How AI is helping to predict wildfires.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Stephanie Hughes.

The wildfire risk mitigation company Technosilva helps utilities, insurers, and government agencies

predict where and when a fire could spark. It uses historical weather data to make those predictions

and suggest changes to help prevent or mitigate a fire. For example, maybe moving a tree branch

that's close to a power line so it doesn't

fall and start a blaze. The company is nearly 30 years old, and I asked Technosilva's chief

executive, Brian Spear, how the advent of AI has changed the work they do. The data that we're

training our models on is about 240 times greater resolution than the other

AI models that you hear about.

These are purpose built.

And the key difference is that we are, you know, we're building from the local scale up

versus the global scale down.

And that matters because the decisions our customers are making, they're inherently local

decisions around where to put resources,

where to evacuate people.

And what generative AI does,

it allows us to be able to have more speed

and the forecast that we're running,

to do forecasts much faster in minutes instead of hours,

update the risk more frequently,

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