Berkshire Hathaway Homestate Companies will enhance their understanding of climate risks at the individual commercial property level.

The Berkshire Hathaway Homestate Companies (BHHC), a group of six insurance carriers that are part of the Berkshire Hathaway insurance group, will use Zesty.ai’s AI-driven models that predict climate risks for specific properties. (Yahoo! Finance)

Zesty: AI-driven climate risk prediction

In recent years, there have been mounting losses from secondary climatic perils such as wildfires, severe convective storms, and floods. These are separate from, and additional to primary risks such as hurricanes and earthquakes.

In 2020 alone, secondary perils caused $97 billion in insured losses, according to Zesty.ai.

Though models for risk analysis of primary perils exist, secondary perils were hitherto mostly uncharted territory. Zesty has pioneered the use of AI and computer vision in the development of risk models for these risks. The technology enables the use of data such as aerial imagery, weather, and real estate along with property insights, such as roof pitch, building height, parcel slope, and more. Added to the mix is Zesty’s proprietary database of actual loss data.

The resultant risk model, for example Zesty’s Z-FIRE, which trained on more than 1,400 wildfire events, takes into account property-level factors that contribute to wildfire risk including building materials, historical weather data, and factors extracted from aerial imagery like vegetation.

The model combines these details to generate a property-specific predictive risk score.

Attila Toth, Founder & CEO of Zesty.ai, commented on BHHC’s selection of the company’s products: “Their understanding of commercial property insurance combined with our AI-powered climate risk analytics will drive substantial value for their customers while giving BHHC a true edge in risk selection.”

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