AI Is Here. Why Should I Care?

By Leonard Lewis, Co-Founder of Caydev

When AI comes up in conversation here, the most common response I hear is some version of “isn’t this all a bubble?”, which is a fair question. Global corporate AI investment passed 580 billion US dollars last year by Stanford University’s count, some valuations look stretched, and history says a portion of those bets will fail.

History also offers a useful precedent. The dot-com crash of 2000 wiped out hundreds of companies, yet the internet kept going and eventually became the plumbing of modern life. Analysts and academic studies of today’s AI market keep landing on the same description: a real technological revolution with pockets of overvaluation. Some companies will crash, while useful capabilities rarely get uninvented.

Faster than the internet

The same Stanford report, the 2026 AI Index, found that generative AI reached 53 percent adoption within three years of mainstream release, a faster early curve than the personal computer or the internet, and that 88 percent of organisations in its global survey now use AI in at least one business function. Whatever the stock market does, these tools are already in the hands of your co-workers, your customers, and your children’s teachers.

Cayman is moving too. The Civil Service formalised its first AI policy in March 2026. The National Digital Transformation Task Force has been preparing AI policy recommendations for government, and the Premier has told Parliament to expect a draft AI legislative framework by 2027. The rules for how these islands handle AI are being written right now, whether or not you are paying attention.

“It will take our jobs”

Job losses are the fear underneath much of the scepticism, and the fear deserves a straight answer.

In 2016, AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton predicted that machines would replace radiologists within five years and said we should stop training them. Radiology did not disappear. Training programmes have continued to grow, demand for imaging keeps rising, and AI is now a tool that radiologists direct, check, and act on. ATMs were supposed to eliminate bank tellers; instead they changed what tellers spend their day doing. Often, when technology makes a service cheaper and faster, demand for it grows rather than disappears.

The current research points the same way. The International Labour Organization estimates that around one in four workers worldwide is in an occupation with some exposure to generative AI, and its analysis points to jobs being transformed rather than eliminated, because most occupations are a mix of automatable tasks and human ones. Drafting, summarising, research and routine analysis may become faster. At the same time, judgment, accountability, local knowledge and human relationships remain difficult to automate.

Some tasks will disappear, and the people affected deserve honesty about that. The larger and faster change is this: many jobs done differently, with better options for the person who learned the new way of doing it.

What caring actually looks like

Nobody is asking you to love this technology. Treat it the way an earlier generation treated typing and spreadsheets: a skill you pick up because the workplace now assumes it.

AI literacy means three things. Learn what these tools do well: drafting, summarising, and research legwork. Learn where they fail: they can state wrong answers with full confidence, and confidential information should never go into a tool unless you know where that data ends up. And keep ownership of your judgement, because the human still carries responsibility for the result.

The investment boom may slow and some valuations may correct. The capability stays, Cayman’s rules are being drafted as you read this, and the options available to you narrow the longer you wait.

You are allowed to distrust the hype. In fact, informed scepticism is useful. But ignoring the technology completely is no longer a neutral position.

The real questions are do you understand AI well enough to keep your options open, and when the time comes that AI is the solution to whatever problem you are trying to solve, will you know where to go and what to do?

Caydev helps Cayman professionals and businesses build practical AI literacy and put it to work. Visit https://www.caydev.com/consult  to book a chat with us.

References

1. Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, The 2026 AI Index Report, Economy chapter. https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report

2. Boom, Bubble, or Buildout? A Multi-Method Evaluation of Whether Artificial Intelligence Is in an Ongoing Financial Bubble (May 2026). https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.01575

3. Amundi Investment Institute, AI Boom or Bubble? Lessons from the Dot-Com Period (April 2026). https://research-center.amundi.com

4. Premier André Ebanks, response to parliamentary question on artificial intelligence, Cayman Islands Parliament, 6 March 2026. Reported in IFC Review (13 March 2026) and Cayman News Service (25 March 2026).

5. Cayman News Service, “Public survey opens to shape national AI policy” (14 May 2026). https://caymannewsservice.com/2026/05/public-survey-opens-to-shape-national-ai-policy/

6. Geoffrey Hinton, remarks at the Machine Learning and the Market for Intelligence Conference, Creative Destruction Lab, Toronto, 2016. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HMPRXstSvQ

7. Fortune, “A decade after the ‘Godfather of AI’ said radiologists are obsolete, salaries are $571K and growing” (4 May 2026).

8. James Bessen, Learning by Doing: The Real Connection Between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth (Yale University Press, 2015).

9. Gmyrek, P., et al., Generative AI and Jobs: A Refined Global Index of Occupational Exposure, ILO Working Paper 140 (May 2025). https://www.ilo.org/publications/generative-ai-and-jobs-refined-global-index-occupational-exposure