Progressing climate change increases the unpredictability of the weather and has an increasingly severe impact on agricultural processes. According to Eurostat, as a result of extreme weather phenomena in the season 2020/2021, the production of certain cereals in the European Union fell by more than 30%. Droughts, torrential rains, hurricanes, wet winters - all this has a direct impact on the income of millions of farmers, as well as the availability and prices of food.
PZU pays a special attention to solutions that cover risks in agriculture because Poland is the second biggest country in EU in terms of number of people employed in agriculture (around 10% of all people employed). As the biggest insurer in Central Eastern Europe we constantly look for solutions that can make our process of agro claims handling more efficient. Fast and adequate compensation is essential both to avoid the insolvency of hundreds of thousands of households and to ensure the possibility of seeding after a damage.
Catastrophic weather phenomena generating mass damages are becoming more and more intense, and the standard agricultural damage verification process is long, imprecise and hard to scale. So far our experts had to spend long hours on field in order to assess the damage. In case of situation when thousands of farmers were affected by the weather this resulted in long waiting time for the service.
However, now, by combining artificial intelligence and space technology, we are able to analyse thousands of satellite images simultaneously. We trained AI on the basis of claims data collected in many years at PZU. Thanks to that our algorithms are able to track the history of a field before the catastrophic phenomena and analyse it after the damage. Comparison of these images lets us to precisely calculate the damaged area on the filed even in case of large fields and supports our employees in quick calculation of the compensation. Our experts have access to conducted AI analysis both on their laptops and via mobile app and thanks to that they can easily confirm the claim already on the field with a client. Time required for claim handling process could be even 2 times shorter so we are able to handle significantly more claims in the same time and farmers can receive compensation in few days after the damage happened. Additionally, the tool ensures that damage is assessed on the basis of precise data and a proper amount of compensation is paid out.
