Closing the Loop: A Software Framework for AI to Support Business Decision Making
For businesses using experimentation platforms, this framework enables AI agents to autonomously conduct richer causal analysis and iterate faster, but the improvements are incremental over existing methods.
The paper presents a software framework that integrates heterogeneous effects, policy algorithms, mediation analysis, and forecasts into a single interface for AI agents, enabling faster business iteration cycles. The framework improves code correctness, reduces lines of code, and outperforms a baseline vanilla agent in experiment analysis.
Create an idea, prototype it, evaluate if users like it, then learn. It is the circle of business. If AI can operate in all parts of the circle, it will enable rapid iteration and learning speeds for businesses. Experiment platforms that deploy experiments to evaluate return on investment for businesses are abundant, but systems that help businesses learn personalization, mechanisms, and what to ideate next, are rare. Among technologies that do exist, they cannot be well orchestrated in a single software interface that can be safely and efficiently leveraged by an AI agent. These challenges make it difficult to teach an AI agent how to learn within a robust experimentation framework, and difficult for an AI agent to operate and iterate for the business. We offer a two part solution: one half that is rooted in mathematical reductions to contain complexity, and one half that is rooted in software design to optimize for orchestration, software safety, and multiplicity. Our solution, a software framework, moves beyond the simple treatment effect computed as a difference in means. To create a better understanding of a business and its customers, we enrich causal analysis with heterogeneous effects, policy algorithms, mediation analysis, and forecasts of effects. To have an AI complete the iteration cycle faster, we further enrich the analysis with variance reduction and anytime valid inference. The enrichments are made compatible across different types of experiments, and are presented in a single software interface that is usable in an AI agent. We evaluate the approach on various objectives in experiment analysis, and show that the framework improves code correctness, reduces lines of code, and is more performant than a baseline analysis constructed by a vanilla agent.