Intelligent agents represent a new breed of software with significant potential for a wide range of Internet applications. They have been successfully used for personal assistants, intelligent user interfaces, managing electronic mail, etc.They also help automate a variety of activities, mostly time consuming ones, and thus lower the transaction costs. Software agents differ from “traditional” software in that they are personalized, social, continuously running and semi-autonomous.
Intelligent Agents in E-Commerce
Electronic commerce entails business-to-business, business-to-customer and customer-to-customer transactions. It encompasses a wide range of issues including security, trust, reputation, law, payment mechanisms, advertising, ontologies, electronic product catalogs, intermediaries, multimedia shopping experiences, and back office management. Agent technologies have been applied to these areas, promising a revolution in the way we conduct business. In this way, e-commerce is becoming more user-friendly, semi-intelligent and human-like. These qualities are conducive for optimizing the whole buying experience and revolutionizing commerce, as we know it today.