Ashish Agarwal is an accomplished Chief Technology Officer with extensive experience in the industrial automation industry. He has a robust skill set encompassing software development, start-ups, mobile payments, embedded systems, and mobile devices. Ashish co-founded Weather Risk Management Services Pvt. Ltd. (WRMS) and has been serving as the Chief Technology Officer since January 2016. In this role, he has been pivotal in developing innovative solutions to mitigate weather-related risks, significantly enhancing the company’s service offerings.
WRMS is a global company specializing in agricultural and climate risk management, with over two decades of experience. The organization develops solutions that incorporate advanced technology to assist businesses and communities in adapting to climate-related challenges.
With a multidisciplinary team of experts and consultants, WRMS focuses on identifying emerging climate risks, assessing potential impacts, and formulating risk management strategies aimed at improving climate resilience.
What inspired you to found Weather Risk Management Services (WRMS) in 2004? Were there specific challenges or gaps in the market you aimed to address?
Founded in 2004, WRMS emerged as a great response to the overwhelming demand for farmers and businesses to shield themselves from the uncertainties exploited by climate risks. Back then, agricultural communities and enterprises used to suffer from erratic weather patterns. Their losses were only compounded by scant access to reliable risk mitigation tools.
And in realizing that gap, we set out to create innovative technology-driven solutions for proactive climate risk management. We needed to treat data, analytics, and insurance-backed models as forms of empowerment to offer timely insights on climate risk and financial means to the stakeholders.
Over the years, WRMS has moved beyond agriculture, offering AI-led climate resilience solutions to various sectors that assist companies in managing climate-related disruptions. We are still leveraging IoT, AI, and predictive analytics to respond to climate change that threatens organizations and their sustainability, allowing them to make informed decisions in protecting their operations.
How has your vision for WRMS evolved over the past two decades, especially with the growing awareness of climate change and its impact?
Over the past two decades, WRMS has evolved from a farmer-centric approach to a comprehensive climate risk management organization. Initially, our focus was on providing innovative solutions to help farmers mitigate climate risks. As climate change accelerated, we expanded our expertise, integrating advanced technology, data analytics, and risk management frameworks to build resilient solutions for diverse industries.
Today, WRMS is at the forefront of climate risk solutions, extending beyond agriculture to sectors like travel, renewable energy, and insurance. Our vision is not just to protect livelihoods but to empower businesses and communities with adaptive strategies that ensure sustainability in an unpredictable climate. This journey has strengthened our commitment to delivering impact-driven solutions that help vulnerable populations navigate climate challenges with confidence.
How does WRMS differentiate itself from competitors in providing data-driven climate risk management solutions?
WRMS stands out with its data-driven and technology-centric approach to climate risk management. Unlike conventional models, we leverage cutting-edge analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and predictive modeling to provide accurate, real-time risk assessments. This enables organizations to make proactive, informed decisions in navigating climate risks.
Our customized climate resilience solutions go beyond assessment, offering governments and businesses tailored strategies to identify and mitigate physical climate risks. By integrating sector-specific insights, we help stakeholders build sustainable, long-term adaptation frameworks to combat climate volatility.
What truly differentiates WRMS is its multidisciplinary team of experts specializing in climate risk identification, impact analysis, and risk mitigation. We don’t just analyze climate threats—we design comprehensive risk management plans that enhance resilience, minimize losses, and create lasting impact for industries ranging from agriculture and renewable energy to infrastructure and finance.
Can you dive deeper into how SecuSense uses AI-driven analytics and granular weather data to help businesses make smarter decisions?
SecuSense is WRMS’s AI-powered climate intelligence platform that provides organizations with real-time, hyper-local weather insights and advanced analytics. By leveraging machine learning, predictive modeling, and satellite-linked weather stations, SecuSense delivers high-precision forecasts, empowering businesses to make well-informed, timely decisions in the face of climate uncertainty.
Organizations that integrate SecuSense gain a strategic advantage by identifying risks before they escalate. Its ability to overlay location-specific weather data with operational parameters helps businesses assess climate threats such as storms, heat waves, and floods. This level of customization ensures targeted risk mitigation, optimized resource deployment, and enhanced business continuity.
What truly sets SecuSense apart is its seamless risk intelligence framework, which spans early warnings, impact evaluation, and response planning. By providing short- to medium-term forecasts with actionable insights, it enables businesses to anticipate disruptions, protect assets, and reinforce climate resilience. With SecuSense, businesses don’t just react to climate risks—they proactively adapt, ensuring sustainability and long-term growth.
AI-powered tools play a pivotal role in WRMS’s offerings. How do these tools enhance climate resilience and risk management for your clients?
AI-driven solutions are at the core of WRMS’s approach, enabling precise risk assessments and proactive climate adaptation strategies. By processing vast amounts of climate data, these tools identify trends, predict potential disruptions, and provide actionable insights to minimize risks before they escalate.
For our clients, this translates into stronger preparedness and adaptive decision-making. AI-powered models analyze historical weather patterns, real-time climate variables, and geospatial data, allowing businesses to optimize resource allocation, fortify supply chains, and mitigate financial exposure. This level of predictive intelligence helps them build long-term resilience against evolving climate threats.
How does WRMS ensure the accuracy and reliability of its predictive models, especially in sectors where real-time data is critical?
WRMS operates within a framework built by standards according to IMD and WMO for the validation and reliability of predictive models. We aspire to the continually scalable IoT network through a wide array of AWS-based and AWS-based facilities across diverse geographies that render complete coverage and full and thorough data services.
Advanced data infrastructure with the ability to collect, validate, and store real-time data on temperature, humidity, rainfall, wind speed, wind direction, and solar radiation forms the backbone of our enterprise that makes sure our predictive models are based on precise and dependable data very much important to those sectors in which real-time information has a preeminent significance.
With climate risks evolving rapidly, how does WRMS use AI and data analytics to stay ahead of these changes?
WRMS applies AI and data analytics to monitor weather patterns and other climate variables continuously to remain one step ahead of the challenges posed by rapidly changing climatic conditions.
Our AI-based tools can recognize emerging trends and potential risks allowing us to fine-tune our predictive models and risk management strategies in an advanced way. This proactive approach ensures that our clients receive timely and relevant insights, allowing them to adapt to changing climate conditions and mitigate potential impacts effectively.
How do you see the role of technology, especially AI, evolving in the future of climate risk management?
Technology, particularly AI, is set to assume an even more vital role in future climate management. Considering climate risks have become more complicated and unpredictable, their provisions for vast data processing and analyses will be needed in the formulation of accurate forecasting models and sound risk management practices.
We expect advancements in AI to allow for better forecasting, optimal resource allocation, and greater resilience against climate threats. From our side at WRMS, we will continue to stay at the forefront of these scientific advances to ensure our clients receive the best solutions available.
What new opportunities do you foresee for businesses in leveraging data-driven climate resilience strategies?
Organizations that integrate data-backed resilience strategies can unlock significant advantages, from risk-proofing operations to enhancing regulatory compliance. Predictive analytics and scenario modeling enable businesses to anticipate disruptions, improve decision-making, and ensure long-term financial stability in an increasingly volatile climate landscape.
Additionally, investing in supply chain resilience and sustainable infrastructure strengthens business continuity while boosting corporate reputation and investor confidence. By proactively addressing climate risks, companies can not only safeguard their assets but also position themselves as industry leaders in sustainability and responsible governance.
Are there any emerging trends or technologies you’re particularly excited about that could revolutionize the way we manage climate risks?
I am quite optimistic about some of the key trends and upstream technologies poised to disrupt climate risk management. AI and ML are changing the game with endless predictions and responses to climate risks by crunching through massive datasets to anticipate such events as droughts and floods. IoT-enabled devices are playing an increasingly prominent role in offering real-time environmental data to enable quality decision-making. Earth Observation offered by drones and satellites creates high-resolution images that can be used for assessing climate effects and planning for future risks.
Simple advanced computing and data analytics offer sophisticated approaches to climate risk assessment while climate-resilient infrastructural assets fall back as a means to lessen the impacts of extreme weather events. New insurance products for climate risk are coming along to support businesses and communities in climate-related events’ recovery. These waves of innovations are only upgrading our ability to manage climate risk and nurture a culture of resilience and sustainability.
We at WRMS Global are dedicated to leveraging these technologies toward building a safer and more sustainable world.
Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit WRMS.