90-Day Progress & Impact Report
Building agentic AI infrastructure for the Caribbean and distributed markets globally
Figures as at 23 August 2026 — day 90 of an ongoing programme
Ninety days, in numbers
Cohort 1 of the Future Caribbean Agentic AI Buildathon. The application window closed on 31 August 2026, eight days after this reporting period, so final figures may rise.
An operating international ecosystem
Future Caribbean launched on 26 May 2026 during IDB Invest Sustainability Week in Barbados, with founding partners IDB Invest, ACTAI Global and ACTAI Advisors. The proposition: bring Caribbean and global talent, technology, institutions and capital together to build deployable Agentic AI systems around the region's most important economic opportunities.
Ninety days on, it is an operating international ecosystem — and the first Buildathon is still running. To date it has drawn 236 team applications from 39 countries, comprising 450 builders, with the window open to 31 August. Launched with 40 places, the programme secured additional resources so that all 236 teams are building. Supporting them are 49 partner organisations and a 159-strong network of judges and advisors spanning the World Bank, IDB, UNDP, Google DeepMind, Intel AI Cloud, Citigroup, DRW and ANSA McAL.
A continuous digital programme runs alongside the build: 34 events so far, 1,016+ hours watched, 541 Tapin members, and 7,014 people across owned channels.
With teams now building, Future Caribbean is moving from mobilisation into validation, deployment and capital formation.
A region built around one question
Can Agentic AI provide a new coordination layer for distributed economies?
The Caribbean is globally connected but operationally distributed — different governments, regulators, legal systems, currencies, central banks, procurement systems and datasets across each territory. That creates friction in payments, healthcare, property, disaster response, transport and trade.
The region is an unusually good place to answer that question: 43 million people, among the most climate-vulnerable geographies on earth, concentrating nearly every category of cross-border coordination problem found in far larger economies.
The distinction matters. Conventional software automates a task inside one system; an agentic system can observe, decide and act across systems on an ongoing basis. A region whose central difficulty is coordination across boundaries is precisely where systems that act across boundaries generate outsized returns.
Future Caribbean therefore treats the Caribbean not as a market for imported technology, but as a place from which globally relevant technology is built.
Each track is a coordination problem
Teams build against a named failure of coordination in the region's economy — not a generic hackathon brief.
| # | Track | Core coordination problem |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Finance, Payments & MSME Capital | Multiple currencies, regulators and banking systems |
| 02 | Healthcare Systems & Delivery | Fragmented records; specialist access; cross-border referral |
| 03 | Tourism & Transportation | Intra-regional connectivity, scheduling, capacity matching |
| 04 | Climate Risk & Disaster Coordination | Multi-jurisdiction prediction, allocation and response |
| 05 | The Electron Economy | Generation, storage, grid and energy transition |
| 06 | Ocean Systems & Blue Economy | Marine data, conservation, fisheries, maritime awareness |
| 07 | Food Systems & Supply Chains | Import dependence, logistics, yield and traceability |
| 08 | AI for the Arts | IP protection, production, distribution |
| 09 | Real Estate & Development | Title, transaction capacity, capital velocity, approvals |
| 10 | Open Track | Cross-cutting opportunities |
What the first 90 days show
Talent is present and mobilisable
Demand ran at nearly six times the original capacity — 236 team applications against 40 planned places.
The region attracts world-class resources
Frontier model providers, GPU platforms, a global exchange, a multilateral bank and a Big Four strategy practice all committed to a first cohort.
The binding constraint has shifted
From talent and technology to deployment: operating environments, data, procurement pathways and capital, on terms that make building for the public sector economically rational.
49 partner organisations
Capital, compute, networks, domain expertise, market access and deployment pathways.
Presenting partners
Technology
Investor, venture and capital
Institutional, government and development
Foundations and impact
Ecosystem, community and media
Industry and track partners
US$70,000+ in prizes and opportunities
Compute is provisioned for inference — running agentic systems in operation — rather than training, reflecting the emphasis on deployable systems.
| Component | Value | Provider |
|---|---|---|
| Cash prize pool | US$50,000 | Prize partners |
| AI deployment machines | US$20,000 | Other World Computing |
| H200-class inference compute | In kind | Nebius, Highrise, Impala |
| Model and API credits | In kind | MiniMax, Shogo, NoInfra and others |
| Incubator scholarships | In kind | DMZ via Cayman Enterprise City |
| Mentorship, partner perks, market access | In kind | Ecosystem partners |
| Final showcase at the New York Stock Exchange | — | NYSE |
Where the programme stands
The stages marked in progress are where Cohort 1 is today.
Rolling review against a published rubric
Submissions are assessed on deployability, technical architecture, agentic workflow, business model and go-to-market strategy — reviewed as they arrive, not in a single post-deadline round.
A shared rubric across all tracks
Every submission is scored against the same published criteria — deployability, technical architecture, agentic workflow, business model and go-to-market strategy.
Two-person verification of final scoring
No single reviewer determines an outcome; final scores are verified independently.
A 48-hour freeze before announcement
Results are locked ahead of publication, so what is announced is what was scored.
The Founding 1000
159 named judges, advisors, members and volunteers as at 23 August 2026, and still growing. A 236-team cohort across ten tracks cannot be judged credibly by a small panel — the size of the network is what makes track-level expertise and two-person verification achievable.
Covered across eight territories and the international press
Future Caribbean's Global AI Movement Accelerates with Inaugural Agentic AI Assembly
Read the story →Future Caribbean's Global AI Movement Accelerates with Inaugural Agentic AI Assembly, Recruitment Continues Worldwide
Read the story →Future Caribbean's Global AI Movement
Read the story →Future Caribbean launches Agentic AI Buildathon
Read the story →Future Caribbean's Founder On Why Two of AI's Fastest-Growing Markets Are Being Overlooked
Read the story →Future Caribbean: Shaping the region's AI landscape
Read the story →Three routes for corporates and institutions
Much of the value is what partners find in each other — a payments company, a development bank, a GPU provider and a national export agency have few natural occasions to be in the same room.
Membership
Contribute expertise, networks and people; nominate specialists to advise builders or join the Founding 1000; gain visibility across the ten tracks.
Track sponsorship
Help define the challenge in your sector, contribute the domain knowledge that shapes what teams build, and see the resulting systems first. The most direct route for an organisation with a specific operational problem.
Future Caribbean Partner
Full partnership, carrying access to the Digital Partner Lounges and curated introductions across the partner network — 49 organisations spanning multilateral finance, frontier AI, capital markets, regional government and sector operators.
Talk to us about Cohort 2
Partnership enquiries go to lily@futurecaribbean.com. Experts and industry leaders can join the Founding 1000 as judges, advisors, members or volunteers.
Figures as at 23 August 2026. PDF · 28 pages · 5 MB. The full report carries the complete judges and advisors roster, session-level watch time, the channel breakdown and applications by territory.