Catastrophe Modeler

Catastrophe modelers estimate how much money insurers could lose from hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires and floods. There is no government count of this job. The closest categories, financial risk specialists and actuaries, are both projected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to grow faster than average from 2025 to 2035: financial risk specialists by about 7% and actuaries by about 9%, against about 3.5% for all jobs.

AI is changing how the models are built. An Aon catastrophe researcher told the journal of ANZIIF, an insurance training body, in 2024 that the basic structure of the models has stayed the same, but machine learning lets modelers analyse vastly more data, and that checking and cleaning that data is still a big part of the work. Two studies of how people use AI chatbots at work rate the closest job, financial risk specialists, as fairly exposed: Anthropic puts them in its top 11% of 756 jobs and Microsoft in its top 22% of 785. Neither study looks at catastrophe modelers directly, and both come from companies that sell AI.

We lower this from 4 to 3 (Moderate). The old 4 rested on claims we could not find in any source, including that analysts were being "automated out" of the field. What the evidence shows is a job where AI takes over a real share of the data work, which will make junior roles harder to get, while demand for the people who judge the models looks steady. What would change the score: insurers or modeling firms cutting junior modeling teams because AI now runs the analysis would push it back to 4. Evidence of hiring growing as disaster losses climb would support a 2.