According to the Chinese calendar, 2026 is the Year of the Fire Horse. I can definitely say that for me, this year has started off at a gallop! It’s been a busy March in terms of travel: PLUS sessions in New York, meetings in Bermuda, and a team offsite last week in which our product team collectively imagined the future of cyber insurance and our role in it. Now back at my desk (safely, gratefully, and with no major flight delays), I’m taking stock of everything I heard, everything we discussed, and how to make sense of where we are as an industry.
Going into PLUS, I was genuinely curious whether the conversation around cyber insurance would feel materially different from where it has been over the past few years. Generally, it did not. The themes were familiar: soft market conditions, strong competition, and plentiful capacity. Unlike the previous soft market cycle prior to 2020, though, there is relatively little product innovation happening that I can see.
Insurers are competing on pricing, sublimits, and how much non-IT CBI (contingent business interruption) to throw in, but we are not seeing much in the way of novel coverage concepts or structural reinvention. (An exception would be some novel structures for non-proportional reinsurance over the last year.) In some ways, it feels as though cyber insurance has matured into a stable, proven line of business — which is an achievement in itself — but one that is starting to look staid. This is particularly striking at a time when the technology environment is changing exponentially due to the advent of agentic AI.
To be clear, cyber insurance is doing what it was designed to do. It is helping customers navigate skilfully through some of the most stressful and consequential moments they will ever face, and restore their systems and operations to continue doing good work in the world. This is true whether the proverbial “bad day” involves a ransomware attack, a privacy-related lawsuit, complex business interruption losses, or all of the above and a lot more.
The policies themselves are multi-faceted and often more complex than many initially realized, particularly as business interruption coverage has been tested in recent years. Yet the overall sentiment from market participants is that the product is functioning as intended. That is good news for the industry and for the clients we collectively serve.
And yet I sit with a lingering question: is this it? Are cyber (re)insurers now going to ride soft and hard market cycles in a relatively stagnant manner?
Technology Is Moving Faster Than the Market Conversation
As I contemplate the future of the cyber insurance market, I’m also reviewing what's happening in the broader technology landscape. Not a day goes by without a new paper or discovery in AI, not a week without a new corporate announcement of some kind. We're in the midst of one of the most transformative periods of technology in the modern era, probably of our lives. AI comes up in nearly every conversation I have, whether with colleagues, clients, or parents at our daughter’s school. This is literally the epitome of an exponential growth curve; capabilities are doubling every few months12.
I can't help but wonder, is insurance missing the boat?
Insurance needs to be here to support 21st century risks or lose relevance and be relegated to the physical world only. For example, while insurance has helped with the rapid expansion of data centers, where will insurance go once those data centers are built, and AI compute loads are exponentially bigger than they are right now?
Risk is increasingly intertwined with the digital and physical worlds, and the economic landscape is changing quickly. We are here for that, and we are excited to discover and shape the future of insurance together with our clients. We look forward to creating a world that is resilient to technological harm, and that works for everybody, where insurance can play its role in creating economic stability and opportunity.
At CyberCube, we believe insurance should not miss this moment. We see our role as a close thought and analytical partner to the insurance industry, helping understand and navigate risks that are increasingly defined by technology rather than confined to it.
Aligning Product and Analytics for the Next Chapter
That ambition underpins my new and expanded role as Head of Product & Analytics at CyberCube. In addition to continuing to lead our Analytics function, I will now also oversee Product Management. Bringing Product and Analytics into closer alignment ensures that the questions we investigate, the models we build, and the solutions we deliver are tightly focused on areas that matter most. Product helps define where client demand and market opportunity intersect, while Analytics provides the rigor and quantitative foundation to address those needs in ways that support underwriting, capital allocation, and portfolio management decisions.
As we consider the company’s next phase of growth, having these teams in lockstep is essential. We have already built multiple category-leading products powered by our analytics, and our ambition now is to press our advantage in those existing categories while also setting a compelling vision for where technology risk — and insurance’s response to it — is heading next.
For our clients, this means both continuity and expansion. We will continue to deepen our work in areas where we have earned the market’s trust, particularly around cyber catastrophe risk, which remains a central constraint on capital and a defining challenge for the line. At the same time, we will broaden our focus to examine how emerging developments (including AI-driven risk, expanding digital infrastructure, and the growing entanglement of digital and physical systems) reshape the exposure landscape.
Some of these questions are only beginning to surface, and few have clear answers today. That is precisely why they deserve attention now. My priority in the months ahead is to listen carefully to clients, engage deeply with problems that do not yet have robust solutions, and work alongside our Product and Analytics teams to ensure we direct our energy toward the areas that will matter most in the years to come.
Ambition in a Time of Fatigue
It would be easy to describe the current cyber market as fatigued. Soft conditions can dampen urgency, growth can feel incremental, and conversations can become repetitive. Yet I see this as an opportunity rather than a moment of stagnation. The market has matured, and CyberCube has earned credibility and respect that provide a strong foundation for what comes next.
Cyber insurance is working, and that is worth recognizing. But the broader world of technology risk is evolving at an extraordinary speed, and insurance has an opportunity, and arguably a responsibility, to evolve with it. At CyberCube, we are committed to helping the industry meet that challenge, strengthening resilience in an increasingly digital and interconnected economy while ensuring that insurance continues to play its essential role in fostering stability, confidence, and growth.
Footnotes
1 TechCrunch, The post-exponential era of AI and Moore’s Law. Available at: https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/10/the-post-exponential-era-of-ai-and-moores-law/
2 Live Science, AI can handle tasks twice as complex every few months. Available at: https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/ai-can-handle-tasks-twice-as-complex-every-few-months-what-does-this-exponential-growth-mean-for-how-we-use-it
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