Fix it before you speed it up — choosing the first thing to automate, and the data work that comes first

Last week, Barbados’s Senior Minister Kerrie Symmonds put some numbers to something anyone who works with small businesses in this region already suspected. Across the Caribbean, only 4 to 5 per cent of business transactions are conducted digitally, against 18 to 19 per cent in the United States. Citing research commissioned by that country’s Small Business Association, he noted that among Barbadian micro, small and medium enterprises, 78 per cent use social media and customer-facing platforms.

Only 13 per cent use payroll software. Only 14 per cent use digitised inventory management. A quarter use no digital management tools at all.

Read those last four numbers together and a pattern appears. The stock room, the payroll and the ledger are still being run by hand. A Mastercard study reported in May found that only 8 per cent of small merchants use point-of-sale systems, and that cash still accounts for roughly 72 per cent of personal consumption spending.

Set that against the roughly 422,000 registered micro, small and medium enterprises the Ministry of Finance and the Small Business Association of Jamaica count in this country, and the scale of the gap becomes clear. What gets automated first versus what actually pays: 78 per cent on social media, only eight percent of small merchants on point-of-sale, against 13 per cent on payroll software and 14 per cent ondigitised inventory. (Branded graphic by PGH Consulting, LLC) The order most businesses choose, and the order that pays This is not only a Caribbean habit.

In a survey commissioned by Intuit last year, covering more than 2,200 American businesses with up to 100 staff, the most common uses of AI were marketing at 43 per cent and customer service at 36 per cent. Bookkeeping came last, at 29 per cent. Now set that against where the returns actually turn up.

The Hackett Group’s 2026 study of finance functions found accounts payable to be the most mature area of AI adoption, with a third of organisations already scaling solutions there, followed by travel and expense management. Financial planning, forecasting and reporting sit well behind. Paying suppliers and processing expenses are high-volume, repetitive and rule-bound: the same shape of task, many times a week, with a right answer that can be checked.