The Cincinnati Insurance Company Partners with ZestyAI to Assess Wildfire Risk at the Individual Property Level
Mar 16, 2021 | 3 min Read
Oakland, Calif., March 16, 2021: ZestyAI, the leader in climate risk analytics powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), today announced that The Cincinnati Insurance Company has successfully integrated its predictive wildfire risk analytics solution, Z-FIRE™ across the carrier’s personal lines property portfolio. With Z-FIRE™, Cincinnati is able to assess wildfire risk using an AI model that’s been trained on more than 1,200 wildfire events across several decades and accounts for the property-level factors that contribute to wildfire risk, compared to the ZIP code-wide perspective that legacy models rely on.
“We were immediately impressed with ZestyAI’s ability to provide precise risk scores for individual properties at scale,” said Scott Schuler, assistant vice president, Personal Lines – Product for The Cincinnati Insurance Company. “Z-FIRE enhances our current wildfire risk assessment tools, increasing our teams’ confidence in writing more business for the independent agents who represent us while simultaneously giving homeowners more coverage options.”
When assessing risk, Z-FIRE considers building materials, topography, historical weather data, and critically, factors extracted from high-resolution imagery like vegetation clearance and mitigation efforts, which legacy models fail to evaluate. It then combines these details with actual loss data to derive a predictive risk score, giving insurance carriers a much more accurate risk metric to inform underwriting, while taking into account many of the home hardening efforts taken on by property owners.
“Five of the six largest wildfires in California history occurred last year. As the costs of climate change continue to increase, it’s critical that the insurance industry and its customers look beyond the status quo and embrace emerging technologies like AI to better understand the risks associated with natural disasters,” said Attila Toth, CEO of ZestyAI. “The Cincinnati Insurance Company has always been known for its progressive approach, and we’re proud of our partnership with them as they further cement their pioneering position, providing homeowners with policies that accurately reflect a property’s wildfire risk.”
For more information on ZestyAI please visit www.zesty.ai. For more information on The Cincinnati Insurance Company please visit www.cinfin.com.
About ZestyAI
Increasingly frequent natural disasters, such as wildfires, floods and hurricanes devastated communities and drove $2.2 Trillion in economic losses over the past decade. ZestyAI uses 200Bn data points, including aerial imagery, and artificial intelligence to assess the impact of climate change one building at a time. ZestyAI has partnered with leading insurance companies and property owners helping them protect homes, businesses and support thriving communities. ZestyAI was named Top 100 Most Innovative AI Company in the world by CB Insights in 2020, and Gartner Cool Vendor in Insurance by Gartner Research in 2019. For more information visit: https://www.zesty.ai/
About Cincinnati Financial
Cincinnati Financial Corporation offers primarily business, home and auto insurance through The Cincinnati Insurance Company and its two standard market property casualty companies. The same local independent insurance agencies that market those policies may offer products of our other subsidiaries, including life insurance, fixed annuities and surplus lines property and casualty insurance. For additional information about the company, please visit cinfin.com.