Artificial intelligence agents can cost big corporations hundreds of thousands of dollars to build.

Bermudian Dallas Scott is determined to build Personal Adaptive Artificial Intelligence on a shoestring budget, even if he has to work two part-time jobs to manage it.

The 27-year-old has been building Paai — his own Bermuda-oriented AI agent, for almost four years.

“Paai is an acronym,” he said. “I called it that because I believe there is a big enough pie for everybody to get involved in AI and have it work on their behalf for their benefit and productivity.”

Paai is based on what he calls a personal central intelligence model.

“It helps enable a lot of downstream opportunities for the individual,” he said.

Typical tasks might be summarising bulk e-mails, helping with administrative tasks, assisting with budgeting before a trip, or finding grocery deals in Bermuda.

Mr Scott said one advantage of using Paai over larger, more established models is that it is geared specifically to the Bermuda market.

It takes into account the 2016 Personal Information Protection Act that came into force last year, allowing for consent-based opt-in, and the forgetting of the user’s information when they are done with their task.

Mr Scott, entirely self-taught in AI, has built more than 70 different personal AI agents as proof of concept. Most of them are designed to handle specific roles within organisations, such as data scientist, code reviewer or financial analyst.

In recent years there has been concern expressed over the possibility of AI displacing jobs. Mr Scott acknowledged this.

“Half of Bermuda’s population are white-collar workers in international business or in the professional sector in some way,” he said. “Maybe a quarter of their workload could be automated. That has made me pump the brakes and think about what it would mean for me to release Paai.”

He believes that doing such a project in Bermuda has its advantages.

“Bermuda provides me a unique opportunity, given our sophisticated regulatory environment and our tech‑friendly, innovation‑friendly, business‑friendly professional sector, to manoeuvre faster than others in more kind of red-line or red-taped areas.”

Mr Scott has seen a rise in competition in the AI agent sphere in the past year. He welcomes it.

“Other products are often just first passes at the big idea, while Paai has been in development for several years,” he said.

Paai is in the late product-development, pre-launch stage. After building core concepts and architecture, Mr Scott is transitioning from building to testing. He is now looking for a design partner and planning structured early-access releases.

He hopes to do a full launch in the next six to 12 months, depending on how Paai’s soft launches go.

“If even one person finds value from Paai, what I have built will be enough,” he said.