Building Before Disaster: AI, Risk, and the Future of AEC with Ben Gilliland, Chairman of Future Proof

What happens when 37 million homes are projected to be at extreme climate risk over the next 20 years?

In this episode of AEC Trailblazers, Valentin Noves, CEO of e-verse, sits down with Ben Gilliland — Founder and Chairman of Future Proof Property Intelligence — to unpack one of the most urgent challenges facing the built environment today: how to proactively retrofit and finance resilience at scale before disaster strikes.

Ben brings more than five decades of experience across construction engineering, software, structured finance, and venture capital to a conversation that reframes climate risk as a design and systems problem — not just an insurance issue.

The numbers are staggering. Roughly 37 million U.S. homes are expected to face extreme exposure over the next two decades. That translates to nearly 100 million people directly affected. And much of the existing housing stock was built using technologies and standards that are 60 to 75 years old — long before current climate volatility was imaginable.

Rather than waiting for insurance markets to collapse or premiums to skyrocket, Future Proof is building an AI-driven platform that combines:

• Multi-peril extreme weather analytics
• Address-level historical weather data dating back to 1950
• Long-range climate forecasting through 2100
• Engineering-based remediation planning

Through partnerships with IBM Climate Intelligence and The Weather Company, Ben’s team integrates predictive modeling with granular property data to create actionable remediation strategies — not theoretical risk scores.

This episode explores why remediation — essentially large-scale, engineered retrofitting — may be the only viable response to systemic climate exposure. Ben explains why floods in Asheville, North Carolina, and expanding wildfire zones in states like Colorado are signals of a broader structural shift in risk geography.

More importantly, he challenges the AEC industry to act.

If resilience becomes a measurable, financeable input into the building lifecycle, contractors, architects, engineers, insurers, and policymakers must collaborate differently. This is no longer about reactive rebuilding. It’s about proactive upgrading.

For professionals in AEC, construction tech, proptech, and climate intelligence, this episode offers a grounded look at how AI, engineering, and capital markets intersect in the next phase of the built environment.

Because the future of AEC may not be about building new — it may be about fixing what already exists.