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. GlobalData's 2025 UK SME Insurance Survey found cyber insurance penetration rising sharply with firm size: 13.1% of sole traders hold cover, against 26.4% of micro firms, 40.1% of small firms and 63% of medium-sized firms - leaving the smallest businesses, which often have the weakest cyber controls, the least protected.
Separately, the UK's Department for Science, Innovation and Technology found 42% of small businesses experienced a breach or cyberattack in 2025, while research from Grant Thornton found 35% of UK SMEs carry no cyber insurance at all. The UK cyber insurance market itself is projected to grow from an estimated $22.2 billion in 2025 to $35.4 billion by 2030, according to a Strategic Intelligence report published in late 2025, driven substantially by rising SME awareness.
The Association of British Insurers, in a January 2026 review of SME under- and non-insurance conducted by Public First, found that low take-up across UK SMEs is driven mainly by a lack of awareness of relevance, while underinsurance among those who do buy cover often stems from businesses not understanding what they've bought, deliberately insuring below their actual risk, or failing to update cover as circumstances change.
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 across markets, including several insurers active in the UK that combine continuous risk monitoring with coverage. 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, including growing UK regulatory attention on how insurers document and govern AI use 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.
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.
