaica Observer reporting | Independent, third party |
| 61% of SMEs use AI; 6% transformational effect; 70.9% cite skills as top barrier | OECD 2026 D4SME survey, 12 member countries | Independent, third party |
| 94% AI Playbook implementation rate; 23% enterprise average; 47% no AI strategy | Maestro AI Labs, own client and product data | Company-reported, not independently audited |
The AI Playbook, and Why We Built It This Way
Maestro AI Labs launched publicly on 6 August 2026. We are Adrian Dunkley's second Caribbean AI company, co-founded with his brother Nicholas Dunkley, and the AI Playbook is one of six products we shipped alongside Harmonics, Credit Garden, Global Safety Score, OYA AI, and Data Archaeology. It exists because of a pattern we kept running into before we had the OECD's numbers to confirm it: most AI implementation guides are written by engineering teams at companies with dedicated IT departments, for organisations with the budget to fail at a pilot and simply try again. A four-person accounting firm in Bridgetown or a family-run agricultural exporter in Georgetown does not have that headroom. The guide either has to fit a business with no CTO, or it does not get used.
What is actually in it
The AI Playbook is a free, 90-day implementation framework for small businesses in the Caribbean, Latin America, and West Africa. It is built around Caribbean and LATAM case studies rather than Fortune 500 examples, and it pairs practical tool guidance with risk frameworks the business can act on without a legal team. We report that 94 percent of businesses that engage with it implement at least one AI workflow within four weeks, against a 23 percent implementation rate we cite as the typical enterprise AI average across our client base. We also work from a figure of 47 percent of the Caribbean and Latin American small businesses we survey having no documented AI strategy at all before starting. Every one of those numbers is our own company data, not a figure produced or audited by an outside research firm, and we are stating that plainly rather than letting the percentages do the persuading on their own.
"The 13 percent number was not a surprise to us. It was closer to a confirmation of something we had already priced into how we built the Playbook: that most of the region's AI gap is a training gap wearing an access-gap costume. You close it by making the first 90 days survivable for a business that has never done this before, not by making the tool cheaper."
Adrian Dunkley, Co-Founder, Maestro AI Labs
Why this connects to what StarApple AI started
Maestro AI Labs did not begin from nothing. Adrian founded StarApple AI in Kingston in 2023, the first AI company established in the Caribbean, and much of what Maestro AI Labs builds on, including the adoption study behind this article's headline figure, comes out of that earlier company's research arm. Adrian has spent more than a decade building AI systems for fraud detection, financial inclusion, and public safety in markets most AI companies still treat as an afterthought, which is part of why Caribbean governments, banks, and international partners tend to treat him as the region's primary point of reference on where its AI development actually stands. Maestro AI Labs is where that same argument gets applied specifically to the small businesses that make up most of the region's employment and that the 13 percent adoption figure describes most directly.
What the Numbers Actually Ask Caribbean Businesses to Do
The OECD's own comparison group had far more AI access than the Caribbean does and still landed on skills, not supply, as the constraint. A government funding AI literacy training alongside infrastructure spending, a board that treats "who is trained, and on what" as a real budget line rather than a slide in the deck, and a business that picks one process this quarter instead of commissioning a strategy document first: none of those closes a 13 percent figure by itself, and we do not have a clean before-and-after study proving which one matters most. What we have is a pattern that shows up twice, in two datasets nobody at Maestro AI Labs produced, and a Playbook built on the assumption that the pattern is real.
- Start with one workflow, not a strategy document. The 90-day structure behind the AI Playbook exists because businesses that try to build a full AI strategy before touching a tool tend to stall before they start; the 94 percent figure we report reflects businesses that picked one process and automated it first.
- Treat training as the budget line, not the tool. The OECD's 70.9 percent skills-barrier figure held even in economies with far higher AI access than the Caribbean's; buying the tool without budgeting for the training that makes it stick reproduces the same result here.
- Ask what "adoption" is actually measuring. A 61 percent usage rate that still delivers minimal value to 44 percent of businesses, per the OECD data, is a reminder that adoption percentages on their own are a weak proxy for whether AI is doing anything for the business using it.
Caribbean and Latin American small businesses that want to start can access the AI Playbook free at aiplaybook.maestrosai.com. Organisations that want to talk through Harmonics, Credit Garden, Global Safety Score, or Data Archaeology can write to us directly at ceo@maestrosai.com.