In our April 2023 Community Chat, and with members of the Caribbean tech community, Charlie Ann St. Cyr, a Social Impact Strategist and Founder of Girls With Roots, and Gisselle Ramsaran, a Digital Marketing Systems Strategist, the panel discusses:  AI and its impact on content development; how technology can contribute to inequality and threaten the rights and well-being of girls in the Caribbean; and the quality of telecoms services across the region.

 

This episode is also available on SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast, Spotify, Amazon Music and Stitcher!

Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to be top of mind in regional and global conversations. To some degree, it seems that the initial flush of excitement is transitioning to more deliberate considerations of the potential impact and limitations of AI.

This month’s Community Chat discussion is a mixed bag of topics, reflecting the diverse issues that we need to grapple with: not just cutting-edge technology, but also matters related to equality and inclusion and the nuts-and-bolts of telecoms service quality across the Caribbean region.

 

Introducing our guests

Charlie Ann St Cyr

Charlie Ann St. Cyr is a Founder, Social Impact Strategist, and digital marketing professional with a passion for storytelling and story doing.  For over 12 years, she’s worked with corporate, non-profit, and governmental organizations in the field of marketing and communications, helping them connect their strategy with social objectives to deliver meaningful impact.

In addition to her work in communications and marketing, she is an advocate for girl leadership and education. She is skilled in movement-building, adolescent girl leadership, and girl-centred advocacy. In 2025, she founded the non-profit organisation, Girls With Roots, through which she continues to lead and support projects that improve the well-being and economic outlook of women and girls.

 

 

Gisselle Ramsaran

Gisselle Ramsaran is a Digital Marketing Systems Strategist with nearly 20 years of experience in the field. She brings a deep understanding of traditional marketing models and an appreciation for the digital landscape. But it’s her unique ability to anticipate changing consumer behaviour that allows her to keep track of new platforms and opportunities, influence and build better communication pathways for brands.

Gisselle is currently the Head of Digital and Content Strategy for the local office of one of the world’s largest advertising and communications networks. She also has been a Digital Marketing Systems Consultant working with companies interested in building internal digital marketing teams to support their business and customer needs. 

 

 

Community Chat topics

In this Community chat episode, the following topics were discussed:

  1. AI and content development. Thanks to her involvement in digital content development, Gisselle has been witnessing first-hand not only the impact that AI has been having on the marketing space, but also the perceptions around AI and content creation. This also leads to questions about AI in the Caribbean content creation space which can be a completely different animal, as our conversation explored.
  2. How technology can contribute to inequality and threaten the rights and well-being of girls in the Caribbean. When one considers the state of development of the Caribbean region and the opportunities available to girls and women when compared with other developing countries, technology acting as a vector for inequality and threats to their rights and well-being may not seem readily evident. However, in working closely with girls, Charlie Ann has been able to observe the subtle and not-so-subtle ways in which Caribbean girls and women are not in a position to leverage technology as one would hope, which is creating inequality and threats to their future.
  3. The quality of telecoms services across the region. This topic stemmed from an article in The Tribune (Bahamas), in which the author was discussing the poor and inconsistent quality of service customers have been experiencing from the Bahamas Telecommunications Company (BTC). Sadly, the situations outlined are not unique to The Bahamas, and speak to a bigger issue of the quality of telecoms service in the Caribbean region.

 

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Also, if you or a member of your network is interested in joining us for an episode, do get in touch.

Let’s make it happen!

 

Select links

Below are links to some of the organisations and resources that either were mentioned during the episode or otherwise, might be useful:

 

 

Images credit:  C A St Cyr;  G Ramsaran;  Diggity Marketing (Pixabay); Julia M Cameron (Pexels); Discover Savsat (Unsplash)

Music credit: The Last Word (Oui Ma Chérie), by Andy Narrell

Podcast editing support:  Mayra Bonilla Lopez