Kelly Ho -Sang

Kelly Ho-Sang is the Founder and Principal Consultant of Style Connoisseur Marketing, where she helps organizations bridge the gap between strategy and execution through marketing operations, project management, and business transformation. Her career spans integrated marketing at Resorts World New York City, experiential marketing with 160over90, and consulting across business operations and organizational growth.

Today, Kelly works alongside the leadership team at Carol's Auto Supplies, a leading Caribbean heavy-duty truck parts supplier, where she supports operational transformation through recruitment, inventory management, software implementation, and process improvement. This hands-on experience has fueled her interest in responsible artificial intelligence and its potential to strengthen supply chains, improve operational efficiency, and drive sustainable business growth across the Caribbean.

Through the EthicaAI Caribbean Fellowship, Kelly hopes to develop practical, ethical, and scalable AI solutions that empower Caribbean businesses to adopt AI responsibly while building more resilient, efficient, and future-ready operations.

Caribbean AI policy should be centred around AI literacy, digital transformation and responsible adoption, particularly for SMEs and the workforce. AI education should be treated as basic business infrastructure, with literacy introduced through schools and workforce-development programmes while SMEs receive practical support to digitize their records, processes and operations. Tax credits could incentivize digital transformation, but simply purchasing a ChatGPT subscription should not qualify; businesses should demonstrate meaningful implementation, employee training and measurable operational improvements. Responsible adoption must also include protections for data privacy, transparency, bias and the use of a person’s image, voice, likeness or personal information. Implementation should begin with a small SME pilot that measures whether participating businesses save time, improve productivity, reduce operating costs, increase revenue or strengthen their digital capabilities. Rather than presenting the proposal as another “AI bill,” it should be positioned around economic growth, stronger SMEs, workforce readiness, productivity and Caribbean competitiveness. AI may be widely available, but availability does not equal meaningful access; real access requires the education, digital systems, data, infrastructure and support necessary for people and businesses to benefit from the technology.

Building on this perspective, we proposed an additional equity question: could a well-intentioned tax-credit programme unintentionally favour businesses that are already digitally and financially equipped to qualify?

AI availability does not guarantee that businesses are equipped to benefit from it. Larger, digitally mature companies are more likely to have the money, expertise and administrative capacity needed to implement technology and qualify for tax credits. Smaller SMEs may need the most support but lack the upfront capital and evidence required to access it. Poorly designed eligibility requirements could therefore reward businesses that are already digitally capable. The framework must prevent this imbalance from widening the existing digital divide.

AI & Industry

Access to AI Does Not Mean Readiness for AI

AI tools are becoming easier and cheaper to access, but access alone does not determine whether a business is positioned to benefit from them.

AI Readiness MSMEs Digital Inclusion Caribbean Business
The Core Issue The AI divide may increasingly be determined not by who can access AI, but by who has the resources and capacity to use it effectively.

For Caribbean micro, small and medium-sized businesses, meaningful AI adoption depends on more than purchasing software or opening an account with an AI platform.

Businesses may also require reliable digital infrastructure, appropriate data, digitally capable employees, financial resources, cybersecurity practices and enough organizational capacity to integrate new technology into existing operations.

This creates an important inclusion challenge. Businesses with greater capital, stronger digital systems and more specialized employees may be positioned to adopt AI much faster than smaller enterprises operating with limited resources.

Encouraging adoption without addressing readiness could therefore reinforce the very inequalities digital transformation is expected to reduce.

Question to Consider

As AI becomes more accessible, what do Caribbean MSMEs need to have in place before they can meaningfully benefit from it—and where do we risk leaving businesses behind if adoption advances faster than readiness?

Leadership & Professional Development

What Happens When Business Knowledge Walks Out the Door?

A business can possess decades of expertise without having a system capable of preserving it.

Succession Planning Knowledge Transfer Leadership Workforce Development
The Core Issue Institutional knowledge becomes vulnerable when businesses depend on people to remember critical processes instead of building systems that preserve them.

The planned closure of Jamaica's People’s Leather Supplies provides a useful case for examining succession, knowledge transfer and organizational resilience.

When experienced owners and employees retire, businesses can lose more than workers. They can lose supplier relationships, technical expertise, customer knowledge, operating practices and lessons accumulated over decades.

Documentation, standard operating procedures, mentorship, structured knowledge transfer and succession planning can help prevent valuable institutional knowledge from disappearing when key individuals leave.

The issue can also extend beyond a single company. When specialized skills begin disappearing across an industry, workforce-development institutions, training bodies and regional qualification systems may also have a role in preserving and transferring that expertise.

Succession planning is therefore not simply about replacing a leader. It is about determining whether the knowledge that made an organization valuable can survive the people who currently hold it.

Question to Consider

Should protecting critical skills and institutional knowledge remain solely the responsibility of individual businesses, or should wider workforce-development systems share that responsibility?

Fellow-Led Discussions: A collection of topical explorations examining emerging challenges across AI, industry, leadership, and professional development through a Caribbean lens. Each discussion connects real-world issues with broader questions of inclusion, readiness, resilience, and sustainable development.

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Shadae McIntosh