
The Caribbean's first AI summit is in the books.
Gracias, San Juan.
For centuries, the Caribbean has been where cultures, continents and ideas meet. Today, that same crossroads becomes the stage where the world comes to engage with AI. Not to watch from the sidelines. To lead from here.
Two days in San Juan to build what's next — with the people already building it.
"The Future Starts with Better Questions."Business leaders, technical builders and the AI-curious: everyone has a seat. Pick your path.
Strategy, finance, healthcare, startups, creative industries. For the people deciding where the business goes.
See sessions →AI in production, hands-on workshops, LLMs, fine-tuning, security, infrastructure. For the builders.
See sessions →AI for everyone. Career impact, education, ethics, ecosystem. No prior experience needed.
Start here →Teams of 2–4. 48 hours. One theme: build AI that solves a real problem on the island. Winners split $10,000.

43 speakers · 5 keynotes · 3 tracks · 2 days. Global AI leaders and the best Caribbean talent on one stage.











































The agenda as it ran on October 9 and 10, 2026.
Tap ☆ on the sessions you want to attend, then open My agenda to see just those. Saved on this device.
AI & How It Impacts the Enterprise
HPE opens the Summit with a look at how AI is changing the way enterprises build, run and secure their technology, and what it takes to move from experiments to infrastructure that delivers.
Fireside Chat: AI in Puerto Rico and Beyond
AI for Urban Biodiversity
About half of the world’s GDP, approximately US$44 trillion, is moderately or highly dependent on nature, according the the World Economic Forum. By mid-century, between 30% to 50% of species may be lost. Urbanization has been a major driver of biodiversity collapse. However, cities have been implementing policies not only to avert and revert this collapse, but also to foster rich biodiversity—which improves people’s health and quality of life. Monitoring biodiversity, though, is a challenge. At MIT Senseable City Lab we have been developing technologies and employing artificial intelligence methods to monitor urban biodiversity, including the use generative AI to improve classification models, computer vision to detect insect species and identify tree species, and the analysis of air and soil urban microbiome.
AI for Smart Cities & Urban Mobility
Real-time traffic signal control presents a challenging multi-agent planning problem, particularly in urban road networks where (unlike simpler arterial settings) there are competing dominant traffic flows that shift through the day. Further complicating matters, urban environments require attention to multi-modal traffic flows (vehicles, pedestrians, bicyclists, buses, etc.) that move at different speeds and may be given different priorities. For many years now, my research group has focused on utilizing AI techniques and technologies to produce better solutions to this and other interconnected problems in urban mobility. Our initial work produced Surtrac, a real-time adaptive traffic signal control system unique in its ability to optimize movement of the actual traffic on the road, as opposed to optimizing a prediction of current traffic based on recent historical traffic flow information. Surtrac treats traffic signal control as a decentralized online planning process, where each intersection (agent) repeatedly solves a type of single machine scheduling problem locally and then communicates expected traffic flows and congestion to its neighboring intersections to achieve network level coordination. Pilot tests of the system showed significant reductions in both vehicle travel times and emissions, and it is now deployed in over 40 North American cities. Given this success, more recent work has focused on making this approach to smart traffic signals smarter, safer, and more sustainable. One thrust has explored opportunities for further optimizing network traffic flows that are made possible by emerging connected vehicle technology and real-time vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) connectivity, demonstrating the reciprocal traffic flow optimization benefit of vehicles sharing their route information with the traffic signal system and establishing a novel basis for revenue generation via voluntary tolling at the intersection. Another thrust has developed a smartphone app for pedestrians with disabilities that utilizes real-time connectivity to the traffic signal system to influence traffic control decisions and promote safe intersection crossing. Other current work centers on techniques for integrated optimization of signal control and vehicle route choice decisions, and for utilizing large language models to achieve cooperative perception and navigation on urban roadways by multiple connected autonomous vehicles. In this talk, I’ll summarize this overall research effort and discuss outstanding research challenges.
Remarks
Leadership in the Age of AI
En una era donde la adopción de la IA avanza más rápido que la preparación organizacional, los líderes que establecen marcos claros de gobernanza no solo mitigan riesgos — convierten la IA en una ventaja competitiva medible. Esta sesión equipa a ejecutivos con la mentalidad estratégica y las herramientas prácticas para liderar la implementación de IA con accountability, cumplimiento y confianza.
So You Have 50 Agents. Now What?
A few years ago, enterprises were drowning in unmanaged APIs, siloed, undiscoverable, and duplicated across teams. We solved that with API-led connectivity. Now we're watching the exact same pattern repeat itself with AI agents. Every SaaS platform is shipping its own agent, every team is building their own, and without a central strategy, you end up with an unmanageable, fragmented mess.
In this talk, we'll dig into the architectural principles behind orchestrating multi-agent systems. Not the theory, but the practical decisions you'll face when building them. We'll explore the tension between deterministic and probabilistic orchestration: when you want an LLM to reason its way to the right agent, and when you absolutely cannot afford that non-determinism and need hard-coded rules. We'll look at how domain-based routing works, grouping agents into logical domains so an orchestrator can intelligently dispatch tasks without needing to know about every individual agent upfront.
Using MuleSoft Agent Fabric as a concrete reference implementation, we'll walk through how a specification-first approach (declaring your agent network in YAML) separates the what from the how, and how guided determinism, mixing fixed handoff rules with LLM reasoning, gives you production-grade reliability without giving up flexibility. You'll leave with a mental model for designing orchestration layers that scale, and concrete patterns you can apply regardless of which stack you're building on.
AI-Powered Oral Exams
Generative AI is often discussed in education as a threat to assessment integrity, but the same technology may also provide a new path forward. This presentation explores Elenkis, an AI-supported platform that uses conversational assessment to help verify student understanding in a world where written work is increasingly difficult to authenticate.
The talk will examine how large language models can be used to conduct dynamic oral questioning, generate context-sensitive follow-up questions, evaluate student responses with rubric-based criteria, and provide repeated opportunities for practice and mastery. Rather than focusing only on detection or restriction, Elenkis reframes the AI challenge as a design opportunity: if AI can weaken traditional assessment, it can also help create richer, more interactive forms of assessment.
The session is based on research from on ongoing pilot studies involving actual K-12 and higher education students, teachers, faculty, and administrators. Attendees will see how Elenkis applies generative AI to a practical education problem with broader implications for trust, verification, and human-AI interaction. Key takeaways include design principles for AI-mediated assessment, the role of Socratic dialogue in evaluating understanding, practical considerations for deploying LLM-based tools in institutional settings, and findings from in-progress pilots related to privacy, scalability, reliability, learning value, and faculty workload.
Why Your AI Pilot Never Made It to Production
Organizations aren't short on AI ideas, they're short on results. Most AI pilots spark excitement, produce a great demo… and then stall before ever reaching production. Not because of the technology, but because of how adoption is governed.
In this session I'll share what I've seen working with enterprises, utilities, and government across the Caribbean: the exact patterns that kill a pilot, and the playbook to avoid them. We'll cover the three essentials of adoption that actually scales (leadership and sponsorship, high-value use cases, and data governance) and how to quantify business value before you invest, using a Customer Business Outcomes model.
You'll leave with a practical 90-day framework to move your next pilot from demo to measurable impact. No hype: real cases, real metrics, and the mistakes we already made for you.
Do's and Don'ts in the Agentic AI Era
AI has stopped just talking and started doing. A new generation of "agentic" AI doesn't only answer questions: it books the meeting, moves the money, writes to the database, and calls other software, often with little human review. That leap from chatbot to coworker unlocks enormous value, but it also opens a brand-new attack surface that most organizations are not ready for.
In this session, we'll separate the hype from the hazard. Using real 2025–2026 incidents (an AI coding agent that deleted a live production database and lied about it, a zero-click email that quietly exfiltrated corporate data through Microsoft Copilot, and the first documented AI-orchestrated cyber-espionage campaign); we'll show exactly how agents go wrong: prompt injection, excessive permissions, the "lethal trifecta," and identity sprawl.
Then we'll get practical. You'll leave with a clear, jargon-free checklist of "do's and don'ts": where to keep a human in the loop, how to give agents the least privilege they need, why agents deserve their own identities and audit trails, and how to red-team before you deploy. Whether you lead a business, write code, or shape policy, you'll walk away able to capture the upside of agentic AI without becoming the next cautionary tale.
AI, IP & Machine Creativity
Artificial intelligence is forcing a fundamental reexamination of how the law protects creativity, identity, and ownership. At the center of this shift are three converging legal issues: (1) the use of a person’s image, likeness, and voice in AI-generated content; (2)
the question of who owns works created with or by AI; and (3) the legality of using copyrighted material to train AI models. Each of these areas exposes a different gap between existing legal frameworks and rapidly evolving technology, challenging doctrines that were built for a pre-digital world. Courts, regulators, and legislators are now grappling with how to adapt longstanding principles to systems capable of generating content at scale, often without clear human authorship or consent.
A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence
Up until early 2023, I regularly said AI would always have a bright future—and I didn't mean that as a compliment. Sure, deep learning had made us good at building very impressive classifiers in the decade or so prior, but for so long, human-like intelligence was just five years in the future—and that made me a skeptic. Things are different now, but how much skepticism is still warranted? What is it that we've got on our hands? What changes is modern AI bringing with it? Like with so many other questions, the answers are easier if we understand where we've come from.
Beginning with the Turing Test itself, the famous Dartmouth Conference of 1956, and the Perceptron of 1957, we'll trace decades of disappointment and broken promises as we tried to realize the true potential of computing, at the same time grasping for an understanding of what it means to be human. Taking a close look at various technologies along the way, we'll arrive in the 21st century, the revival of neural networks, the advent of the Transformer, and a revolutionary new technology category that has prompted oracles of weal and woe from our most optimistic and apocalyptic technology prophets.
Standing on the edge of the unknown, what elements of the 75-year-old promise have we realized? A close examination gives us a better view of our immediate future as technologists and insight into what it means to be human.
Modernizing Customer Experience for the Agentic Era
Customer experience is entering a new era, powered by Agentic AI. A new paradigm where AI agents are beginning to transform how organizations design, operate, and scale customer experiences, taking automation and responsiveness to a new level.
Discover how DFX5, together with AWS technologies, is enabling this next generation of Customer Experience, and what organizations need to transform across infrastructure, data, and contact centers to build experiences that are smarter, more agile, and ready for the future.
Customizing AI Models for Real Business ROI
Frontier AI models are powerful, but general intelligence rarely delivers the accuracy, efficiency, and performance that real-world business applications demand. To unlock their full potential, organizations are moving beyond out-of-the-box capabilities and embracing model customization.
In this session, we’ll explore how techniques like fine-tuning and continued pre-training transform general-purpose models into domain-specific systems that drive measurable business value. You’ll learn how to select the right customization approach for your use case and evaluate the tradeoffs between cost, performance, and time-to-value.
Through real-world examples, from enterprise document intelligence to optimizing agentic AI workflows, we’ll demonstrate how tailored models consistently outperform generic alternatives, delivering higher accuracy, lower latency, and stronger ROI.
Whether you're a technical leader designing AI systems or a business leader shaping AI strategy, you’ll leave with a practical framework for turning foundation models into a competitive advantage.
AI in Healthcare & Life Sciences
Three practitioners on where AI is already changing healthcare in Puerto Rico: biomedical discovery and precision medicine, faster and more ethical clinical research, and the governance and data protection that keep patients safe.
Legal Panel
AI Cybersecurity: Offense vs. Defense
How criminals are using AI right now (deepfakes, dark LLMs, AI-written phishing and autonomous attacks) and how defenders fight back. Two security veterans walk through the attacker's AI toolkit and the AI-driven defenses that counter it.
Sovereign AI: The Caribbean's Advantage
The dominant story about AI and the Caribbean is one of catch-up — fewer data centers, less compute, later arrival. That story is wrong, and believing it is the most expensive mistake the region can make right now.
The mainland AI economy is built on an architecture the Caribbean was never going to win at: hyperscale infrastructure, public frontier models, and data flows routed through U.S. servers governed by U.S. law. That architecture carries sovereignty costs regulated markets and enterprises increasingly cannot absorb. Forty-two percent of U.S. business leaders have already made major decisions on hallucinated data. Deloitte is being sued by four governments over AI-generated reports. The cracks are not hypothetical.
This keynote argues that the Caribbean's lack of legacy infrastructure is not a deficit — it is freedom to build the next architecture rather than inherit the broken one. Closed-loop, sovereign AI is the natural fit for the region's SMEs, mid-government, and regulated industries. Regional data consortiums and Caribbean-hosted compute aren't compromises. They are the model the rest of the world is quietly converging toward.
Drawing on work with governments and enterprises across North America, Europe, and the Middle East, this keynote reframes the region's smaller scale, applied to the right architecture, as a competitive advantage the mainland cannot replicate.
48 hours. $10K in prizes.
AI for Humans: How a Small Business Out-Competes a Fortune 500
Most small business owners hear "artificial intelligence" and think one of two things: it's for Silicon Valley, or it's going to kill their business. Both are wrong, and the confusion is costing them money every day.
For the first time in business history, the gap between a two-person operation and a Fortune 500 is not capital or headcount. It's knowing which AI tools to use and in what order. This session walks through real cases of SMEs beating companies a hundred times their size, using tools that cost less than a business lunch per month.
Key takeaways:
- The three processes to automate first
- Specific tools and real pricing that work on lean budgets
- When to use AI, and when to walk away
- The question every owner must answer before 2027
Signal in the Noise: AI Hype vs. Real Business Value
Artificial Intelligence is generating unprecedented excitement, investment, and attention. Yet despite the rapid pace of innovation, many organizations still struggle to identify where AI can create meaningful value and where it is simply adding to the noise.
This presentation explores how leaders, entrepreneurs, and technologists can separate AI hype from practical business outcomes. Drawing from real-world experience building AI-powered products and data platforms across banking, media, and enterprise environments, attendees will gain a framework for evaluating AI opportunities through the lens of business impact rather than technology trends.
The session will examine why many AI initiatives fail, common misconceptions around large language models and AI agents, and the critical role that data quality, operational workflows, and organizational readiness play in successful deployments. Through practical examples, including the development of an AI-powered media intelligence platform that analyzes radio, television, podcasts, and digital content at scale, attendees will see how AI can transform large volumes of unstructured information into actionable insights.
Rather than focusing on the latest model releases or speculative predictions, this presentation emphasizes the fundamentals that consistently drive successful outcomes: understanding the problem, building trustworthy data foundations, measuring results, and deploying AI where it creates genuine value.
Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of how to evaluate AI investments, identify high-impact use cases, avoid common pitfalls, and distinguish lasting opportunities from short-term trends. In a world increasingly overwhelmed by both information and AI hype, the ability to find signal in the noise may become one of the most important skills for leaders and organizations alike.
AI-Native Networking: Transforming Enterprise Network Operations
HPE engineers show how AI-native networking is changing enterprise network operations: networks that spot, diagnose and often fix problems on their own before users ever notice.
Hands-On: Getting AI Agents Up and Running with OpenAI and Anthropic
The Right to Stay Human: Neural Privacy & BCIs · 2026: The Year AI Works With You… or Without You
Gerardo Lebrón: Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are not merely the next consumer technology — they represent an unprecedented category of human intrusion. Unlike smartphones or social media, which record what people do or say, BCIs capture what people think and feel before any decision to act. When that neural data flows to private operators, it becomes the ultimate prediction product in what Zuboff called the "behavioral futures marketplace" — and AI is the engine that makes that marketplace run.
AI systems are what transform raw neural signals into actionable intelligence. The same machine learning architectures that infer mood from a scroll pattern or predict purchase intent from a search query can — and will — be trained on neural data to decode intention, emotion, and cognition at a resolution no prior technology has approached. Input-capable BCIs raise the stakes further: where output BCIs read from the brain, input BCIs write to it — and AI-driven feedback loops could enable externally modulated cognition at scale, a qualitative leap from behavioral modification to what Zuboff termed instrumentarian power.
This proposal does not argue that legal mandates will compel BCI adoption. The more urgent and realistic threat is structural coercion — the same quiet mechanism by which the internet, the smartphone, and social media became de facto prerequisites for employment, civic access, and social belonging. No law forced that outcome. Market dynamics did. AI-enhanced BCIs will follow the same diffusion logic, only faster.
Key takeaways for attendees:
- AI is the critical intermediary that converts neural data into behavioral predictions — making neurotechnology a direct extension of existing AI surveillance infrastructure
- Neural data is categorically distinct from existing behavioral data and demands a new legal framework
- Structural coercion, not legal compulsion, is the near-term threat to neurotechnological autonomy
- The emerging legal question is whether individuals hold a right to decline neural-level integration without forfeiting meaningful participation in social and professional life
Nesty Delgado: Al adentrarnos en el 2026, surge una pregunta determinante para líderes y organizaciones: ¿la inteligencia artificial trabajará contigo… o avanzará sin ti? Esta conferencia aborda ese punto de inflexión, cuestionando los modelos tradicionales de liderazgo y proponiendo un nuevo paradigma donde la Inteligencia Artificial (IA) y la Inteligencia Emocional (IE) convergen para definir el futuro empresarial.
Basado en más de dos décadas liderando proyectos complejos y de alto impacto en Estados Unidos, Puerto Rico y Latinoamérica, esta presentación ofrece un enfoque práctico y centrado en las personas para navegar la transformación impulsada por la IA. Más allá de verla como una herramienta tecnológica, se plantea la IA como un socio estratégico que potencia la toma de decisiones, acelera la ejecución y redefine la cultura organizacional.
Los participantes obtendrán claridad para trascender el miedo y el “hype”, comprendiendo las verdaderas implicaciones de adoptar IA en sus operaciones, liderazgo y equipos. Se presentarán estrategias accionables para integrar la IA en el día a día, fortaleciendo a la vez las capacidades humanas irremplazables como la empatía, el juicio y la ética.
Aprendizajes Clave:
- Por qué el 2026 marca un punto de inflexión en la adopción de la IA
- Un marco práctico para integrar IA sin perder el enfoque humano
- La Inteligencia Emocional como ventaja competitiva en la era de la automatización
- Casos reales y estrategias para aumentar productividad, innovación y ventaja competitiva
- El cambio de mentalidad que requiere el liderazgo para prosperar en un futuro impulsado por IA
Esta conferencia es un llamado claro: los líderes que no evolucionen de forma intencional y estratégica corren el riesgo de quedarse atrás en un mundo que ya está siendo transformado.
The AI-Powered Creative: Do More, Look Bigger, Stay Human
Ship a Production AI App in Two Weeks
Methodology to build full stack Databricks Apps with Lakebase, AI, and many more tools like MCP servers, trackmaster PRD, Agents, Skills, all working to make your Databricks App a reality in just two weeks.
Taste Cannot Be Prompted
Remarks
Beyond AI: Building AI-Capable Organizations
AI is not the future of analytics. It is only one piece of a much larger transformation.
While headlines focus on Generative AI, leading organizations are quietly combining Business Intelligence, Machine Learning, Generative AI, and Autonomous Agents to create faster, smarter, and more adaptive decision-making systems. Yet technology alone rarely delivers lasting results.
In this session, Gauthier Vasseur explores the foundations that separate successful transformations from expensive disappointments: FAIR data, data quality, governance, lean process design, and the critical distinction between deterministic and non-deterministic systems.
Through practical examples and real-world lessons from Silicon Valley and global enterprises, participants will learn how to orchestrate these technologies responsibly, identify where each creates the most value, and build organizations capable of continuous learning and innovation.
The session concludes with the most important ingredient of all: cultivating a growth mindset rooted in curiosity, experimentation, and entrepreneurial thinking—the true catalyst behind sustainable transformation.
Turning AI into Business Results
The best builds of the weekend, live in Ballroom B
Smart Models, Naive Systems: Context Engineering for the Enterprise
Many enterprise AI deployments fail not because the model is wrong, but because it doesn't know the business. This session examines context engineering, the discipline that has emerged in 2025–2026 to govern what an AI sees at inference time, and the case for treating it as enterprise architecture rather than as a prompt-tuning exercise.
Economic Development & AI
Ethics & EU Regulation: the Global Playbook
El uso de la Inteligencia Artificial hoy día no es opcional. Su potencial es indudable pero también lo es su posible riesgo si no cuidamos los principios éticos desde su diseño. Basándose en los principios éticos internacionales en IA, la UE ha desarrollado una regulación, de obligado cumplimiento, aplicable a los sistemas de Alto Riesgo, con el objetivo de fomentar la confianza y la excelencia en el marco de la UE. Dicho marco está sirviendo de referencia en todo el mundo. La ponencia explica esta necesidad de ética en la IA, explica la regulación europea en IA, e indica las medidas que está aplicando España para su gobernanza, en la que la ponente ha estado directamente involucrada: Sandbox regulatorio en IA, sello Nacional en IA y Agencia de Supervisión de algoritmos. Explica, además, otras medidas necesarias de gobernanza para maximizar el impacto positivo de esta revoucionaria tecnología.
The Global State of AI: Governance, Risk & What's Next
Leaders. Builders. Founders. Students. Diaspora. The curious. If AI is moving your world, this is your place.
C-Suite, directors, founders. The next chapter of AI in the Caribbean is being shaped here. The first ones in the room set the direction.
VIP · BusinessDevs, AI engineers, data scientists. You don't have to leave to work at the frontier. The frontier came home — and this is your stage.
Technical · HackathonFounders, VCs, family offices. You walk into the room when it's still forming. Everyone will say they were early — be the one who was.
VIP · NetworkingStudents, newcomers. You're not here to watch. You're here to make your first demo in front of the people who can hire you, fund you, or build with you.
Learning · HackathonYou left for opportunity. Opportunity came home. You come back to see what's being built — and to lead the next chapter.
ComunidadNo prior experience needed. Just curiosity. You leave understanding where the world is heading — and where you fit.
LearningWhere the Caribbean meets the U.S. Where Spanish and English coexist without translation. Where the next chapter of AI is being written.

3.5 hours from NYC, 2.5 from Miami, no passport or currency change. Puerto Rico is the Caribbean's window to the United States — and the U.S.'s door to Latin America.

Puerto Rico Convention Center — the largest, most modern in the Caribbean. 580,000 sq ft, world-class AV. 5 min from Condado, 15 from Old San Juan, 10 from SJU airport.

The Caribbean's first AI summit. You're walking in when it's still forming. Next year won't be the first. This one will.
Bilingual ES/EN. Live captions in both languages via PowerPoint 365 — no headsets required.
Full 2-day access, all 3 tracks, 5 keynotes, 20+ sessions, networking, expo, coffee breaks both days.
Tickets are non-refundable. You can transfer to another person up to 48h before the event — email caribbeanaisummit@gmail.com.
Yes. Convention Center valet: $18/day. Rideshare and taxi available (~$20 from SJU airport).
18+. University students with valid ID get a discount — reach out to caribbeanaisummit@gmail.com.
Your ticket gives access. Teams of 2–4, formed on-site Day 1. Theme: AI for Puerto Rico. $10K in prizes.
Yes, for groups of 5+. Email caribbeanaisummit@gmail.com with the headcount and names.
For sponsorships (tiers $3K–$50K) or any inquiry, email us at caribbeanaisummit@gmail.com. Speaker selection for 2026 is closed.
To every attendee, speaker, sponsor, volunteer and hackathon team who made the first Caribbean AI Summit happen: thank you. The conversation keeps going in the PRAIC community.