New analysis reveals AI's transformative potential to enhance infrastructure planning, response, and recovery, offering a strategic path to minimizing future natural disaster costs.

Key takeaways

, /PRNewswire/ -- Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) could help global leaders fortify infrastructure to plan, respond, and recover quickly and decisively to more frequent and intense natural disasters, preventing approximately US$70 billion in infrastructure losses annually by 2050, according to a new report from the Deloitte Center for Sustainable Progress: AI for infrastructure resilience. The assessment uses empirical case studies, probabilistic risk modeling, and economic forecasting to demonstrate how AI-enabled infrastructure resilience can unlock economic, environmental, and societal benefits and underscores the need to invest in resilience to most effectively mitigate loss and damage.

"AI-enabled infrastructure resilience can transform how leaders protect their communities from the growing risk of extreme weather," says Jennifer Steinmann, Deloitte Global Sustainability Business leader. "If deployed strategically, AI can help leaders identify risks sooner, optimize resources, prevent costly failures and disruption, and accelerate response and recovery times during natural disasters. Investing in both preventative and reactive AI-powered infrastructure solutions can help safeguard economic value and increase business resilience."

The case for infrastructure resilience investment is strong
As natural disasters are expected to become more frequent and intense, infrastructure will be increasingly at risk. Its economic value can also increase its exposure to different hazards, further increasing the risks. It is important for leaders to enhance infrastructure resilience to protect existing networks and future projects, help minimize disruption to operations, and mitigate economic damage, given the potential future impacts, including:

Using AI at each stage of the infrastructure cycle
Adopting AI technologies, from infrastructure planning through operations, can offer preventative, detective, and responsive solutions to help address natural disasters, providing private and public sector leaders options to proactively mitigate these risks. And the benefits are significant—Deloitte Global's report found that AI can help prevent damages of US$30 billion on average per year from storms alone globally by 2050. AI can provide leaders with options to proactively address risks across:

How leaders can overcome challenges to adoption
While AI can be a powerful tool to enhance critical infrastructure resilience, leaders should work in tandem to remove roadblocks to adoption that span legacy infrastructure, regulatory gaps, and financial constraints. Global collaboration across sectors is critical to unlocking AI's potential for infrastructure resilience:

"Coordinating across global stakeholders to develop AI solutions that complement other resilience options is important to boosting innovation and subsequently creating a more resilient future," says Costi Perricos, Deloitte Global GenAI Business leader. "With broader adoption and improved AI capabilities, projected annual savings in direct disaster costs by 2050 could reach as much as US$115 billion, potentially eliminating nearly one-third of disaster-related losses. This research demonstrates the clear economic, environmental, and societal value AI can provide—and leaders  should take action to help ensure minimal disruption."

To learn more, read the full report here: www.deloitte.com/global/en/issues/climate/ai-for-infrastructure-resilience.html 

About Deloitte Global AI for infrastructure resilience report
The report presents a data-driven, model-based assessment of how AI can help reduce the growing risk to global infrastructure posed by natural disasters. Leveraging empirical case studies, probabilistic risk modeling, and economic forecasting through 2050, the report quantifies how AI applications—from predictive maintenance to digital twins—could avert billions of dollars in annual damages. It offers a roadmap for public and private stakeholders to deploy AI strategically across planning, response, and recovery phases.

About Deloitte
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SOURCE Deloitte Global