What we shared in Grand Bahama about how AI strengthens entrepreneur support organizations

The Grand Bahama ecosystem has what it takes.

On June 11 Suricata Labs was in Freeport, at the northern campus of the University of The Bahamas, invited by UB IGNITE and IDB Lab to Ecosystem Connect: The Roadshow. The room held development banking, the port authority, the chamber of commerce, the Small Business Development Centre, government agencies and entrepreneurs from the island. You rarely see that many players from an ecosystem this size sitting in the same room on the same day, and even less often willing to listen to each other for a full working session.

We went to talk about how we have supported company growth in Colombia and in the other countries where we have operated, where their ecosystem might look like ours, and how technology and artificial intelligence can help with business operations and transformation. It was everything we hoped for and then some. We came back with plenty of notes to share with the team.

The invitation had us talking about growth first

The talk Suricata brought was titled MSME Growth & Digital Transformation, and the order of those words matters. Growth first, digital transformation after. Our CEO tells the story of the firm and what we have learned working with more than 1,200 companies in Colombia, El Salvador and Central America, including the stumbles, which tend to be more useful than the success stories when the audience is made up of colleagues running similar programs.

The rest of the agenda lived up to it. Wel'Andra Francis-Rolle presented IDB Lab's work on ecosystem development in the Caribbean and Latin America. Damian McIntyre, of DM Consultancy, walked through a study done with Carib Equity on nascent ecosystems and where The Bahamas fits within the Caribbean. María Vallejo Martelo, of IDB Development Venture Finance, facilitated a session on theory of change and results frameworks applied to business support initiatives, which is exactly the conversation we as ESOs struggle to have with our funders.

Thanks to UB IGNITE and IDB Lab for the invitation. The fact that a Caribbean university brings in a Colombian operator to share its experience says something good about how they are approaching ecosystem work. UB IGNITE published its own account of the day with the full agenda and photos.

The AI piece we proposed was not for the entrepreneurs

Almost every conversation about artificial intelligence in entrepreneurial ecosystems ends up in the same place: teaching AI tools to the companies in the program. That is valid, and it falls short.

The bottleneck in most programs is not the entrepreneur, it is the organization supporting them. A business diagnostic that eats three weeks of a consultant's time, a call for applications where someone reads two hundred submissions by hand, a mentor matching process that depends on the memory of whoever coordinates it, and funder reports that consume weeks of team time every quarter. That is where an ESO's installed capacity goes, and that is where technology, with automation and now with AI behind it, actually changes the equation.

That is what we showed in Freeport: how a support organization can use automation and artificial intelligence to shorten its own diagnostic cycles, keep the quality of its support consistent across cohorts, and free up team hours for the one thing that cannot be automated, which is the conversation with the business owner. It is the logic behind our operating system, and the same logic we apply through our digital transformation framework when we help an institution decide what to optimize, what to accelerate and what to transform. It has led us to a new way of understanding that path, one we have started calling AI-Enabled Digital Innovation.

Grand Bahama has more of a business base than its size suggests

The numbers from the Bahamian Small Business Development Centre are clear about the size of the challenge and about the opportunity too. Micro, small and medium enterprises account for 98% of the country's registered companies and close to 47% of employment, yet they generate barely 20% of national revenue. Put the other way around: 2% of companies produce 80% of the revenue. That productivity gap is the central problem of Bahamian MSME policy, and we recognize it well because Colombia and Central America face the same one.

What is interesting is that, in that same SBDC analysis, Grand Bahama shows up among the best performing islands both in MSME growth and in revenue growth. The island is not stuck. It is moving.

And it is moving from a hard starting point. Hurricane Dorian left more than $3.4 billion in losses and damages across the country in 2019, with Grand Bahama among the hardest hit areas, and then came the pandemic. That seven years later there is a room full of people discussing how to scale the ecosystem instead of how to survive is, in itself, an indicator.

On top of that there is something almost no other Caribbean island has: Freeport has a free trade zone and port and industrial infrastructure operated by the Grand Bahama Port Authority. The physical base for diversifying beyond tourism already exists. What is missing is enough business density to use it.

The university is taking on a role that in other countries nobody takes

This was the observation that stayed with me the longest.

Across much of Latin America the university sits at the edge of the ecosystem. It signs agreements and lends auditoriums, but the hard work of connecting players ends up in the hands of chambers of commerce, government agencies or multilaterals, often each working on their own.

In Grand Bahama the University of The Bahamas put itself at the center. UB IGNITE was born out of a partnership between UB North and IDB Lab, and today it runs a business incubator, a fintech incubator with OKX, startup bootcamps and an annual innovation summit. At the roadshow, Keturah Babb-Higgs, executive director of UB IGNITE, announced work on a national ecosystem platform that will connect entrepreneurs, MSMEs and support organizations across the country.

That announcement is the one worth watching closely from the outside. A national platform run by a university, with multilateral backing, tackles the fragmentation problem through infrastructure rather than good intentions. If it works, it will be a case worth replicating in many countries in our region where entrepreneurs still do not know which door to knock on.

What we took back with us

The day closed with a roundtable with the Port Authority, the Grand Bahama Chamber of Commerce and local business owners from construction and technology, on what the island needs in order to scale. Four themes came out: access to capital, talent development, market access and ecosystem infrastructure.

None of those four gets solved by a single institution, and nobody in that room pretended otherwise. That is the difference between an ecosystem and what we once called an egosystem, a term we ended up sharing in the room, where each player competes for the spotlight instead of organizing around the business owner. In Grand Bahama we saw the first kind, everyone willing to contribute and collaborate, an ecosystem that keeps getting stronger.

Suricata leaves Grand Bahama with a lot of learning and with the task of continuing to contribute where it can, showing how a program can be run with tools that multiply the team's capacity instead of adding administrative work, and how to reach more companies while making better use of resources, consultants' time and the support entrepreneurs receive.

Read also: What is an ESO and why it matters in the entrepreneurial ecosystem