From Carnival to Claude: The Caribbean’s Next Wave of Builders
Justin Elliott joined Future Caribbean to talk about Agentic AI. His most compelling message was about knowing a problem well enough to build something people need.

Essays, briefings, and post-mortems from the team running the Caribbean's first agentic AI buildathon. We build in public.
Justin Elliott joined Future Caribbean to talk about Agentic AI. His most compelling message was about knowing a problem well enough to build something people need.


Sigma Prime co-founder Mehdi Zerouali tells Caribbean builders the real risk of vibe-coded software is not bad code — it is what nobody thought to ask an AI to protect.

Inside Future Caribbean's Cinematic AI Video & Visual Storytelling Workshop with Dallas and Sharon of Mercury Tech — creative direction, emotional storytelling and why founders should stop romanticizing their product.

Inside Future Caribbean's first Electron Economy brainstorming session — intelligent grids, renewable energy, hydrogen storage, autonomous microgrids and new models for community infrastructure.

Inside Future Caribbean's Agentic AI Open Track brainstorming call with IDB Invest's Christopher Burt and Exodus Capital's Chjango Unchained — employment, healthcare, travel, physical AI and the capital needed to scale.

Inside Future Caribbean's workshop with longevity scientist Jessy Abed — health span over lifespan, why more data isn't better healthcare, and what agentic AI could unlock for prevention in the Caribbean.

Inside Future Caribbean's Agentic AI for Trade & Regional Commerce session with Automotive Art's Dereck Foster and EY Parthenon's Samantha Conyers — customs complexity, logistics intelligence, product discovery and trusted digital coordination.

OWC founder Lawrence O'Connor on the hidden costs of cloud dependency — on-premise AI infrastructure, orchestration, tokenization, edge AI and what data sovereignty could mean for the Caribbean.

Michele Romanow on why building is no longer the moat — distribution, revenue as customer feedback, the “four days in one” principle, and how Caribbean founders can use small markets to build big companies.

Inside the Future Caribbean brainstorming session on Agentic AI for Tourism — airlift mismatches, direct bookings, fragmented data, and the case for a connected regional tourism economy.

A Future Caribbean fireside chat with David Doss on what happens after the prototype — defensible IP, realistic revenue math, deployable first products and why distribution now matters more than the build.

Inside a Future Caribbean session with the UNDP's Eric Loubaud and builder Nick Hurley — localized models, mesh networks, digital twins and data sovereignty as the missing coordination layer for Caribbean disaster response.

Inside a Future Caribbean session on PropTech, eConveyancing and circular economics — why the region can't tokenize a broken system, and how Agentic AI could turn nine-month property transactions into digital infrastructure.

Inside Future Caribbean's Agentic AI for Healthcare session — medication safety, FHIR interoperability across borders, voice-driven clinical documentation, and why adoption, not technology, is the hardest problem.

Creator and strategist Rashida Denbow on storytelling, pitching and social media for Caribbean founders — the four doorways to attention and the human → practical → technical framework.

Builders from WAM, Naytive, Kori, Smarter Partner and Activate.io on fragmented financial infrastructure, stablecoins as practical rails, cross-border investing, community savings, and agentic AI as the coordination layer.

Coral Vita, Ocean Currency Network, Hub Culture, the Caribbean Biodiversity Fund and Permacity on restoration economies, sargassum, and building agentic AI for the blue economy.

Google DeepMind Senior Scientist Lucio Dery on continual learning, modular agents, and why emerging markets shouldn't copy Silicon Valley's AI playbook — they should build for constraint.

Economist Marla Dukharan on extractive economic legacies, the cost of fragmentation, and why the next generation of Caribbean companies should be regional by design from day one.

Andela and Flutterwave co-founder Iyinoluwa "E" Aboyeji on talent pipelines, learning by building, and why local problems in small markets can become global companies.

Google DeepMind research scientist Lucio Dery on why the Caribbean should not try to reproduce Silicon Valley's AI infrastructure — and why constraint, context and continual learning may matter more than scale.

Inside the Future Caribbean WhatsApp chat: 729 members, 4,971 messages, 86 days — and what happens when builders scattered across 39 countries find out they were never building alone.

OllyGarden CEO Juraci Paixão Kröhling on telemetry that is actually useful: Insights for spotting cost and noise, Rose for reviewing instrumentation and catching PII in logs, and open-source OpenTelemetry skills for AI coding agents.

Inside the Giotto.ai onboarding session: a Swiss reasoning model that runs on a single GPU, no per-token billing, and free API access for Future Caribbean builders during the buildathon.

Colin Lowenberg walks buildathon teams through Nebius Token Factory: picking models by task, connecting coding agents with Kimi Relay, real-time web search, cloud sandboxes, and $50 in free credits.

NoInfra founder Nikhil Tayal on one-click agent deployment, agent memory, built-in email and wallets, ~100 integrations, and $10,000 in inference credits for Future Caribbean builders.

Blue Mahoe Capital's David Mullings on trading scarcity for abundance, climate and housing opportunities, the region's data gap, founder-market fit, and building investment bridges between global capital and Caribbean assets.

Alejandro Lopez of Highrise and Bar Yochai of Impala on Hut 8's pivot from Bitcoin mining to digital infrastructure, and what compute and API access mean for buildathon teams.

Daniel Shi on MiniMax's foundation models, 500 token plans for buildathon teams, routing Cursor or Claude Code to MiniMax endpoints, 512K-1M context windows, and planning before you code.

Founder Lily Dash recounts a conversation with Dr. Ralph Chami — former IMF mission chief — that confirmed the Caribbean is sitting on billions in natural assets it has never monetized, and why the region's future comes down to a single word.

Six weeks after launching the Future Caribbean WhatsApp community, founder Lily Dash reflects on the 400+ builders, judges, advisors and partners who are quietly turning a group chat into an ecosystem.
Reflections on a conversation between Marla Dukharan and Keeghan Patrick during Future Caribbean's first advisory calls — on Caribbean capital markets, GDP vs. quality of life, and why ideas often need the nth person to push on the door.
A few weeks ago, Future Caribbean did not exist. Today it has partners across the region, global advisors, venture capital, and builders worldwide — all converging on one question: can the Caribbean build the board to ride the Agentic AI wave?

Founders, builders, and members of the Caribbean diaspora joined Future Caribbean's first global orientation call, signaling a fast-forming community around open-source Agentic AI.
At The Possibilities Summit in Barbados, Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley made one thing clear: for small states, standing still is the real risk. A dispatch on adaptation, urgency, and the Caribbean's next move.
At The Possibilities Summit in Barbados, Export Barbados CEO Mark Hill argued the world is entering an era where intelligence itself is being industrialized — and small states with vision can punch far above their population size.
Forty million people across fifteen jurisdictions. One coordination opportunity the rest of the world is about to face. This is where agentic AI gets tested against the real world.
Tourism, financial, healthcare, disaster, energy, blue economy, trade, arts, real estate, intelligence — plus an open track. Here is what we are actually asking teams to build.
Not chatbots. Not RPA with a face. We mean systems that act on the world, take economic risk, and can be held accountable for outcomes. Here is the line we are holding.