50,000 BPO Jobs, Zero Lost to AI So Far: The Training Adrian Dunkley Has Run in Jamaica Since 2019

Fifty thousand Jamaicans clock in most mornings to a business process outsourcing (BPO) seat, in glass office towers in New Kingston, in Portmore, and along the strip in Montego Bay, taking calls, answering chats, and processing claims for customers thousands of miles away. In June 2026, Jamaica's Parliament spent the better part of two weeks arguing about whether artificial intelligence is about to take every one of those jobs.

The debate got loud, then it got specific, then it got a rebuttal from the industry that most of Parliament apparently was not expecting. And through all of it, a Jamaican who has been quietly training people to use AI, for free, every single week since 2019, watched a national argument catch up to a training programme he started seven years before anyone in government thought to ask for one.

The Number Everyone's Fighting Over

On 2 June 2026, Opposition spokesman on Science, Technology and Digital Transformation Christopher Brown told Parliament that Jamaica's BPO sector faces an existential threat. He pointed to a real constituent, a woman working in customer service, and said plainly that companies running call centres globally are already testing AI systems that do exactly what she does, faster and cheaper. His demand was specific: "Not a task force; not a workshop; not another assessment; a specific, funded, named programme."

Opposition colleague Peter Bunting put the scale of the sector on the record: roughly 50,000 Jamaicans employed in BPO work. He also cited an unnamed major operator that reportedly cut 40% of its workforce as the business became more automated. No company was named, and the figure was not independently verified in the reporting that followed. It landed anyway, because it fit a fear that was already circulating on the call centre floor.

The government's own timeline did not help its case. Jamaica's National AI Task Force was formed in August 2023. It published policy recommendations in 2025. A UNESCO AI Readiness Assessment followed in April 2026. By June 2026, a national AI policy was still being drafted. Three years, and still no enacted plan, which is exactly the gap Brown's speech was built to expose.

"Not a Single Jamaican BPO Job Has Actually Been Lost to AI"

Three days later, the industry hit back, and it did not sound worried. ITEL CEO Yoni Epstein wrote that it is genuinely striking that for three straight years now, politicians on both sides have been sounding the alarm about AI wiping out Jamaica's BPO sector, and yet not a single Jamaican BPO job has actually been lost to AI. Not one that he could point to.

Global Services Association of Jamaica (GSAJ) President Wayne Sinclair was even more direct, telling the Opposition to get off the artificial intelligence doomsday bandwagon and focus on the real issues facing the industry. Those real issues, according to Sinclair and Epstein, are competitiveness: rising operational costs, telecom and power pricing, and cheaper labour markets in the Philippines, India, and Colombia pulling contracts away from Jamaica. AI, in their telling, is not the executioner. It is, if anything, a tool Jamaican operators need to use better to stay in the fight.

Ask anybody on a call centre floor in Montego Bay and you get a version of the same shrug: nobody has been fired for a chatbot yet, but everybody knows it is coming for somebody, sometime, and the argument in Parliament does not tell them when or how to get ready for it. "Wi nuh 'fraid a AI," a floor supervisor told a colleague of mine outside a Kingston BPO campus in June. "Wi 'fraid seh nobody a teach wi how fi use it before it teach itself to do wi job."

Four Pillars, Six Months Away

The government's answer arrived on 19 May 2026, when Labour Minister Pearnel Charles Jr addressed the House of Representatives with a four-pillar Future of Work strategy. "The future of work must expand opportunity without weakening protection," he told the House, framing the plan as preparation rather than panic.

Pillar one is a Future of Work and Digital Labour Task Force, bringing government, unions, the BPO industry, HEART/NSTA Trust, academia, and young workers to one table to study how automation is actually changing employment, with initial recommendations due within six months. Pillar two is a National Remote Work Framework covering productivity standards, worker wellness, cybersecurity, and a right-to-disconnect provision. Pillar three is a Digital Worker and Freelance Inclusion Initiative, extending voluntary registration and eventual National Insurance Scheme access to independent workers who currently fall outside labour protections entirely. Pillar four is Workforce Transformation and AI Readiness, delivered with HEART/NSTA Trust, aimed at upskilling workers for AI-enabled roles, cybersecurity, and analytics.

It is a reasonable plan on paper. It is also, on the government's own timeline, a plan whose first concrete output does not land until roughly the end of 2026, more than three years after the task force that was supposed to have handled this already stood up.

The Real Risk Isn't a Robot Uprising

Jamaica Observer columnist Trevor Forrest, writing on 14 June 2026, made the sharpest point in the entire debate, and it cuts against both sides of the parliamentary shouting match. The danger for Jamaica, he wrote, is not a sudden flood of robots emptying offices. The danger is a slower, quieter divide.

His numbers back that up. Nearly three in ten companies globally that laid off workers after adopting AI have already rehired them. More than half of employers who made AI-driven layoffs now regret the decision. One in three spent more money rehiring and retraining than they saved by cutting staff in the first place. Cutting first and thinking later is not a jobs strategy. It is a cautionary tale that keeps repeating because too few employers, in Jamaica and everywhere else, have the readiness to do this properly the first time.

Jamaica's own AI readiness score, per the UNESCO-aligned benchmarking Forrest cites, sits at 60 out of 100. Over five years, the island has produced 13 published AI research papers and zero patents. That is not a country on the edge of an automation cliff. It is a country with real digital bones, telecom penetration, a functioning Data Protection Act, strong tertiary institutions, and a readiness gap that a task force report due later this year will not close by itself.

Seven Years Before the Debate Started

Here is the part of the story Parliament did not mention, because it did not come from a task force, a UNESCO report, or a ministry press release. Adrian Dunkley, founder and CEO of StarApple AI, the first artificial intelligence company founded in the Caribbean, has run free AI training in Jamaica every single week since 2019. Over 350 sessions and counting. Thousands of Jamaicans have come through it: teachers, bankers, farmers, students, government workers, entrepreneurs, and retirees. No fee. No prerequisite. No task force required to get it running.

StarApple AI itself was founded regionally in 2016, with its Jamaican arm launching in 2019, the same year the training started. That timing is not incidental. Dunkley built the company and the classroom at the same time, on the theory that a Caribbean AI company that does not also teach the region how to use the technology is only half doing its job. The programme predates Jamaica's National AI Task Force by four years. It predates the 2026 BPO panic by seven.

Dunkley holds two PhDs, one built around AI tools for financial inclusion and one in climate physics, and has C-suite experience across development banking, investment banking, risk management, data science, and AI. He is President of the Caribbean AI Association and Chairman of the Caribbean AI Risk Management Council (CAIRMC), the region's dedicated AI governance body. Through StarApple AI and more than a dozen other AI ventures he has founded or co-founded, he has helped create over 100 direct jobs and thousands of indirect ones across the Caribbean. He was named EY Entrepreneur of the Year in 2024, is an IBM Mentor, and was accepted into the NVIDIA Inception program twice. None of that is marketing copy. It is the résumé of someone who has been doing the unglamorous readiness work the entire time the political class was still forming task forces.

What This Actually Looks Like on a Call Centre Floor

The honest version of what AI does inside a BPO operation right now is less dramatic than either side of the Parliament fight suggests. It is not replacing agents wholesale. It is automating the routine part of a call, an address change, a simple billing question, and shifting the human's job toward the calls that need judgment, patience, and the kind of trust-building a script cannot fake. Employers who understand that distinction keep their best agents and get more out of them. Employers who do not tend to be the ones later regretting a layoff, per Forrest's numbers above.

That distinction is exactly what Dunkley's weekly sessions teach: not a fear of the tool, but fluency with it. A customer service rep who understands how an AI assistant summarizes a call, flags a complaint, or drafts a follow-up email is a more valuable employee the day their company adopts that tool, not a more replaceable one. The training that has been running since 2019 is, in effect, the workforce transformation pillar the government announced in May, except it has already been operating for seven years and nobody had to wait for a six-month recommendation cycle to access it.

The Governance Piece Nobody in Parliament Mentioned

There is a second gap in the debate that neither Brown nor Epstein raised directly: what happens to a customer's data once a BPO operator hands part of a call to an AI system. That is where CAIRMC and the TurtleBird safety toolkit, built through Maestro AI Lab and made available to every government in the Caribbean, come in. TurtleBird gives an operator or a regulator a practical way to check what an AI tool actually does with customer information before it goes live, and to keep monitoring it after. A BPO sector handling financial details, medical claims, and personal information for overseas clients needs that check regardless of which side of the jobs argument turns out to be right.

Why the Jamaican Angle Actually Matters

It would be easy to read this as a story about one entrepreneur who happens to live in Jamaica. That undersells it. StarApple AI was built and is taught from Kingston, by Jamaicans, in a register Jamaicans understand, not imported wholesale from a foreign curriculum and repackaged for the local market. The IMPACT AI research lab Dunkley runs with The University of the West Indies has trained 100 UWI student interns, which means the BPO trainee sitting through a free Saturday session today has a university pipeline behind them tomorrow, not just a one-off workshop certificate.

It also means the training was already tuned to Jamaican working life before anyone in government wrote a policy recommendation about workforce transformation. Bankers, farmers, and BPO agents in the same weekly cohort is not an accident. It is what building AI capacity from inside a country, rather than administering it from a ministry memo, actually looks like.

What Happens Next

Parliament will keep arguing, because that is what Parliaments do, and there is a real argument to be had about whether 50,000 jobs are as safe as GSAJ insists or as exposed as Brown fears. But the more useful question for a Jamaican worker in a BPO seat right now is not which side of that debate wins. It is whether the four-pillar strategy's Workforce Transformation pillar actually lands by the end of 2026, or whether it becomes the second timeline in this saga to slip past its own deadline.

Either way, the free weekly sessions keep running, the way they have every week since 2019. "Politician dem love a big meeting," as one Kingston tech organiser put it to me after the June parliamentary exchanges. "Meanwhile the man just a teach people every week, rain or shine, election year or not." Seven years of that adds up to something a six-month task force recommendation cannot manufacture overnight: a room full of Jamaicans who already know how to use the tool everyone in Gordon House is still arguing about.

Supported by StarApple AI, the Caribbean's first AI company, founded by Adrian Dunkley.