Concept: American property insurance and climate risk analytics startup Zesty.ai has unveiled a predictive wildfire risk analytics solution, Z-FIRE a data-driven model powered by AI and comprehensive fire science. American mutual insurance company Amica Insurance has partnered with Zesty.ai, to integrate Z-FIRE into its homeowner’s product line, enabling them to write policies more confidently, despite increasing wildfire risk in recent years.
Nature of Disruption: Z-FIRE is an AI model that is trained on over 1,400 wildfire events with historical loss data from more than 20 years. The solution analyzes property-level features = influencing risks such as historical climate data and topography. Also, considers critical factors extracted from high-resolution imagery such as building materials and surrounding vegetation in multiple defensible spaces. The platform generates a predictive risk score that splits risk to insurers, providing them flexibility in recognizing mitigation efforts taken by homeowners and respective communities. The customers can access coverage and premiums based on their mitigation efforts, empowering insurers to effectively underwrite and rate policies, avoid claims losses while streamlining risk assessment.
Outlook: With the devastating wildfires in recent years, there arises the need for accurately predicting and pricing wildfire risk. These insured losses from natural disasters had a huge setback for the insurance industry, forcing them to seek out innovative ways to assess the risk of all-natural disasters and mitigate losses. Zesty.ai’s Z-FIRE solution can provide insurers on how likely a home might be exposed to wildfire along with the probability of its damage. It claims to help insurers close the underwriting gap, better predict disasters, and prevent costly damage. Z-FIRE boasts to have higher resolution and accuracy than traditional models.
This article was originally published in Verdict.co.uk