My role at Hoorban
Hoorban works in international supply and trade: it connects a buyer to a supplier that has been vetted, and carries the route between them — documentation, shipping, clearance, delivery.
My role has three parts, and all three come from one sentence: the problem is always either not enough information, or not enough connection.
Connecting trade to information and AI
A commercial decision built on memory and relationships is not repeatable. It has to be made from scratch each time, and each time it depends just as much on the person behind it.
What I do is this: what has lived in people's heads — which supplier holds up, which route ends up more expensive, where the risk gathers — becomes knowledge the system keeps and can use again.
AI here is the instrument, not the subject. What it does is take the repeatable part of the analysis away, so the time is left for the part that needs judgement.
Finding new routes
The supply market is full of routes everyone uses. Those routes are crowded, and the crowding is what sets their price.
My work is finding the ones that are still uncontested: a supplier nobody has approached, a link in the ecosystem nobody is looking at, or a way to the buyer a competitor has not found yet.
The reason is simple: where it is uncontested, competition has not yet spoiled the price.
Bringing experience into the system
The third part is the one that cannot be built quickly.
Knowing what a one-page contract means, that a supplier left alone for years becomes expensive, that change in a traditional organisation runs through budget rather than strategy — none of this is learned from a document.
Hoorban uses that experience so that the decision made on the buyer's behalf can be defended.
One thing runs through all three: the guarantee we give is not that we can do it. It is that if we cannot, your organisation will not lose.