theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Actai Global | Lily K. Dash, Future Caribbean & Melissa Powell, Pocmi

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More from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: Actai Global

Lily K. Dash

Co-Founder

Future Caribbean

Melissa Powell

Founder & CEO

Pocmi, Inc.

play_circle_outline Future Caribbean 21-Day Agentic AI Buildathon: 450 Builders, 280 Teams Pitching at NYSE to Investors, Media, Caribbean Leaders

play_circle_outline Climate vulnerability in Caribbean: hurricanes, earthquakes, infrastructure challenges

play_circle_outline Secure Trusted Agent Systems: Partnerships, Commercialization, Accelerators, Global Deployment and Community Access

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Lily K. Dash, Future Caribbean & Melissa Powell, Pocmi

Lily K. Dash

Co-Founder Future Caribbean

Melissa Powell

Founder & CEO Pocmi, Inc.

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John Furrier

>> (INTRO)John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here at theCUBE's NYSE Wired studio in New York Stock Exchange. Of course, we are at Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. This is part of the ACTAI Global Series where the innovators are making things happen. It's very community-oriented. We've got two great guests here. The Future of the Caribbean is the big project, the 21-day hackathon, buildathon, building companies over a longer period of time, global agentic buildathon. We have Lily Dash, the founder of Future Caribbean, Melissa Powell, Human Intelligence Ventures. You guys have quite the project. Thanks for coming on NYSE Wired here.

Lily K. Dash

>> Thank you for having us.

John Furrier

>> Cool.

Lily K. Dash

>> Thank you so much for having us. It's such a pleasure to be here on this show.

John Furrier

>> The trade is going crazy. The NVIDIA stock and all the chip stocks and AI is up in the balance. But the beautiful thing is it's a real big entrepreneurial global market. And what I love about your project, is you did a buildathon, not a hackathon, a company building exercise over 21 days. Explain the mission. What's happening? What happened?

Lily K. Dash

>> Yeah, thank you so much. Okay, so we put on a global Agentic AI Buildathon, very much in the spirit of ACTAI community. And we said, okay guys, you're gonna come together. We brought 450 builders together to build Caribbean relevant Agentic AI solutions, Caribbean relevant, but globally relevant. So Think oceans, think energy, think tourism, finance, disaster management, relevant to the Caribbean but globally relevant. And so we're now here at the New York Stock Exchange. We have an event tonight where the winners are going to be presenting to a room of investors and media and Caribbean leaders.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. So they're going to be about— so it's like a presentation. So are the folks here like the delegates? Are they the companies, the winners? Who's here?

Lily K. Dash

>> So the delegates you just met, those are the select teams that have done the best. So the top teams are going to be presenting tonight. But we, at the event, it's investors, government delegates, UN delegates and media.

Melissa Powell

>> And it's important to note that we were able to— or Lily was able to pull together 280-something teams and help them with resources to do the build.

John Furrier

>> It's not just a community thing. This is money-making too. This is a commercial opportunity, but it has kind of a community vibe in the sense of you're working on problems in areas that are growing— finance, healthcare, energy, you mentioned. These are global issues, but it's not like just North America. Talk about the scope of the focus.

Melissa Powell

>> So, especially with climate change, a lot happens in the Caribbean that is as a result of what happens in North America. And so we do have to focus on that because we have extremities like hurricanes, earthquakes, and in terms of our infrastructure, it may not be as solid as what's in North America. So we have to work extra hard to resolve these things. So when we get Build-a-Thons like this that come up with solutions to help us and to help us to move the needle quickly, especially with a natural disaster like what happened in Jamaica last year. This is key to our growth.

John Furrier

>> So entrepreneurs and money follow constraints. They follow problems. Where there are problems, there are opportunities. What are some of the problems that might not be obvious to people who live in New York or California? You mentioned disasters. You have FEMA in the U.S. They have a whole global force, all kinds of things to solve that technology and human capital could bring to the table. Human intelligence.

Lily K. Dash

>> Yeah, the two— I'm seeing a few trends. Energy, some really strong new capacity, especially as we go more green. We're going to need grid energy management systems, prediction management systems, whether you're measuring how much sun is coming through. All of that can be managed digitally. New forms of exchange of green energy. Then the blue economy, the Caribbean has a huge blue economy. And as we look to commercialize nature and these new markets for nature that are coming down the pipeline, these might not be so obvious, but very obvious, massive markets.

John Furrier

>> You know, Bill Tai and I have known each other for a long time. About almost a decade ago, we both saw the power of blockchain. And there was a lot of international events that went on. Of course, you had the ICO craze, which kind of went the wrong way, and all the other stuff. But early on, the formation was very entrepreneurial, very technical. So you saw those early stages. But what was interesting is that crypto with stablecoins now kind of going on, there was already early signs of the finance side of it was booming where they wanted some sovereignty, they needed stability. So you had the money entrepreneurship happening. I noticed finance is one of the areas. How's that playing out in today's AI native world and all that?

Lily K. Dash

>> Yeah, I want to talk about this. I started in crypto in 2013, or smart contracts. Now, and that's very much Bill's ethos and where the world will go next. And tokenization, smart contracts, you have the blockchain ledger, which is the contract. And now we have agentic AI, which is very much the smart. And you have these oracles now that can make these things possible that might not have been so possible in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 when we were building out these tokenized markets. So, New York Stock Exchange is a great example. Now everything's going tokenized.

John Furrier

>> the crypto market has expanded so much to the point where even the early definition of fintech has evolved. Even crypto— talk about infrastructure. It's gotten so much more effective capability-wise, resilience. The mainstream market's coming in. So when you start to see that, it's kind of one. So now we're expecting to see entrepreneurs look at building financial stacks tech stacks, but also large-scale AI stacks. So,

Melissa Powell

>> and that's the main thing, right? Speed. Because we didn't have speed even when we had blockchain. We didn't have speed. I think Agentic Systems is giving us the speed that we need to catch up with the problems that we have.

John Furrier

>> And the resilience on the money side too. I see a lot of countries can get sovereignty in the digital realm. Yes. To actually propel and accelerate more entrepreneurship. What do you guys see there? Is this part of the program? People taking a lot of this stuff to heart now?

Melissa Powell

>> Absolutely. They're absolutely taking this to heart because they're also seeing— I think governments and all agencies are actually seeing the importance of this and to get on top of it, especially when it comes to even the governing side of it.

John Furrier

>> Lily, what's the biggest aha or not? Not aha. What was the biggest surprise that you saw on the Buildathon of all the companies, entrepreneurs coming through? What stood out to you? What was the big moments? Can you share some anecdote stories around some of the journeys, some of the projects?

Lily K. Dash

>> I think one of the big patterns that we're seeing is the future is going to be super. It's going to— fragmentation is going to be eradicated. Speed— we're taking time, we're compressing it down to zero. And so when we think about what we have in tech now, where we have individual different tech companies doing individual things, everything is going to come together organizations are going to have their own operating systems, their own brains. Countries are going to have their own operating systems and regions of the world are going to have federated markets like never before. And then you can stand up exchanges like this.

John Furrier

>> I love the operating system mindset because if you look at what's going on in AI right now, it's a systems game.

Melissa Powell

>> Absolutely not.

John Furrier

>> Build some new SaaS software hosted on the cloud. Everything is interconnected. The network effect, the communities, ideation. The physical and digital world have come together and it's global. An entrepreneur in Jamaica could connect with us in New York or Palo Alto with a click seamlessly. And banking solved that problem. Check.

Melissa Powell

>> Yep.

John Furrier

>> Settlement rails. We got to work on that. But payment rails are looking great right now. So we could run a company anywhere. That must be highly motivating for us grizzled veterans. But now the young guns coming out as the entrepreneurs. What's the mindset of some of these builders? How would you describe the mindset of the builders?

Lily K. Dash

>> Yeah, I mean,

John Furrier

>> young, aggressive, or old veterans back in the game, or—

Lily K. Dash

>> we have a lot of young guys, young, innovative guys. We also have some of the older guys as well, but with a mix of experience with the new world and the old world. It's interesting. And the really cool thing about the young guys is They're just re-engineering the systems. they have a

John Furrier

>> whole—they don't have any dogma. There's no dogma. There is no— they don't have the baggage.

Lily K. Dash

>> Yeah. What is needed? What makes the most sense today with the technology that we have today? How can we do this better today?

John Furrier

>> They ask the right

Melissa Powell

>> question.I think older people are also as excited. my father is in his 70s and he just said that it was like, imagine if I had this when I was younger. Yeah, there's so much more I could have done.

John Furrier

>> Melissa, that's a great point. So I was going to say that to that point. I've never seen this in my entire career and in my life. And from when I was a computer science undergraduate to starting companies, working at the big companies, the model used to be young guns get rid of the old guns right now because us older folks who had theory of AI, they didn't have the supercomputing. Yeah, they didn't have the decentralized infrastructure. So a lot of people are coming back in. Because they see the problems that they've been trying to solve that are now solvable, and they bring experience in. The young folks come in guns blazing. I'm going to— what's the problem? I'll get it out of the way real fast. And then you put them together. You put experience

Melissa Powell

>> withdurability, and that's needed, especially that fusion in the realm of agent systems going rogue, right? That's very important to be able to catch certain things, and experience is what helps you to catch some of

John Furrier

>> this.Yeah, it's more than just mentoring. It's just actually hands-on.

Lily K. Dash

>> And that's what we did with this Buildathon, right? Really in the spirit of Bill, we put on, we brought 200 advisors on platform. We hosted 600 one-on-one advisory calls with the builders and these advisors from NVIDIA, AWS, Citibank, J.P. Morgan. Innovation happens in

John Furrier

>> collaboration.We just gotta get a digital twin of Bill and all those experts, mixture of experts out there. Absolutely. All right, final question. What's on your future? How do you see this rolling forward? Obviously congratulations on a great community and Buildathon. Love that format. What's next? What are you optimizing for? What's the focus?

Lily K. Dash

>> Commercialization, commercialization, commercialization. So partnerships, deployment. How do people get involved?

Melissa Powell

>> Accelerators.

Lily K. Dash

>> You can go to our website futurecaribbean.com. We actually have a button, it says get involved. You can type it in. We have a WhatsApp with 700 members in it. You can click, it's right there. It's very easy to access. You can message me.

John Furrier

>> Melissa, what about you?

Melissa Powell

>> My main goal here is to make sure that all the agent systems that are being built are being built securely and that it's trusted enough so that when we take them to the rest of the world, nobody is asking, can we trust these systems or not? They know for sure.

John Furrier

>> So very trusted, on brand. Good. Yeah. Okay. Thank you very much. Congratulations. Big event tonight at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), the celebration, but also somewhat competition. It's gonna be presentations to the experts, media. We'll be there with theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.

Lily K. Dash, Future Caribbean & Melissa Powell, Pocmi

search

John Furrier

>> (INTRO)John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here at theCUBE's NYSE Wired studio in New York Stock Exchange. Of course, we are at Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. This is part of the ACTAI Global Series where the innovators are making things happen. It's very community-oriented. We've got two great guests here. The Future of the Caribbean is the big project, the 21-day hackathon, buildathon, building companies over a longer period of time, global agentic buildathon. We have Lily Dash, the founder of Future Caribbean, Melissa Powell, Human Intelligence Ventures. You guys have quite the project. Thanks for coming on NYSE Wired here.

Lily K. Dash

>> Thank you for having us.

John Furrier

>> Cool.

Lily K. Dash

>> Thank you so much for having us. It's such a pleasure to be here on this show.

John Furrier

>> The trade is going crazy. The NVIDIA stock and all the chip stocks and AI is up in the balance. But the beautiful thing is it's a real big entrepreneurial global market. And what I love about your project, is you did a buildathon, not a hackathon, a company building exercise over 21 days. Explain the mission. What's happening? What happened?

Lily K. Dash

>> Yeah, thank you so much. Okay, so we put on a global Agentic AI Buildathon, very much in the spirit of ACTAI community. And we said, okay guys, you're gonna come together. We brought 450 builders together to build Caribbean relevant Agentic AI solutions, Caribbean relevant, but globally relevant. So Think oceans, think energy, think tourism, finance, disaster management, relevant to the Caribbean but globally relevant. And so we're now here at the New York Stock Exchange. We have an event tonight where the winners are going to be presenting to a room of investors and media and Caribbean leaders.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. So they're going to be about— so it's like a presentation. So are the folks here like the delegates? Are they the companies, the winners? Who's here?

Lily K. Dash

>> So the delegates you just met, those are the select teams that have done the best. So the top teams are going to be presenting tonight. But we, at the event, it's investors, government delegates, UN delegates and media.

Melissa Powell

>> And it's important to note that we were able to— or Lily was able to pull together 280-something teams and help them with resources to do the build.

John Furrier

>> It's not just a community thing. This is money-making too. This is a commercial opportunity, but it has kind of a community vibe in the sense of you're working on problems in areas that are growing— finance, healthcare, energy, you mentioned. These are global issues, but it's not like just North America. Talk about the scope of the focus.

Melissa Powell

>> So, especially with climate change, a lot happens in the Caribbean that is as a result of what happens in North America. And so we do have to focus on that because we have extremities like hurricanes, earthquakes, and in terms of our infrastructure, it may not be as solid as what's in North America. So we have to work extra hard to resolve these things. So when we get Build-a-Thons like this that come up with solutions to help us and to help us to move the needle quickly, especially with a natural disaster like what happened in Jamaica last year. This is key to our growth.

John Furrier

>> So entrepreneurs and money follow constraints. They follow problems. Where there are problems, there are opportunities. What are some of the problems that might not be obvious to people who live in New York or California? You mentioned disasters. You have FEMA in the U.S. They have a whole global force, all kinds of things to solve that technology and human capital could bring to the table. Human intelligence.

Lily K. Dash

>> Yeah, the two— I'm seeing a few trends. Energy, some really strong new capacity, especially as we go more green. We're going to need grid energy management systems, prediction management systems, whether you're measuring how much sun is coming through. All of that can be managed digitally. New forms of exchange of green energy. Then the blue economy, the Caribbean has a huge blue economy. And as we look to commercialize nature and these new markets for nature that are coming down the pipeline, these might not be so obvious, but very obvious, massive markets.

John Furrier

>> You know, Bill Tai and I have known each other for a long time. About almost a decade ago, we both saw the power of blockchain. And there was a lot of international events that went on. Of course, you had the ICO craze, which kind of went the wrong way, and all the other stuff. But early on, the formation was very entrepreneurial, very technical. So you saw those early stages. But what was interesting is that crypto with stablecoins now kind of going on, there was already early signs of the finance side of it was booming where they wanted some sovereignty, they needed stability. So you had the money entrepreneurship happening. I noticed finance is one of the areas. How's that playing out in today's AI native world and all that?

Lily K. Dash

>> Yeah, I want to talk about this. I started in crypto in 2013, or smart contracts. Now, and that's very much Bill's ethos and where the world will go next. And tokenization, smart contracts, you have the blockchain ledger, which is the contract. And now we have agentic AI, which is very much the smart. And you have these oracles now that can make these things possible that might not have been so possible in 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018 when we were building out these tokenized markets. So, New York Stock Exchange is a great example. Now everything's going tokenized.

John Furrier

>> the crypto market has expanded so much to the point where even the early definition of fintech has evolved. Even crypto— talk about infrastructure. It's gotten so much more effective capability-wise, resilience. The mainstream market's coming in. So when you start to see that, it's kind of one. So now we're expecting to see entrepreneurs look at building financial stacks tech stacks, but also large-scale AI stacks. So,

Melissa Powell

>> and that's the main thing, right? Speed. Because we didn't have speed even when we had blockchain. We didn't have speed. I think Agentic Systems is giving us the speed that we need to catch up with the problems that we have.

John Furrier

>> And the resilience on the money side too. I see a lot of countries can get sovereignty in the digital realm. Yes. To actually propel and accelerate more entrepreneurship. What do you guys see there? Is this part of the program? People taking a lot of this stuff to heart now?

Melissa Powell

>> Absolutely. They're absolutely taking this to heart because they're also seeing— I think governments and all agencies are actually seeing the importance of this and to get on top of it, especially when it comes to even the governing side of it.

John Furrier

>> Lily, what's the biggest aha or not? Not aha. What was the biggest surprise that you saw on the Buildathon of all the companies, entrepreneurs coming through? What stood out to you? What was the big moments? Can you share some anecdote stories around some of the journeys, some of the projects?

Lily K. Dash

>> I think one of the big patterns that we're seeing is the future is going to be super. It's going to— fragmentation is going to be eradicated. Speed— we're taking time, we're compressing it down to zero. And so when we think about what we have in tech now, where we have individual different tech companies doing individual things, everything is going to come together organizations are going to have their own operating systems, their own brains. Countries are going to have their own operating systems and regions of the world are going to have federated markets like never before. And then you can stand up exchanges like this.

John Furrier

>> I love the operating system mindset because if you look at what's going on in AI right now, it's a systems game.

Melissa Powell

>> Absolutely not.

John Furrier

>> Build some new SaaS software hosted on the cloud. Everything is interconnected. The network effect, the communities, ideation. The physical and digital world have come together and it's global. An entrepreneur in Jamaica could connect with us in New York or Palo Alto with a click seamlessly. And banking solved that problem. Check.

Melissa Powell

>> Yep.

John Furrier

>> Settlement rails. We got to work on that. But payment rails are looking great right now. So we could run a company anywhere. That must be highly motivating for us grizzled veterans. But now the young guns coming out as the entrepreneurs. What's the mindset of some of these builders? How would you describe the mindset of the builders?

Lily K. Dash

>> Yeah, I mean,

John Furrier

>> young, aggressive, or old veterans back in the game, or—

Lily K. Dash

>> we have a lot of young guys, young, innovative guys. We also have some of the older guys as well, but with a mix of experience with the new world and the old world. It's interesting. And the really cool thing about the young guys is They're just re-engineering the systems. they have a

John Furrier

>> whole—they don't have any dogma. There's no dogma. There is no— they don't have the baggage.

Lily K. Dash

>> Yeah. What is needed? What makes the most sense today with the technology that we have today? How can we do this better today?

John Furrier

>> They ask the right

Melissa Powell

>> question.I think older people are also as excited. my father is in his 70s and he just said that it was like, imagine if I had this when I was younger. Yeah, there's so much more I could have done.

John Furrier

>> Melissa, that's a great point. So I was going to say that to that point. I've never seen this in my entire career and in my life. And from when I was a computer science undergraduate to starting companies, working at the big companies, the model used to be young guns get rid of the old guns right now because us older folks who had theory of AI, they didn't have the supercomputing. Yeah, they didn't have the decentralized infrastructure. So a lot of people are coming back in. Because they see the problems that they've been trying to solve that are now solvable, and they bring experience in. The young folks come in guns blazing. I'm going to— what's the problem? I'll get it out of the way real fast. And then you put them together. You put experience

Melissa Powell

>> withdurability, and that's needed, especially that fusion in the realm of agent systems going rogue, right? That's very important to be able to catch certain things, and experience is what helps you to catch some of

John Furrier

>> this.Yeah, it's more than just mentoring. It's just actually hands-on.

Lily K. Dash

>> And that's what we did with this Buildathon, right? Really in the spirit of Bill, we put on, we brought 200 advisors on platform. We hosted 600 one-on-one advisory calls with the builders and these advisors from NVIDIA, AWS, Citibank, J.P. Morgan. Innovation happens in

John Furrier

>> collaboration.We just gotta get a digital twin of Bill and all those experts, mixture of experts out there. Absolutely. All right, final question. What's on your future? How do you see this rolling forward? Obviously congratulations on a great community and Buildathon. Love that format. What's next? What are you optimizing for? What's the focus?

Lily K. Dash

>> Commercialization, commercialization, commercialization. So partnerships, deployment. How do people get involved?

Melissa Powell

>> Accelerators.

Lily K. Dash

>> You can go to our website futurecaribbean.com. We actually have a button, it says get involved. You can type it in. We have a WhatsApp with 700 members in it. You can click, it's right there. It's very easy to access. You can message me.

John Furrier

>> Melissa, what about you?

Melissa Powell

>> My main goal here is to make sure that all the agent systems that are being built are being built securely and that it's trusted enough so that when we take them to the rest of the world, nobody is asking, can we trust these systems or not? They know for sure.

John Furrier

>> So very trusted, on brand. Good. Yeah. Okay. Thank you very much. Congratulations. Big event tonight at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), the celebration, but also somewhat competition. It's gonna be presentations to the experts, media. We'll be there with theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.