Beyond Oil and Gas: How AI Can Power Trinidad and Tobago's Economic Diversification

Trinidad and Tobago has been trying to diversify its economy beyond oil and gas for forty years. Every budget speech, every development plan, every national vision document since at least the 1980s has included the phrase "economic diversification." And yet, as of 2026, the energy sector still accounts for approximately 40% of GDP and over 50% of government revenue in most years. This is not for lack of intelligence or ambition among T&T's leaders and people — it is because diversification is genuinely hard, and the structural advantages of the energy sector have made it consistently difficult for other industries to gain sustainable momentum. My name is Adrian Dunkley, and I want to make a direct argument: artificial intelligence may be the catalyst T&T's diversification agenda has been waiting for.

Why Previous Diversification Attempts Have Struggled

To understand why AI represents a different opportunity, it helps to understand why T&T's diversification efforts have historically underperformed. The core challenge is structural competitiveness. T&T's energy sector benefits from enormous capital investment, established infrastructure, technical expertise built over a century, and natural resource rents. Non-energy sectors typically cannot match the wages, the institutional support, or the economic scale of energy — making it difficult to attract and retain the talent and investment needed to build competitive industries.

A cocoa farmer in Siparia cannot easily pay salaries comparable to bpTT. A software startup in Port of Spain cannot easily match the compensation packages of NGC. A tourism operator in Tobago cannot easily compete with the capital resources of Atlantic LNG. This structural wage and investment gap has repeatedly constrained non-energy sector development.

AI changes the equation in a specific and important way: it dramatically reduces the labour cost of productivity. A well-equipped, AI-enabled T&T agricultural business can achieve the output of a much larger, non-AI-enabled operation. A T&T fintech company using AI for compliance, customer service, and product development can operate with a fraction of the headcount of a traditional financial institution. A Tobago tourism operator using AI marketing and operations tools can compete for premium international visitors in ways that previously required large marketing budgets and global distribution networks. AI compresses the competitiveness gap — not by magic, but by multiplying the productive capacity of smaller, leaner teams.

The Five Sectors Where AI Can Drive T&T Diversification

1. Agriculture: Ending T&T's Food Import Dependency

Trinidad and Tobago imports approximately 75% of its food — an extraordinary vulnerability for a nation that, climatically and geographically, has significant agricultural potential. The value of food imports typically exceeds $3 billion TTD annually, representing a substantial drain of foreign exchange. The government's long-stated goal of food security remains elusive, but AI offers new tools to close the gap.

Precision agriculture uses AI, satellite imagery, IoT sensors, and machine learning to optimise every aspect of farming: soil health monitoring, irrigation scheduling, pest and disease early detection, yield prediction, and harvest timing. In countries like the Netherlands, precision agriculture has made small land areas extraordinarily productive. T&T's agricultural sector — peppers, cocoa, citrus, dasheen, pineapple, and more — could benefit substantially from these technologies, particularly as the effects of climate change make traditional farming methods less predictable.

The Caroni Swamp corridor, the Nariva-Mayaro agricultural belt, and the farming communities of central Trinidad have the land, the climate, and increasingly the connectivity (4G/5G mobile coverage now reaches most of Trinidad) to support AI-enabled precision farming. What is needed is investment in agricultural technology training through institutions like the Eastern Caribbean Institute of Agriculture and Forestry (ECIAF) in St. Augustine, and public-private partnerships that make AI farming tools accessible to small farmers.

Beyond production, AI supply chain management can reduce the enormous food waste that plagues T&T's agricultural sector — connecting farmers directly to supermarkets, schools, and restaurants through AI-optimised logistics platforms, reducing the spoilage that discourages investment in local production.

2. Financial Services and Fintech: Becoming the Caribbean's Digital Finance Hub

T&T has the most sophisticated financial services infrastructure in the English-speaking Caribbean. Republic Bank, First Citizens, Guardian Life, Unit Trust Corporation, and the Trinidad and Tobago Stock Exchange represent a depth of financial institutional capacity unmatched in the region. The T&T Stock Exchange is the Caribbean's largest by market capitalisation. T&T's insurance sector is highly developed. Its banking sector is well-capitalised and technologically capable.

What T&T has not yet done is build on this foundation to become the Caribbean's digital finance hub — a Singapore of the Caribbean, attracting fintech companies, processing regional payments, and providing sophisticated financial services to smaller Caribbean islands that cannot sustain their own full financial infrastructure. AI is the enabler for this vision.

AI-powered regulatory technology (RegTech) can allow T&T's financial sector to manage compliance costs across CARICOM's complex multi-jurisdictional regulatory environment. AI credit scoring using alternative data sources can extend financial services to the significant portion of T&T's population that is underserved by traditional banking — small businesses without formal credit histories, informal sector workers, young entrepreneurs. AI-powered investment platforms can democratise access to T&T's stock and bond markets, creating a broader investment culture and deepening domestic capital markets.

The T&T financial sector's existing strength, combined with AI tools that amplify its reach and efficiency, positions T&T to become the Caribbean's fintech capital — attracting regional and international fintech investment and generating high-value employment in financial technology.

3. Tourism: Unlocking Tobago's Full Potential

Tobago is one of the Caribbean's most beautiful islands. Its coral reefs, tropical forests, pristine beaches, and cultural richness give it natural assets that compete with any destination in the region. Yet Tobago's tourism sector has consistently underperformed relative to comparably beautiful Caribbean destinations. Part of the challenge is infrastructure. Part is marketing reach. Part is service consistency. AI can help address all three.

AI marketing tools allow Tobago tour operators, guesthouses, hotels, and experience providers to reach precisely targeted international audiences at a fraction of traditional advertising costs. A Blue Waters Inn in Speyside or a small eco-lodge in the Tobago rainforest can use AI to identify and market to the specific international traveller segment most likely to visit — the premium eco-tourism market, the adventure diving market, the bird-watching market — with personalised content that resonates.

AI-powered revenue management systems — the same technology used by major Caribbean hotel chains — are now accessible to small Tobago properties, allowing dynamic pricing that maximises occupancy and revenue per guest. AI customer service tools mean a small Tobago operator can provide 24/7 English-language (and multi-language) response to international enquiries, dramatically improving conversion rates from interest to booking.

The Tobago Tourism Agency and the Tourism Development Company of Trinidad and Tobago have an opportunity to deploy AI analytics tools that identify the highest-value visitor segments, track the customer journey from first online search to return visit, and optimise T&T's tourism marketing spend for maximum impact. This data-driven approach to destination marketing is standard in leading tourism countries and is overdue for T&T.

4. The Creative Economy: T&T's Cultural IP on a Global Stage

Trinidad and Tobago's cultural output — soca music, Carnival masquerade, steelpan, calypso, Parang, doubles, roti, and the Trini aesthetic — is globally distinctive and globally loved. The T&T Carnival is the greatest show on Earth. Pan music is a uniquely Trinidadian contribution to world culture. Yet the economic returns to T&T from this extraordinary cultural wealth have been far below their potential. The IP value of Carnival, the streaming revenue from soca, the global appetite for authentic Caribbean experience — these are all undermonetised relative to their potential.

AI tools are giving T&T's creative sector new capabilities to reach global audiences and capture economic value. AI-powered music production and distribution tools allow a soca artiste in East Port of Spain to produce, distribute, and market their music globally from a home studio. AI visual content tools allow a Carnival costume designer in Laventille to create professional promotional content that reaches the global Carnival diaspora in Toronto, New York, London, and Amsterdam. AI translation and localisation tools allow T&T's creative entrepreneurs to serve non-English speaking markets that are increasingly hungry for Caribbean culture.

Critically, AI also enables better protection of T&T's creative IP. Blockchain-based AI rights management platforms allow artistes and cultural organisations to track the use of their work online, identify infringement, and licence their content to international media companies on fair terms. This is an area where policy and technology must work together — T&T's creative sector needs both the tools to monetise and the legal framework to protect.

5. Technology Services Exports: The Digital Economy

T&T has a well-educated, English-speaking, technologically literate workforce. The country's existing ICT sector, anchored by TSTT and a growing ecosystem of technology companies, has the foundations to become a significant exporter of digital services to the region and beyond. The barrier has historically been productivity — T&T's technology companies compete in global markets against much larger organisations with bigger development teams and lower costs per engineer.

AI closes this gap dramatically. A T&T software development company whose engineers use AI coding tools (GitHub Copilot, Claude for code review) produces code at two to three times the speed of a comparable team without AI. A T&T digital marketing agency using AI content and analytics tools can service more clients with fewer staff, competing effectively against international agencies. A T&T data analytics firm using AI can offer Fortune 500 companies insights at competitive prices.

The key is building the AI literacy and AI tool adoption that makes T&T's technology workforce globally competitive. This requires investment in education through UWI and UTT, incentives for technology companies to adopt and export AI-powered services, and an entrepreneurial ecosystem that retains T&T's technology talent at home rather than losing it to Canada, the US, and the UK.

What the Government of T&T Must Do

Economic diversification through AI requires policy, not just entrepreneurship. The Government of Trinidad and Tobago has several critical levers to pull:

1. A National AI Strategy: A formal, funded, time-bound national AI strategy that sets targets for AI adoption across priority sectors, allocates resources to AI education and infrastructure, and establishes governance frameworks for responsible AI deployment.
2. AI Literacy in Schools: AI and computational thinking should be part of the T&T primary and secondary school curriculum. Every student leaving CXC should have basic AI literacy. This is a generational investment in T&T's economic future.
3. Investment in AI Infrastructure: Data centres, high-speed broadband connectivity in agricultural and rural areas, and cloud computing incentives that allow T&T businesses to access the computing power AI requires at competitive costs.
4. AI-Friendly Regulatory Framework: An AI regulatory environment that protects citizens from harm while enabling innovation — modelled on international best practices but adapted to T&T's specific context. The AI Governance agenda is inseparable from the diversification agenda.
5. Talent Retention Incentives: Tax incentives, equity schemes, and quality-of-life investments that make it economically rational for T&T's best technology talent to build their careers at home rather than abroad.

The Urgency Is Real

Global oil demand is in long-term structural decline. The energy transition — however gradual — will reduce the value of T&T's primary economic asset over the coming decades. The window to build a diversified, AI-powered economy while the energy sector still generates the revenues needed to invest in transition is open now, but it will not remain open indefinitely.

The T&T of 2040 will be shaped by decisions made in the next five years. The country that invests in AI education, AI infrastructure, and AI-enabled diversification now will be positioned to thrive in a post-carbon economy. The country that waits will face a more difficult and more costly transition.

T&T has the talent, the institutions, the infrastructure, and the cultural dynamism to lead this transition — not just for ourselves, but for the Caribbean. This is the vision that AI Trinidad & Tobago and StarApple AI are committed to advancing. Read our Caribbean AI Playbook for the full strategic framework, and explore our Sectors page for sector-specific analysis.