Nine in ten C-suite executives globally say their companies are not adequately protected against cyber threats, according to Munich Re's 2026 Global Cyber Risk and Insurance Survey.
Cowbell, the California-based insurer focused on small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), launched a product that targets the gap between having a policy and understanding what to do with it. Risk Advisor, built into the company's OMNI platform, is an AI agent that synthesizes each policyholder's own risk signals - security findings, dark web exposure, connected tool data and policy context - and converts them into a ranked list of plain-language actions. It is available immediately to policyholders in the US, Australia, and the UK.
The standard criticism of cyber insurance for smaller businesses is that it's hard to buy. The less-discussed problem is that it's also hard to use. A small manufacturer or professional services firm with a cyber policy rarely has the internal security expertise to interpret a risk score, identify which vulnerabilities matter most or know where to start. The result is a policy that sits in a drawer - bought, but not acted on.
Cowbell's pitch is that an AI layer can do that translation continuously and automatically. Risk Advisor draws on what Cowbell describes as a global risk pool of more than 55 million businesses to benchmark exposure, then generates recommendations specific to each policyholder's configuration, including for businesses deploying AI tools, which can introduce new attack surfaces their owners may not be aware of.
"A 40-person manufacturer shouldn't need a team of cybersecurity specialists to understand the risks it faces," said Rajeev Gupta, Cowbell's co-founder and chief product officer. "This is how cyber insurance becomes an active part of a company's resilience, rather than a document sitting in a drawer."
The broker's role sits at the center of that gap. Awareness of cyber risk is high among SME decision-makers, but translating that awareness into active risk management is where the chain breaks, and that's a conversation brokers are positioned to have. Tools that give policyholders a clearer line of sight into their own risk posture can make that conversation more concrete, replacing abstract warnings about breach costs with a specific, prioritized action list tied to what the client's systems actually show.
Cowbell was founded in 2019 and has raised more than $200 million, including a $60 million Series C from Zurich Insurance Group. It operates across 25-plus global reinsurance partners and serves SMEs across the US, Australia and the UK.
