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CASE STUDY
Hacking risk Emerging risks are difficult to identify and predict, but a hackathon can draw on the power of crowd-sourcing ideas to provide fresh insights BY KEITH SMITH
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or many, the importance of emerging risk started with a third-order news story about a virus outbreak in a Chinese food market just over a year ago. For others, pandemics, the rise in obesity, the dramatic advances in artificial intelligence (AI), the impact of climate change and many other emerging risks have been in focus for years. Before COVID-19, a detailed explanation of how emerging risks could rise from nowhere with potentially devastating consequences, or yes, produce substantive opportunities, would have been required. Pre-COVID, two of the popular vehicles for such discussion on emerging risks were AI and climate change. AI taps into society’s fear of machines ruling the world and is rich in both threat and opportunity in seemingly equal measure. Climate change on the other hand remains one of the biggest recognised threats to global society. And while global discussions are dominated by pandemics at the moment, these other emerging risks remain very real and very important to many. One company has been working on such emerging risks for some time. AIR Worldwide is one of the world’s leading event-modelling organisations. That is to say they source and analyse masses of data to deliver important insights into how serious risk events might unfold. The company employs many skilled mathematicians and data scientists who, with sophisticated computer models, use
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While the definition of emerging risk is contested, the idea that analyses of emerging risks are characterised by a lack of data is not
Enterprise Risk
