St. Vincent chamber highlights AI opportunities for Caribbean workforce

Business leaders in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines have, in a move of breathtaking optimism, urged Caribbean countries to 'accelerate workforce training in AI' as DeVry University expands its Bridge to Brilliance initiative across the region. This is, presumably, the same AI that is currently busy replacing call centre workers in Jamaica, threatening the business process outsourcing sector that employs hundreds of thousands across the Caribbean. The chamber's vision appears to be that the region's workforce should leapfrog from low-wage data entry to... slightly higher-wage prompt engineering, before that too gets automated.

DeVry's Bridge to Brilliance, meanwhile, is a for-profit foray into what one might call 'hope capitalism' — training workers for a future that tech billionaires assure us is coming, while conveniently ignoring that the same billionaires are building the machines that will render that training obsolete. The initiative's name is a masterpiece of marketing: who wouldn't want to cross a bridge to brilliance? The subtext, however, suggests the bridge may be a toll bridge, and the brilliance may be a mirage. The chamber's call for 'accelerated training' is the kind of well-meaning gesture that history will record as either visionary or tragically naïve — and given how these things tend to go, the smart money is on the latter.

And yet, there is something almost touching about the faith placed in a DeVry programme to save the Caribbean from the AI disruption that the same DeVry is profiting from. The chamber might be better advised to investigate basic income or climate resilience, but those don't come with a handy branded initiative and a tuition fee. The Bridge to Brilliance will no doubt produce a cohort of graduates who can explain transformer architecture, only to find that the transformer has already taken the job they were training for. But at least they'll understand why.