Cowbell, a provider of AI-native cyber and specialty insurance for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), has launched OMNI, an AI-native Decision Intelligence System built to support underwriting, claims and product development across its specialty insurance business.
Built on the Cowbell Platform, OMNI combines decision intelligence, workflow automation, and governance in a single system. It draws on Cowbell's global risk pool of more than 55 million entities and is designed to help underwriters, claims advisors, and cybersecurity staff make faster, more consistent decisions across the insurance lifecycle.
The first application of OMNI targets a long-standing challenge in specialty insurance: underwriting high-volume, lower-premium excess and surplus business for smaller organisations, where per-account premiums have historically been too thin to support traditional, labour-intensive underwriting.
Specialised AI agents work alongside human underwriters to analyse submissions, evaluate risk, and gather underwriting intelligence, generating coverage and pricing recommendations that underwriters retain final authority to approve.
Cowbell said eligible quotes can now be delivered in minutes rather than the days or weeks typical of conventional specialty insurance workflows, and that new business has grown 53% since the platform's deployment - figures that are self-reported by Cowbell rather than independently verified, and worth reading with that in mind given their scale.
"Specialty lines are increasingly defined by bifurcation," said Jack Kudale, founder and CEO of Cowbell. "The market remains highly risk-segmented, requiring more granular underwriting as pricing pressure intensifies and loss costs, litigation, and volatility remain elevated. With OMNI, we are unifying intelligence, automation, governance, and performance measurement into an AI-native Decision Intelligence System purpose-built for specialty insurance."
Cowbell said the platform has also compressed product development timelines from roughly eight months to as little as six weeks. Bellwether, its internal AI performance measurement tool, is meant to track adoption and outcomes to keep AI-assisted decisions auditable.
Cowbell's push to automate specialty underwriting arrives against a backdrop of chronic underinsurance among the SME segment it serves. Australian Prudential Regulation Authority data shows cyber gross written premium reached just $32 million in the March 2026 quarter, accounting for less than 0.2% of total industry premium, with only around 6,000 risks written that quarter against 4.78 million for domestic motor alone - a stark illustration of how far cyber cover lags other commercial lines in take-up.
The 2026 Vero SME Insurance Index, which surveyed 1,500 Australian businesses, found 75% of small businesses take only an "ad hoc" approach to risk management, with almost 10% of businesses reporting they are currently underinsured. Vero's head of distribution, Anthony Pagano, attributed much of that gap to "a lack of understanding coupled with cost-of-living pressures." The same survey found 90% of businesses have no formal risk management plan and 81% rarely or never conduct structured risk assessments.
Separately, the Australian Institute of Criminology's Cybercrime in Australia 2025 report, released in June 2026, found that cyber insurance holding among individual Australians surveyed fell for a second consecutive year, from 4.6% in 2024 to 3.7% in 2025 - a consumer-level figure rather than an SME-specific one, but indicative of the same broader pattern of declining protective behaviour even as cybercrime harm grows.
Founded in 2019 and based in Pleasanton, California, Cowbell has raised more than $200 million to date, including a $60 million investment from Zurich Insurance Group in 2024. The company has built its business on continuous, data-driven underwriting rather than static questionnaires, reassessing risk on an ongoing basis rather than only at renewal.
"Insurance doesn't need another chatbot," said Rajeev Gupta, co-founder and chief product officer at Cowbell. "OMNI goes further by orchestrating decisions across the entire specialty insurance lifecycle." Gupta added that the goal is for each underwriting decision and claim to inform the next as the system continues to learn.
Cowbell operates in a specialty cyber insurance field where AI-forward underwriting has become a competitive differentiator internationally. Cowbell's own differentiation rests on its focus on the smaller end of the SME market and on continuous underwriting that ties pricing to a policyholder's observed risk profile throughout the year rather than only at renewal, as the company extends its footprint into Europe and Asia-Pacific.
Cowbell's expanded reliance on AI agents in underwriting comes as regulators globally sharpen oversight of algorithmic decision-making in insurance, an area APRA and ASIC have both flagged as a supervisory priority as insurers increase their use of AI in underwriting and claims decisions affecting consumers.
For carriers embedding AI deeper into underwriting, that trend makes documentation a live compliance consideration rather than a future one, regardless of jurisdiction.
A test case for AI-native underwriting at scale
Cowbell's rollout adds to a broader push across specialty and E&S carriers to apply AI directly to underwriting rather than confining it to back-office automation.
Its emphasis on human sign-off, paired with a dedicated tracking tool in Bellwether, reflects a wider industry effort to build governance into AI-assisted underwriting as regulators formalise how such systems will be examined.
Whether OMNI's reported gains hold up as the platform scales across claims and cyber resilience, alongside Cowbell's expansion into Europe and Asia-Pacific, will test how much AI can compress underwriting cycles in a segment long constrained by thin per-account economics and now facing closer regulatory attention.
