People and Property Risk Management Trends for 2025

Managing risk across people and property is an immense challenge organizations face today, as the human element of planning, operations and procedures can often leave businesses exposed with undue risk. However, assessing weaknesses and deficiencies is an opportunity to create more stability and strength in your organization – and to help address risk (and related costs) before it materializes.

As experts in the space, we believe that making highly informed decisions about risk is all about leveraging data and technology to ones’ full advantage. Whether historical insights, general trend information or forward-looking scenario planning, data – along with key actions - presents a unique opportunity for organizations to ensure better business continuity for the long-term and achieve new levels of stability and safety standards.

With this, we’ve outlined a handful of trends that we think will continue to shape how companies approach property and people risk and how to embed a more proactive and data-driven approach to risk management across their enterprise in 2025.

Key risk management trends to watch.

1. Data-driven risk management – Data is transforming our world of decision-making, and its sheer quantity is overwhelming to many. But, by leveraging the power of AI to turn data lakes and stand-alone data sources into repositories of gold is a lofty ambition that is well within reach today. By unlocking data and analytics to gain insights into risks, to identify patterns, and to make more informed decisions, companies can take a more proactive and programmatic approach to risk management, and even adopt an adaptive risk management strategy when it comes to their property, infrastructure, and human capital assets.
2. Leveraging IoT solutions – The acceleration of Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud technologies continues to propel the evolution of risk management through highly responsive solutions. Within buildings, data can be utilized to monitor fire detection systems, equipment failures can be anticipated with predictive AI and water flows can be monitored and changed based on unexpected fluctuations. Wearable technologies can keep workers safe by providing insight into peoples’ working styles and even help to prevent accidents. With technology and data more broadly embedded into operational processes, IoT can play a major role in driving a more proactive risk culture for organizations.
3. Managing escalating litigation costs – Financial exposures and legal liabilities continue to escalate for companies. We suggest engaging in a defensibility claims review to improve your approach to investigating accidents and defending claims. This will help your organization to mitigate risk and ensure you capture information you need to defend claims more effectively – ultimately providing you with the potential to save significant financial resources and time.
4. Take a holistic view of your entire value chain – Business interruption scenarios can have a compounding effect on stability and predictability, especially when it comes to second and third-tier suppliers and partners. Therefore, continuity planning on your entire value chain is crucial to limit disruptions across your supplier network. An interdependency analysis enables the assessment of areas of internal vulnerabilities, while a supply chain analysis allows a broader scope considering external exposures. Both are highly valuable tactics to ensure your entire ecosystem can maintain continuity and limit exposures.
5. People factors play an important role – A safety-first culture is essential to running a strong operation. Human factors like culture, behavior, and decision-making are important and growing components to analyze in any organizational approach to risk management. Through deeper and holistic assessments of key human factors, risk management can become very pragmatic. For example, cultural awareness building and training programs, risk training, and incorporating human behavioral insights into operational processes can have a positive uplift on your workforce and broader risk management program. For organizations that take a true safety-first culture, quality and safety levels often reach new levels and can help in managing insurance costs.

Turn risk into opportunity and strength in 2025.

We see the areas outlined here as critical opportunities to build risk planning and risk management capabilities around in the months ahead. Whether it’s for the ambition to reduce your risk and protect people and property assets, or to simply be better prepared and have the peace of mind that comes with preparation, these factors can help you to have the resiliency needed to overcome the unknown. We believe this kind of preparedness and resilience will ensure employees, customers and suppliers have confidence and trust that you are as prepared as possible to meet their needs.