Intelligent Agent
Software
E-Commerce is changing the way
business is getting done in the Information Age. To gain a competitive edge,
businesses are in need of new ways to get ahead of the competition, new
models and a new infrastructure. To address this need, an
inter-organisational electronic commerce model is being developed.
According to this model,
different users are represented by autonomous software agents interconnected
via the Internet. The agents act on behalf of their human
users/organisations to perform information-gathering tasks, such as locating
and accessing information from various sources, filtering unwanted
information, and providing decision support.
Currently, existing software
agents mostly help to search for product and price information, validate
purchaser’s credit, billing and accounting information. However, soon will
come the time when agents will be able to match buyers and sellers based on
some criteria, find prices and makes bids on behalf of users, notifying of
new books or CDs, notifying when specific products are available at a
specific price etc.
The Intelligent
Fridge?
A system has been devised that
frees a human home owner from having to open their refrigerator and make a
shopping list of low-stock items, and then frees them from having to leave
their home to purchase the required goods!
Granted, the user has to place
goods in designated areas for the system to work, e.g. milk would always
have to be in the same place, as would eggs etc. Sensors would then be able
to determine when items needed replaced and subsequently send a message from
the fridge, over the Internet, to the local grocery store. There, the order
is packaged up and delivered to the consumer's door, thanks to the fridge!
This is a somewhat contrived method of software agency, since it lacks any
real intelligence, but perhaps in the future, software agents will be able
to search databases of several stores within a given area, and then order
the stock form the cheapest provider. Why stop at milk, indeed why stop at
food? Imagine being able to pick up the telephone, dial an international
number, then a software agent interfaces on behalf of the caller, to collect
bids from various carriers, asses the bids and selects the cheapest per
minute!
In an e-commerce context,
software agents can revolutionise the way we trade on the Web. Perhaps in
the future we will see dramatic developments that will have agents operate
without direct intervention from humans (apart from the initialisation
stage), having them take control of auctions or internal state; negotiate
air fares, car prices, book prices and holiday deals etc. Who knows what the
future may bring!
See
http://www.aaai.org/Press/Books/Bradshaw/bradshaw.html for more
information on the development and potential of intelligent software agents.
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