Latest Articles
The Future Is AI. Your Customer Is Still a Trini…
AI generated everything is flooding our Trini feeds with it’s unmistakable chemtrail. Like a vendor at a traffic light, there’s no escape. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing (the vendor too – the one selling stuff, not the obnoxious windshield wiperman!). How are you reacting? Rolling your eyes because you can’t escape it, or indifferent to it as it’s just another new trend?
You’re not getting away from it here either; this article’s featured image was AI generated on Gemini (you can obviously tell); one prompt, got it right the very first image, which is what you see. It took less than thirty seconds from prompt to generation, no need for Photoshop to design from scratch which would have taken at least an hour before final.
Here’s the prompt too; a not much thought went behind it; it’s also the one and only draft, which shows you how skilled AI has become:
“A robot salesman inside a hardware store excitedly selling to a human. The store shelves are filled with tools for construction industry. The human is a Trini who is looking like he’s not impressed with the robot’s sales pitch.”
Now, never has a Trini adopted a new tool so quickly and widely; it took more than a decade to embrace ecommerce, if you can call it that, it was more like poking with a stick; we’re now embracing it. But not this time. AI is revolutionizing business and we Trinis all are all-in, AI graphics, AI captions, AI websites, AI agents. AI videos, AI voiceovers. AI everything.
While local businesses rush to embrace the latest technology, many are forgetting one important fact:
Your customer is still a Trini…
You know, by definition, a typical red-blooded Trini. We eat doubles, drop kids off to school, go to work, go to the beach, dodge potholes, bitch about the guvvament, and to relax, we ‘buss ah lime’. We are not sophisticated like AI; at the end and beginning of the day, we are regular human beings for the most part, very Trini in the rest, and we like to think of ourselves as unique.
Like regular human beings, we get excited with shiny new toys and easily distracted— but make no mistake, yuh cyah fool a Trini— well… in consumer marketing at least.
The Reality: your customer is still a human being
Broadly speaking, many universal behavioral rules apply to us. If you recall this legendary line is from the movie Men in Black: ‘A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it…’ It’s from this positioning the application of psychology-based marketing principles stem, i.e. on the assumption that people will be people. You are smart, I am smart, but as a group, we’re dumb and dumber. These are the same principles our own and world leaders use to lead us by the nose like sheep we are, selling us wars, Dragon Gas, and Yellow is the Code.
More narrowly, there are many nuanced culturally unique elements that businesses need to appreciate to market to us at our level.
Universal Rule- Customers care about themselves
Trinis don’t look for you, they look for the solution you provide. It doesn’t matter how generic or commoditized the product or service. Everyone can get the same basic groceries from at least two mini-marts in their neighborhood at the same prices, yet they prefer to shop at one over the other, and the reasons may be practical, preferential or plain illogical.
And for you, trying to reach them online, they don’t wake up wondering whether your company uses the latest AI model. They wake up wondering whether they can find what they need quickly and whether they can trust you enough to spend their money.
Trini Rule- Trinis don't have patience for your BS
Trinis see through all the smoke and mirrors you use to tantalize their brain. Your fancy social media graphics and flowery post captions don’t necessarily impress. Yes your website may look nice but it’s surprisingly difficult to find basic information. The navigation is confusing. The content is old and not up to date— very typical of TT websites— and filled with buzzwords but says very little. Yes your lofty mission is to exceed customer expectations by providing high quality products and affordable prices blah, blah, blah… meanwhile, a man just trying to find the product you sent him to get more information on from Facebook.
The Reality: your customer doesn't want to be impressed by your AI
If you’re using AI wholesale out of sheer laziness and cheapness, it’s going to come back and bite you. AI is a new tool; customers actually expect you to use it. But if your content does not speak to them then the message and the customer is lost.
Universal Rule- Use AI, being the new tool that it is
AI is so good it works like magic, even a miracle. It does great video, graphics, captions, blog articles, website layouts & content. It’s also super-great for analyzing data and generating reports. It’s a fact that it provides information and insights you would never have thought about on your own. You’ll actually be foolish to not be using AI today.
A tool is only as good as the person using it. You can’t ‘up’ and buy a whacker from the hardware to cut your own grass and use it like the CEPEP ‘whackerman’ making noise in front of your house at 5 in the morning. At your point of the AI learning curve, you may not be as effective compared with someone who is more advanced, but you can get decent results that would make a difference, which is enough of an incentive to keep at it.
Trini Rule- Mash your brakes with so much AI...
Trinis are already bombarded by AI content from every business, making it appear as though they are being bombarded by AI content from every business. Every single post from you doesn’t have to be AI generated, like, lawd, use your own brain a little bit too nah.
It’s real funny, but it’s not to much of a stretch that in the near future not using AI will be a flex.
Universal Rule- The goal is to help yourself and people with AI
You’re helping yourself by now having access to tools that you would have had to pay for. You can now quickly design a graphic with just a prompt without having to hire a graphic designer. In fact you can generate a month of content ideas and accompanying graphics and videos yourself. But that’s in theory; in practice, we at Forward Multimedia don’t use AI like that.
That’s the helping yourself part. But you saving time and money doesn’t not necessarily help you get more customers and sales. So emphasis should be on ensuring that strategy and content you generate, is strong enough to get you the results you’re looking for.
Trini Rule- Izza Trini
Put the item, put the price. Put the item, put the price. Put the item, put the price… you must have seen this Trini video meme frustratingly mocking the ‘inbox for price’ sales tactic some merchants employ still to this day. It’s another glaring example of how unsophisticated some of us are.
Pointing out this ‘unsophistication’ is not to offend, but is the reality. If you notice even in the last decade, regular brick and mortar businesses have not improved their level of customer service to global standards.
The Reality: AI is here to stay, in an extreme fluid state and not settled
As you can see, AI is evolving so fast it’s becoming dangerous. The US government shut down Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5 model release because its capabilities could pose a national security threat in the wrong hands, limiting it’s access from foreign nationals.
The scary bottom line is that it’s playing out just like predicted because AI has been in development for decades, only now is it widely available to the public. And to coin another movie quote, form Jurassic World: “You made a genetic hybrid. Raised it in captivity. She is seeing all of this for the first time. She does not even know what she is. She will kill everything that moves… She is learning where she fits on the food chain and I’m not sure you want her to figure that out”.
Universal Rule- AI has a long way to go before it settles
Don’t get comfortable with AI just yet and it’s only just begun. You would have observed that it’s only in 2026 that there’s such a flurry of AI activity; 2025 was relatively restrained as it was only percolating, and now it’s on full brew.
So don’t think you have anything figured out as AI is still figuring itself out. It might be a good idea to sleep with one eye open as the rate it’s going it’s totally possible it might rise up and kill us all in our sleep.
Trini Rule- Trinis always force ripe
To belabor the unsophistication trope, Trinis are always late with everything. Again, it took us almost two decades to get on board with ecommerce and even then it took the pandemic force us to adopt. Right now as we speak, all over the word, people are paying with their phones at checkout counters while we use the 30 year old Linx system like if it’s modern.
What we think we are doing now is just scratching the scratch on the surface.
Conclusion
It would seem like a long-winded way to essentially say stick to the core marketing fundamentals of knowing your customer. Trinis don’t generally need different marketing rules from what a marketing degree would teach. But specifically, you have to think like a Trini. And if you are a born and bred Trini, just think like you.
It means answering the questions customers actually ask instead of showing off technology they don’t care about. In the end, and in the beninging… in the begingning… aargh… beginning , customers don’t care that your online marketing or website is powered by artificial intelligence; they’d sooner have it powered by actual intelligence.
AI Detection Challenge!
Can you tell if any, and if so, where, was AI content used for this article? The answer may surprise you. Tell us in the comments.
