AI helps SASRIA forecast national risks
The state-owned insurer uses AI, behavioural signals and social-science to identify conditions that precede national disasters.
The South African Special Risks Insurance Association (SASRIA) is utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze social and behavioural signals, with the goal of predicting potential destructive events, as revealed by Muzi Dladla, executive manager for stakeholder management at SASRIA. The state-owned insurer, in collaboration with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), is employing AI alongside human intelligence and social-science expertise to comprehend conditions that may lead to protests, unrest, national disasters, and damage to property and infrastructure.
SASRIA, which has a social mandate to cover risks not covered by traditional insurance, such as losses from civil unrest and national disasters, aims to identify these signals early to improve preparedness and decision-making. By analyzing social media and other data sources, SASRIA hopes to pre-empt major protests using AI-assisted social media analysis.
The approach combines social-science analysis with AI, focusing on information from social media and other data sources, which are then triangulated to produce correlated predictions that help SASRIA understand potential developments weeks before the event. Although AI identifies patterns in large data volumes, it cannot replace human judgment, as AI cannot independently apply ethics and fully comprehend the dynamic nature of human behavior.
The CSIR, a partner in the SASRIA project, works to build models using established scientific techniques and AI's rapid information processing capabilities. The ultimate goal is to create predictive systems that provide information humans must interpret and act upon, rather than dictating specific actions.
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