JBDC and Amber Group urge Jamaican MSMEs to digitise before adopting AI

Jamaican micro, small and medium-sized enterprises need clearer technology roadmaps if they are to compete and grow, speakers said at a JMMB thought leadership breakfast that framed an enterprise-focused discussion on adaptation and scale.

Harold Davis, acting chief executive of the Jamaica Business Development Corporation (JBDC), said a situation analysis found only 32 per cent of MSMEs were using technology in day-to-day operations, and that most of that activity centred on social media. With European Union support over the past two years, JBDC is pushing to lift that share toward an ambitious 60 to 70 per cent of MSMEs using technology within three years.

Ambassador Dashant Savadia, chief executive of the Amber Group, argued that modernisation is no longer optional. Industries, he said, will not look in two years the way they did even a year ago. Firms must decide how quickly to automate, and should repair broken processes before placing artificial intelligence on top of them.

Davis cautioned against a one-size-fits-all approach. Technology, he said, should act as an accelerator: businesses must first name the problem they aim to solve, because speeding up a flawed system only amplifies the flaw.

Savadia stressed readiness to scale, starting with data. Jamaican firms, he said, do not lack data so much as they struggle with where it sits; consolidating information is an early priority. He also said organisations cannot automate what they cannot describe. When invoicing or other routines live only in one person’s memory and change daily, there is nothing stable to encode. Writing down how work actually happens exposes redundancy and bottlenecks, where early gains often appear.

AI’s value, he added, comes from linking the business end to end so one signal can move from inventory through procurement to sales. Governance must be clear: who owns the output, who reviews it, what the escalation path is when something fails, and where human accountability sits. Scaling with AI, he said, is as much change management and trust as it is technology.

The useful question, Savadia argued, is not simply how to adopt AI, but whether a firm is digitised, documented, integrated and governed. With those four foundations in place, AI can sit on top and help the business grow. People remain central, he said: AI will not take jobs; roles will be lost mainly by those unwilling to adopt it.