Don’t Just Achieve Your Goal. Achieve the Best Possible Outcome.
Horizon: The Value Optimization Agent
When there’s more than one way to succeed, how do you choose the best one? Horizon is your value-optimizing Digital Worker, designed to navigate complex decisions by balancing competing priorities like cost, speed, and quality to maximize the overall value to your business.
What is Horizon?
Horizon represents the pinnacle of goal-based decision-making.
Horizon elevates the capabilities of a Pathway agent by introducing the concept of “utility.” While a Pathway agent is successful if it finds a path to its goal, a Horizon agent is designed to find the optimal path by evaluating different outcomes against a utility function—a formal measure of desirability.
This agent doesn’t just ask, “Will this action get me to my goal?” It asks a more sophisticated question: “Of all the actions that could get me to my goal, which one will produce the most desirable outcome for the business?” Desirability is defined by you, through a utility function that can weigh and balance multiple, often competing, variables. For example, it can be programmed to find the path that minimizes cost, maximizes speed, and ensures a 99% quality rating, all at the same time. This makes Horizon essential for solving complex optimization problems where making the right trade-off is critical to business success.
Problems Solved by Horizon
Many of the most critical business decisions are not simple yes/no choices but complex balancing acts. Manually making these trade-offs is difficult, inconsistent, and often based on gut feeling rather than data. Horizon is built to solve these high-stakes optimization challenges.
Complex Resource Allocation
A marketing department has a fixed budget. Should they allocate it to Google Ads for quick but expensive leads, or to SEO for slower but more sustainable growth? A Horizon agent can model the potential outcomes of different budget splits to recommend the allocation that maximizes the projected return on investment (ROI).
Dynamic Pricing Decisions
An e-commerce company needs to price a new product. Pricing it too high will deter buyers, while pricing it too low will hurt margins. A Horizon agent can analyze competitor pricing, inventory levels, and real-time demand to set a price that maximizes overall profit, continuously adjusting it as market conditions change.
Supply Chain Optimization
A manufacturer needs to ship goods from a factory to a distribution center. They can use fast but expensive air freight or slow but cheap ocean freight. A Horizon agent can weigh the cost of shipping against the cost of holding inventory and potential stockouts to choose the transportation method that minimizes total logistics cost for each shipment.
Managing Conflicting Goals
In IT operations, there is often a conflict between deploying new features quickly and ensuring system stability. A Horizon agent can help manage this by evaluating the business value of a new feature against the potential risk of deployment, helping to optimize the release schedule.
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Key Benefits
01
True Business Optimization
Horizon moves beyond simple task completion to actively optimize for key business metrics like profit, cost, and efficiency, driving tangible financial results.
02
Data-Driven Strategic Decisions
It replaces gut-feel decision-making with rigorous, data-driven analysis, ensuring your most complex trade-offs are made optimally and consistently.
03
Maximizing Return on Investment
Whether allocating marketing spend, managing a supply chain, or setting prices, Horizon is designed to make choices that maximize the value and ROI of your operations.
04
Flexibility in a Complex World
It provides a framework for making decisions in the face of uncertainty and competing objectives, giving your business a powerful tool for navigating complex market dynamics.
05
Competitive Advantage
The ability to consistently make optimal decisions at machine speed provides a significant and sustainable competitive advantage.
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Use Cases and Examples
E-commerce Dynamic Pricing
A Horizon agent manages the pricing for products on a retail website. Its goal is to sell the products, but its utility function is to maximize total profit. It analyzes real-time data on competitor prices, customer demand, and inventory levels. It might lower the price slightly to win a sale from a competitor, but raise it during periods of high demand to capture more margin, constantly optimizing for the best financial outcome.
Financial Portfolio Management
A Horizon agent acts as a robo-advisor. Its goal is to grow a client’s investment portfolio. Its utility function balances maximizing returns against the client’s stated risk tolerance. It simulates the performance of different asset allocations under various market scenarios and chooses the one that offers the highest expected return for an acceptable level of risk.
Energy Grid Management
A Horizon agent manages the distribution of electricity in a smart grid. Its goal is to meet customer demand. Its utility function is to do so at the lowest possible cost while also minimizing environmental impact. It decides in real-time whether to draw power from a cheap but less green coal plant, or a more expensive but clean solar farm, based on current demand, energy prices, and weather forecasts.
Marketing Campaign Optimization
A Horizon agent is given a $100,000 monthly budget to generate leads. Its utility function is to maximize the number of qualified leads while keeping the cost-per-acquisition below $50. It allocates the budget across different channels (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn), continuously monitoring performance and shifting funds away from underperforming channels to those delivering the best results, ensuring the highest possible return on ad spend.