AI consulting
We help organisations get real value from AI by readying their teams, services and governance, and building leadership confidence.
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Supporting GovTech Barbados to become an AI-native organisation
The client
GovTech Barbados Ltd. is a government-owned entity established in September 2023 to catalyse a whole-of-government approach to digital transformation and harness modern technology to improve the lives of citizens. Their mission encompassed everything from the introduction of new digital services to meet the needs of citizens, to building and skilling its government teams.
GovTech today
Public Digital has been working with GovTech Barbados since 2025. Over that period, we’ve supported its transformation from a team of one to a self-sustaining organisation defined by AI-augmented ways of working, which serves as a model for how resource-constrained nations can leverage AI to deliver enhanced public services.
We have supported GovTech to leverage team expertise and skills with the use of AI tooling for building new digital services, and they now operate as small, AI-augmented teams - building prototypes at pace, putting them in front of users, and iterating on what they learn. This tooling makes it possible for the GovTech team to incorporate design and product management capabilities, through opinionated AI agents that have been trained by experts in their respective fields, and which support the team with decision-making.
As well as bridging local skills gaps in user-centered design, this ability to harness AI has dramatically lowered the cost of early-stage digital services development, and cemented GovTech’s status as an AI-native organisation.
What we did
GovTech’s journey began in 2025, starting with laying the foundational structures for its organisation to function effectively. This included defining its strategic remit, organisational structure, and delivery model, building and skilling its teams, and initiating high-impact digital service beacon projects to build momentum for government-wide reform.
- 1
We helped scale GovTech’s digital team from a single person in August 2025 to over 30 in 2026, skilling the team in user-centred design and agile ways of working.
- 2
We supported the team to build and launch the first iteration of alpha.gov.bb in just two weeks.
- 3
We facilitated a new approach to procurement and Digital Public Goods (DPGs), pivoting to the iterative and user-centred implementation of a DPG in order to de-risk procurement.
- 4
We helped establish GovTech as an AI-native organisation, building a model for how resource-constrained nations can leverage AI to deliver enhanced public services, and how a small government AI team can work at scale.
We helped GovTech Barbados to establish its institutional design
With strong backing from Prime Minister Mia Mottley, our work with GovTech began in its very early stages, with a team of 1. Through digital assessments and stakeholder interviews, we evaluated Barbados' digital positioning to inform its institutional design. This discovery process enabled us to develop actionable recommendations for GovTech Barbados' mandate, governance, and operational structures, culminating in a high-level strategic roadmap to scale capabilities and prioritise key service areas.
We supported GovTech to meet its mandate of a “whole of government” digital transformation by publishing a digital toolkit for Government - including Barbados service standards, design system, and guidance on procurement - which ministries, departments and agencies can reference when building their own digital services. These standards served as a crucial input to the training of the AI tooling that the GovTech team now uses in the product development process.
At the same time, we helped to build a self-sustaining model for the organisation, including the delivery of leadership coaching to support long-term capability and scaling.
We supported GovTech to scale and skill its team through masterclasses and learning by doing
We supported the recruitment of new capabilities and helped them to form a multidisciplinary team of 20, including a GovTech leadership team.
We also helped to skill that team in the ways of working needed to deliver user-centred services at pace. Our approach involved both delivering masterclasses in agile ways of working, as well as working side-by-side with the team to facilitate applied training, covering elements of user-centred design such as service design, content design, user research, and interaction design.
We facilitated the delivery of high-impact services at pace
We prototyped and launched a new gov.bb homepage in two weeks, consolidating government services under a unified digital platform, and building entry-points to accessing services from a ‘front door’ homepage.
We helped GovTech to run beacon projects - small test and learn experiments - in order to prove the impact of digital services and new ways of working to other government teams, and generate momentum for wider change.
We supported the team to adopt a user-centred approach to those projects, conducting user research with citizens to ensure services were radically focused on their needs.
We helped the team to take a test and learn approach to adopting a Digital Public Good, transforming their procurement
Taking a test and learn approach, we supported the GovTech team and the Barbados Registration Department to run a 6-week pilot with OpenCRVS as a way to quickly learn what it would entail to replace the Civil Registration and Vital Statistics platform of Barbados.
In the place of a ‘big bang’ procurement exercise, we picked one service, birth registration, and mapped the end-to-end journey of a citizen through the process.
Using a service design approach, we were able to redesign the birth registration journey to start from the hospital, thereby saving the new mother hours of queueing at the Registration Department.
We helped establish GovTech as an AI-native organisation
By encoding Barbados’ service standards, design system, content standards and accessibility standards into Claude instruction files, we built the capability within GovTech for dozens of paper forms to be converted into working digital prototypes overnight.
In order to provide deterministic guardrails, robust engineering review, security and testing discipline, we brought in deeply technical practitioners from Public Digital’s network to help the team combine rapid AI generation with production engineering rigour.
Working with AI helped to transform the ways of working in GovTech teams. In the place of a traditional delivery process, we helped to set up 2-3-person AI-augmented teams capable of rapidly building prototypes, testing them with users, and iterating on what it learns.
