IoT & Insurance at Liberty IT: from reactive cover to connected risk

IoT Belfast 31 put insurance at the centre of the evening, but the discussion was really about what happens when connected systems give organisations more information before something goes wrong.

Ben Bland and Carol Campbell from Liberty IT opened with the shift from reactive services toward prediction, prevention and protection. Their talk looked at how several technologies can combine to move some insurance services earlier in the chain, before a loss rather than only after it.

Rory Gallagher brought the discussion into the home. His LLM-backed smart-home project was a useful way to talk about agentic AI without abstract diagrams: where generative AI helps, where it becomes unreliable, and what those lessons look like when you take them back into enterprise engineering.

Phil Weir from Flax & Teal then widened the scale. His talk connected sensor data and knowledge graphs with the idea of insurable cities, where risk depends on relationships between places, infrastructure, events and the data available about them.

The three talks approached the subject from different angles, but all relied on the same basic condition: useful connected systems need trustworthy data, clear context and a practical way to act on what the system is telling you.

Liberty IT hosted the meetup at its Belfast office. The original registration record remains on Meetup, while this page is intended to hold the longer community record, including photographs, talk notes and links as they are added.