The first aerial photograph was taken in 1858, from a hot air balloon floating over Paris. That breakthrough is now making the insurance industry considerably more efficient. For the century and a half following that pioneering flight, the insurance industry assessed properties the same old way — one at a time, up close, by hand. Today, a single plane pass over a storm-damaged area can give an insurer an initial assessment that sets up all the ensuing work on claims to be faster, smarter and less expensive. As part of our emphasis on the massive opportunities for operational efficiency in insurance, we focus on aerial imagery this month. To understand how far the technology has come — and how much further it can go — we turned to Patrick Gill, senior VP and general manager of insurance & commercial solutions at Eagleview, which has spent two decades flying proprietary camera technology over the U.S. and Canada. Gill is candid about where the industry stands today: smarter than it was three years ago but still in an in-between state. The real transformation lies just ahead — in the shift from static snapshots to continuous change detection at scale. A roof slowly degrading. A tree creeping toward a structure. Defensible wildfire space opening up. These are the kinds of signals that will eventually reshape not just claims but underwriting itself. | 
