Fighting fire with insight: Outsmarting wildfire risk with AI

About the event:

Wildfire has become one of the most volatile and costly perils in U.S. property insurance. This year’s Palisades and Eaton fires highlighted the risk of urban conflagration, where wildfire spreads rapidly through dense urban neighbourhoods and drives correlated losses across portfolios. Climate-driven uncertainty, shifting regulations and the expansion of FAIR plans are adding to portfolio complexity. For London Market re/insurers, this means more opportunity to provide coverage but an increased need to assess and manage risk.

Advances in property data, climate science and artificial intelligence (AI) now make it possible to model wildfire risk with increasing precision.

Our upcoming networking event, in partnership with ZestyAI, will explore how London Market insurers, reinsurers and capital providers can apply these advances to improve portfolio resilience. We’ll look at lessons from U.S. carriers, how AI-driven models are already being deployed, and the implications for underwriting, reinsurance and capital allocation.

Key discussion topics:

• Practical frameworks for differentiating strong vs. weak wildfire risks.
• How advanced models can reduce adverse selection and portfolio volatility.
• How reinsurers, insurers, and capital providers can each apply property-level insights to strengthen their position.
• Which mitigation measures materially change loss outcomes, and how to evaluate them.
• Communicating risk quality and rationale to boards, brokers and regulators.

This event is for underwriters, exposure managers, reinsurers, brokers and capital providers with U.S. property portfolios, or anyone interested in how climate risk and AI are shaping specialty insurance.

ZestyAI has developed Z-FIRE™, a wildfire model trained on the world’s largest wildfire loss database. It generates risk scores at both the community and property level, enriching exposure records with up to 71 property attributes, from roof condition to vegetation density, to provide a clearer view of vulnerability and hazard.