Top things C-suite leaders need to know now about extreme weather

Record date: 8/5/25
Air date: 9/24/25

Extreme weather is not a distant threat but an immediate business concern, requiring proactive strategies from leaders and boards to protect assets and maintain a competitive advantage. As climate-related
disasters become more frequent and severe, organizations must rethink their approach to resilience and long-term planning so they can meet tomorrow prepared.

Listen to the latest Future of Risk podcast in our Extreme Weather miniseries where host Arooran "Aroo" Sivasubramaniam, Head of Zurich Resilience Solutions is joined by Adam Aronson, Chief Executive Officer of Arrowsight, to discuss the real-world challenges and solutions that help businesses weather these storms.

In this miniseries, other episodes include:

8/27/25: Immediate risks extreme weather poses to your business
9/10/25: How extreme weather impacts construction
10/8/25: Resilient: How extreme weather is affecting cities

Guest:

Adam Aronson
Chief Executive Officer
Arrowsight
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Mr. Aronson founded Arrowsight Inc. in 2002, and its predecessor company, ParentWatch Inc., in 1998. He is the former Managing Director and founder of two hedge funds that he managed in the 1990‘s. Earlier in his career he worked at Credit Suisse First Boston as a foreign currency trader. Mr. Aronson received a Bachelor of Arts in History and Economics from the University of Vermont.

Host:

Arooran ”Aroo” Sivasubramaniam
Head of Zurich Resilience Solutions
Zurich North America
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As Head of Zurich Resilience Solutions for North America, Arooran Sivasubramaniam is responsible for the direction, growth and management of business resilience services to establish ZRS NA as a leader and trusted partner in the evolving risk prevention space.

(PLEASE NOTE: This is an edited podcast transcript, capturing speakers with natural speech patterns that may include incomplete sentences and/or asides, grammatical errors, verbal shorthand and some statements that may be less clear in print.)

Episode transcript

AROO SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

Over the last decade, extreme weather events have cost the United States approximately $1.4 trillion in damages, and nearly 200 separate, billion dollars disasters impacting the nation. Globally, it's much more. Clearly, extreme weather events are on the rise, and that's what we're here to talk about today.

Welcome to the Future Risk presented by Zurich North America. We explore the changing risk and resilience landscape and share insights on the challenges that businesses face to help you meet tomorrow prepared.

With this episode, we're focused on the role of senior leaders and boards who are responsible for the long-term strategic planning that delivers shareholder value. As the old saying goes, it's only when the tide goes out do you see who's been swimming without trunks. The right mitigation strategies can drive smart capital allocation and ultimately build a competitive advantage, allowing businesses to thrive, while unprepared competitors are distracted with the recovery and possible reputation damage. I'm Arooran Sivasubramaniam, Head of Zurich Resilient Solutions in North America, and today I'm speaking with Adam Aronson, founder and CEO of Arrowsight. Adam, welcome to the podcast.

ADAM ARONSON:

Thanks for having me and looking forward to the discussion.

The power of proactive risk management

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

So, let's jump right in. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and a brief description of Arrowsight so the audience can understand.

ARONSON:

That's great. I actually started in a completely different industry. In the 1990s, I was in the finance world and worked at a big investment bank and then started and ran a couple of hedge funds. And then in the early 2000s, I founded our company, Arrowsight. The main focus of our business is working in multiple industries that are all very safety centric and using a whole services platform that we built over 20 years called Remote Video Coaching, which essentially is putting cameras in the workplace focused on the work zones that can cause very, very severe adverse events that in the insurance world can turn into insurance claims. And so, in the food manufacturing world we're putting fixed point cameras in, you know, high risk work areas with the intent of reducing the risk of food recalls. In hospitals, we primarily get cameras placed inside operating rooms to help mitigate the risk of wrong sided surgeries and also surgical site infections and then more recently in the last seven or eight years, we've gotten very heavily focused on the construction industry. And this is where we've done most of the work with Zurich in a great partnership, really, working in multiple different types of construction from civil to infrastructure to building construction to prevent and mitigate the risk of catastrophic injuries and fatalities. And so, to do this, we essentially have a mix of – we call it like a hybrid AI and human in the loop – solution where in some cases we only use the humans and sometimes we mainly use AI but, in a lot of cases, it's hybrid where the humans are making sure that the AI is working accurately, but the end product is always the same.

And what it is in the morning, providing a small number of coaching clips that are used to, sent to frontline supervisors to help coach their team members, to be safer and to reduce the risk of adverse events, whether again, it's food safety or patient safety or worker safety. It's all basically a risk management approach. And we've had really fantastic results with partners in multiple industries, and more recently, with this great partnership that we have with Zurich in significantly mitigating risk. And so, really happy to again be included on a podcast like this. And I guess the final thing to sort of describe how we do our work is all of the human monitoring that we do is in centers in other countries, very far away. And, we have a lot of considerations on continuity planning and redundancy, that I think will be a big part of today's discussion.

Strategic decisions shaped by real-world weather events

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

That's very interesting. Thanks, Adam. I think, you know, from my point of view when I look at your business, one of the things that really sticks out and makes a difference to customers particularly is how you don't just rely on artificial intelligence, for example. You actually augment it with human interaction as well, right? So, you get the best of both worlds and really supercharged our human capabilities. At the same time, you know, you mentioned about, the behavioral elements, right? So, you really instill positive reinforcement behavior, right? So, what's actually working really well as opposed to just pointing out things that aren't quite going — as you might like, right? So <laugh> I really like that approach that you guys take there. Can we maybe talk a little bit about how extreme weather might impact your business?

ARONSON:

Yeah, definitely. We have had multiple, major extreme weather challenges, in the 20 plus years that we've been in business. Dating back to kind of the first extreme weather event that we faced was in Huntsville Alabama, where at the time we had, the majority of our operations and seemed like a perfectly safe place to be minus — you know tornadoes which, which is a, a different type of extreme weather issue than the one we wound up facing. But in this case, there was a huge ice storm. It was 2014 and at the time, we were a smaller company and didn't have all of the redundancies that we really could have or maybe should have had at the time in place.

And essentially our servers back then, you were using more servers that were physical in your own offices and, and less cloud-based servers. And we didn't have a backup set of servers in our other office, which is in Westchester County, New York. And so, we gutted through a couple of rough weeks, wound up, you know, kind of getting duplicate servers and then, you know, working with the local ISP provider and digging a ditch so that we weren't, you know, sort of cut off at the end of the road. We took a lot of action, took on a bit of an expense to do that. And that was kind of our first wake up call. You know, that was when the tide went out and our trunks were down. It was a rough start, but we, survived it.

And then we were just, at that point in time, beginning to open our first, partnership with a third party, VPO firm in India. And it was in a place called Vizag¹, which is on the east coast of India, beautiful place. And within just a few years of having that center open, they experienced a severe typhoon. And it was, again, it was a big wake up call. These guys were incredibly scrappy. They had generators, and they, they sort of, again, gutted through it. We didn't actually have a breach in any of our ability to provide services, but it immediately prompted us to find another provider, not in a direct, you know, like in the exact same region.

And at the time, the only company we could find was also on the east coast of India in a place called, Chennai. Again, a wonderful city, but very prone to flooding. And so, we had a flood incident there, and they didn't get through it so well, but at least we had the Vizag operation, we still had our U.S. operation, so we were kind of all of a sudden in a better position as it relates to extreme weather events. And then when the one flooding event was so severe in Chennai, we decided to open a third center through a partnership, in another town, which was a little more inland, called Puducherry, and all of a sudden, we felt a little safer, a little better <laugh>. And then for a host of reasons, more business reasons and sort of wanting to be less dependent on third party firms, we then about two and a half years ago, opened our own company in Hyderabad, which is in the center of India and not near any of the coast.

And there's still extreme weather risk, more, more on the flooding perspective, but really not the same kind of typhoon risk. And so, what we did with almost a decade plus of rough experiences, we just made sure that the floors that we work on are higher than the ground. So, we're on the third and fourth floors versus, you know, right at ground level. Those are just sort of on the operational side, some extreme weather, experiences we've been through. I'll kind of put it back to you, Aroo, to kind of have any follow up questions on that. And then we could, potentially talk about some other extreme weather challenges that we have more on the hardware side, the video camera side.

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

It's very interesting hearing you say that. Often when people hear about extreme weather, they tend to think it's a, you know, long-term issue, 50 years down the road. But in reality, I mean, even this morning, right? Wake up, read the news, what's the first thing? Wildfires in California. We know about heat waves. There's, you know, a couple weeks ago there were floods. Obviously, we all remember the extreme cold wave, in Texas a few years ago as well. And so, it's here today. It's not a future risk; it’s actually something we deal with already. And what you highlight yourself is you're experiencing it all the time, or you have experienced it just in the last 20 years, several instances and as a result, you have made specific tactical decisions within your organization and how you allocate your capital.

ARONSON:

A hundred percent. Yeah, and in our case, you know, all those events that I just described happened within, I think it was a 36-month window. It comes in, you know, bunches sometimes, and sometimes you can go 10 years without it. So, to your point, it is here now, you just have no idea whether it's going to be, you know, that horrible situation with the California fires where LA like friends of mine lost houses. Or you know, some of the extreme weather stuff going on as we speak, whether it's the Canadian wildfires or the new ones out in California. So, yeah, I think the days of saying it's a one in a hundred-year event, <laugh> you know, the Chennai flood, and like two years later they had another flood. So, you know, it's, <laugh> it seems like it's like the one in three year, one in five-year event is more the norm.

Plug-and-play cameras: Rethinking risk management tools

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

You know, we don't mean to make light of it, obviously, but as an actuary I'm very familiar with a lot of these return periods, and when I hear them, I always smile. Because you know, you understand how much of an estimate is, and then reality obviously says something very different, right? I'm curious, so we obviously talked about some of where your offices are and how you position it, you know, very logical stuff you're doing going from the coast to Inlands and to higher up in the floors. Could you talk a little bit about, you mentioned the hardware part as well, so that'd be interesting for us to hear too.

ARONSON:

Yeah, definitely. So, a couple of years ago, we began a journey to create, for the construction industry especially, a much lower-cost services outside of the New York area. So, when we got into construction, just as a point of reference, the cost of insurance is extremely high in New York for a host of reasons. It's exponentially more expensive than it is outside of New York. So, while we were getting really great at New York, we also had some wonderful experiences and really great results in, projects all around the country. But we needed a lower price point. And in doing that, we had to come up with camera systems that were a lot, more like the air pods that you buy that just work the second you open them, and you hit a button, and you put them in your ear and it just works.

Versus complex systems that would need more programming, more troubleshooting when they go offline. And what we wound up doing is using [a] kind of an old school technology called body cameras, like law enforcement, body cameras used as job site cameras. And these job site cameras, they're very small. They go in enclosures, they're powered by a battery, and they need to withstand the elements, whether it's very cold or very hot, rain, wind. They have to be very durable. And so, we had really fine-tuned this in the New York area and used those more hardened systems, around the country. But in order to get a kind of more of a plug and play self-service hardware package for the non-New York market, we needed it to come up with a situation where if a camera stopped working, it could literally just be swapped out, didn't need to be programmed.

They already had a spare. And it's a five-minute process versus sending a field tech and a laptop and talking to somebody remotely to try to troubleshoot a video recorder-based system, which is how we do it in New York. So, to take this and fast forward it, we knew immediately that these little cameras had really smart technology in them that would turn them off if they got too hot. Which is a great thing because it could cause an even bigger problem, <laugh>, if there was any kind of malfunction and overheating. And so, they're very good at turning themselves off, which isn't so good for a business that's dependent on looking at the videos to try to mitigate adverse events and claims.

And so, in the beginning and this is sort of the wonderful thing about going into new markets and R&D, you can fill the gap with people. We said it's a self-service program, but when things went wrong, we would fill the gap and send somebody, we wouldn't charge them for it, but we knew we needed to figure this out over, really the summer months. You only have a few months to figure this out. And last year mm-hmm <affirmative>. Last summer we did a bunch of initial research, and this summer we really dug in.

The point is, it's really a game of understanding the conditions or realities of them not just hoping for cool weather <laugh> and really biting the bullet and just getting to work on the R&D side. So, extreme weather has pushed our limits, especially as we tried to meet the needs of you guys as partners and your insureds behind you.

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

That's very interesting and connecting back what you said even a bit earlier in terms of return periods, more than 100 a year, whatever it is, whereas now we're seeing it almost every year or every three years. If we look at even some of the buildings that are being constructed, right? The standards or the approaches of some of the architectural firms may have taken was based on, certain events happening once every hundred years, or once every 500 years, but if all if a sudden they're happening every three years, the building's ability to handle that is very challenged, right? I mean, even something as simple as if you think about hailstorms, right? The size of the pebbles are getting bigger and bigger.

And that alone, you know, many of the outside infrastructure buildings, were not designed to handle this, right? So, these are a lot of things that our customers are starting to think about. For example, where you locate buildings so forth, right? You could imagine, for example, let's say a food manufacturer, right? If they have a critical plant that supplies their whole network, if all of a sudden, let's say in the next five years we expect extreme heat in that location to go up dramatically, which you do see in pockets around the world, then you really have to ask yourself some questions because food production key component is water. And obviously when there's a lot of heat, water availability is down, and now it's not just down for you, but probably everyone else that uses that water supply.

And all of a sudden, you know, people are less willing to share that. And at that point, you have to ask yourself, do I even want to have this plant here? Or do I have to make a decision to relocate this asset somewhere else in the country or the world, or whatever it may be, right? So, these are all things that we don't necessarily think about, but it's super cool to see that you've gone through it, you're very familiar with these topics, and clearly, you're building a fairly resilient company.

ARONSON:

I appreciate it. It's hard work and you can't anticipate everything. But, when you start to see the smoke, there’s usually some fire somewhere and <laugh>. And, honestly, as you know, other business leaders are sort of trying to address this. I mean, the only kind of key advice I would be giving is just don't underestimate how severe things can get, and sort of imagine the worst and to the extent that you can afford to, plan for it. Really does pay off.

The executive team and board’s role in extreme weather risk management

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

Certainly. It feels like we sometimes think things are remote, so we kind of just put it back and almost hope it doesn't happen when it does. I mean, there's obviously the immediate challenge to you, but, you know, the knock-on consequence that I find are quite dramatic, right? So potentially reputation damage with customers, but also if a competitor is smarter than you, then they'll pounce on that opportunity, right? So, we all know business is a very competitive environment, so very smart to be on top of it. I'm curious, so Adam, you obviously have a board of directors, right? Given your background, you've dealt in the finance world as well. I'm curious, what do you think some of the questions that investors should be thinking about as they look into their own portfolios or just new investments as a whole?

ARONSON:

You know, that's a really great question. I mean, I think the board that we have is a very close-knit board. We've been together for over 20 years as a team. And so, we as a board of directors representing the investment base that we've got, you know, the main question that anybody would wonder about as it relates to how the board is handling, you know, evaluating risk management, especially around extreme weather, is redundancy, and contingency planning. If the board of directors and the executive team who are reporting out a couple of times a year with kind of update letters are not talking about contingency planning for an operational based business, something along the lines of what we do, those would be really great questions to start asking.

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

I know, I feel like, you know, extreme weather we often think is natural because it's so complex and we're still wrapping our head around it. We often just think of our own business, but in reality, it's far more complex and it's evolving. And if you think of our supply chains, for example, right? Leaders really need to start understanding and mitigate disruption across key locations, transfer out all this stuff, and likewise for boards and investors as a whole, I would imagine.

ARONSON:

Yeah, and it takes different forms, like whether it's a COVID event or a tariff situation. You know, the global supply chain, which seems so reliable, can immediately, like almost in a minute, just be disrupted.

And the other major aspect of risk management, at the board level, is always just sort of, okay, what contingencies do you have for your most important, key assets that you need, like, can you get — your my world — can you get your cameras and your batteries and your housings? Are they readily accessible in a global supply chain shock? Do you have enough on hand? Does your supplier have enough in the U.S.?

I remember during the COVID situation, there was a ship that had these batteries that we wanted, and they were like, kind of right on the shore. They didn't get to shore for two months, and we were like, we were okay, like we made it through, we had some spare inventory but we kind of sweat it. COVID wasn't an extreme weather event. It's--those things could be--very easily be, extreme weather related in some cases.

Proactive planning for extreme weather events

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

Right. We could study those to understand potential knock-on consequences, so it wouldn't necessarily be a trigger itself, but, you know, what could that lead to? So obviously COVID led to lots of supply chain challenges, right? What you highlight there--I'm curious, when you and your C-suite leaders, or when you sit down with the board and think about your three, five-year, ten-year plans, how do you guys take into account extreme weather? In addition to some of the redundancy components you mentioned. How do you guys tackle that topic?

ARONSON:

We're like at a good turning point, and this is a great example. So, we're making this big decision to migrate all of the third-party centers that we've been using to this one center in Hyderabad, which, because it's on the third and the fourth floor, it sounds pretty good, but within short order, we're going to want to have another center that will open up probably -- within a year, 18 months. So, we have some redundancy there. And you know, that's a real-world example. And the thing is you can't afford to do every single thing that on a whiteboard, seems like the things that you could do perfectly to mitigate risk. So, there's a lot of risk taking, and it goes on, as you make big decisions. You gauge that risk and you basically make business decisions based on those risk analysis.

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

I guess the key there is really to be informed, right? Obviously, not everyone's an expert, but to be informed to the extent you can know that, for example, hey, these things happen actually every day now. It's not a one in a hundred-year or whatever it may be. But what can we do right now? Well, look, Adam, I really enjoyed this conversation. If we were to wrap this up right, what would be — there's one thing you would want every CEO out there to really keep in mind when they think about extreme weather, from your learnings and kind of how you see it going forward as it applies to your business and the broader economy, what would you think hey, there's one thing you guys have to remember.

ARONSON:

It's sort of repeating something I said a little bit earlier, which is just to be very respectful of how severe things can get. Extreme weather, as we've been discussing in this podcast. It's happening kind of every week, every month, there's some kind of an extreme weather event somewhere. Just don't underestimate that it could come to your doorstep. And take the time, be thoughtful, pragmatically plan and financially budget for ways in which you could mitigate those risks. But any kind of an approach, which is, it could never happen to me, would be an approach that would be more concerning. And just hoping things don't — you know — go wrong, is eventually it does. And I don't know if too many places left in the world that are completely free of extreme weather risk factors anymore. And it's just, it's very challenging to say, I could just do it here, I could just do it there, and that's why redundancy and contingency is really the best approach.

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

Well said. And, you know, maybe to wrap this up I like to think that imagery is what helps instill messages the best. So, if we go back to kind of what we said earlier on, right? It's only when the tide goes out do we find out who's been without trunks. So, understanding that it's today, understanding the severity of it, that, you know, how dramatic it can be. Being prepared is really the best way for any leader to move forward in this world. And you could turn that challenge into an advantage, right, a competitive advantage by allocating capital smartly. So, when everyone else is down, you're thriving, right?

Adam, thank you for joining us today. I really enjoyed this conversation.

ARONSON:

Yeah, thank you very much for having me. I enjoyed it as well.

SIVASUBRAMANIAM:

And thank you for listening. If you like the show, leave a comment or review wherever you get your favorite podcast or drop us a note at media@zurichna.com. Stay tuned for our next episode where we'll have a deep discussion with Alex Mirescu, Head of Extreme Weather and Climate for Zurich Resilience Solutions. And Dan Zarrilli, the former Chief Resilience Officer of New York City, about the risk municipalities face due to extreme weather. This has been Future of Risk presented by Zurich North America.

1. Hatangadi, Hatangadi (21 February 2016). "Vizag's hidden history". The Times of India.