PRESS RELEASE: Cyber insurers gain greater AI visibility at point of risk selection

Cyber insurers can now access greater visibility of AI technologies across an organization’s online assets following the launch of new AI detection capabilities from cyber risk intelligence provider KYND.

The new AI discovery capability enables underwriters to identify AI technologies present across an organization’s external digital footprint from a single domain, without requiring input from the business – providing an independently observed source of information alongside proposal forms and underwriting conversations.

The launch comes as rapid AI adoption creates a growing challenge for insurers. While underwriters are increasingly expected to understand how businesses are using AI and the exposures this can create, that assessment can depend heavily on what organizations disclose about their own AI use.

AI adoption can also move faster than organizations’ ability to monitor and govern its use. According to IBM, one in five organizations reported a breach last year due to ‘shadow AI’ – when AI is being used without formal approval or governance – while organizations with high levels of shadow AI experienced an average $670,000 in higher breach costs than those with low or no shadow AI.

“Every AI question on a proposal form can only tell an underwriter what a business knows and declares,” said Melanie Hayes, KYND’s co-founder. “Underwriters have been pricing AI exposure on trust because there was nothing else to go on. Having something observed on the risk itself changes where the conversation starts.”

KYND’s new capability identifies AI applications and features visible across an organization’s infrastructure, including AI assistants and chatbots, generative AI tools, AI within marketing and commerce technology, and the AI crawlers permitted by its infrastructure.

The launch builds on KYND’s research into the emergence of silent AI exposure within insurance portfolios. Its recent white paper, The Wild West of AI Risk, warned that businesses are adopting AI faster than they disclose it, potentially leaving exposure unidentified during underwriting and allowing concentrations to develop across insurers’ portfolios.

While that research highlighted the visibility challenge facing the market, KYND’s latest capability is designed to help insurers begin addressing it by supplementing self-declared information with independently observed technology data.

Applied consistently across a book of business, the data can also give portfolio and reinsurance teams greater insight into where common AI technologies and dependencies are appearing across multiple insured organizations, helping them examine potential concentrations of exposure.

“The bigger issue is what happens when you look across the book,” added Hayes. “If the same AI technologies and dependencies are showing up repeatedly across insureds, that can quickly become an accumulation issue. Insurers need to be able to identify those concentrations before losses reveal them.”

AI is one part of KYND’s wider technology detection capability, which also identifies a wide range of technologies from payment and cloud services, analytics and tracking pixels, to session-recording tools, identity and access management, and the platforms on which websites are built.

This gives insurers additional insight into the technology dependencies behind individual risks, as well as potential concentrations across portfolios.

For more information, please visit www.kynd.io