The Broadcasting Commission of Jamaica (BCJ) is partnering with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to strengthen research and capacity-building in artificial intelligence (AI) for information accessibility.

This will be advanced through the seventh Artificial Intelligence for Information Accessibility (AI4IA) Conference, scheduled for September 28.

Executive Director of the BCJ, Cordel Green, made the disclosure during a session of the Caribbean Broadcasting Union (CBU) 57th Annual General Assembly, held on August 19 at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre in Liliendaal, East Coast Demerara, Guyana.

Mr. Green said the BCJ is uniquely positioned to contribute to regional and international discussions on AI, noting that it is the only regulator represented on both Jamaica’s National AI Task Force and the Caribbean Telecommunications Union’s AI Task Force.

He explained that the partnership will facilitate the launch of a trans-regional frontier technology research and capacity-building pilot programme aimed at developing AI-enabled workflows for search, synthesis, provenance tracking and knowledge-product development.

The initiative will draw on a distributed corpus spanning six years of the AI4IA Conference, and its extensive body of international contributions.

Mr. Green said the AI4IA Conference is the flagship initiative of UNESCO’s Information for All Programme Working Group on Information Accessibility.

The annual conference brings together more than 70 presenters and hosts satellite events worldwide, fostering international dialogue on how AI is transforming access to information.

The 2026 edition will also commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Information for All Programme and the seventh staging of the conference.

According to Mr. Green, this year’s programme will build on six years of archived content, comprising nearly 420 speaker contributions and dozens of international events, transforming that body of knowledge into a continuous ‘Relay of Ideas’.

The September 28 conference, which coincides with the observance of the International Day for Universal Access to Information, will feature two major panel discussions and the launch of the AI4IA Intelligent Pilot, an AI-powered tool designed to leverage the conference archive to generate new thematic narratives.

The panels, titled ‘The Map of Exclusion’ and ‘The Politics of the Pipeline’, will explore a range of issues, including digital divides, education and workforce readiness, legal accountability, intellectual property, creative industries, human cognition, digital rights and ethical frameworks.

Mr. Green said the way forward for Caribbean media must be guided by trust, authenticity and sustainable support for journalism, as the region builds its own AI capacity, infrastructure and culturally relevant regulatory frameworks.

The seventh AI4IA Conference is being convened under the auspices of UNESCO’s Cluster Office for the Caribbean and Regional Office for Southern Africa, in partnership with the BCJ.