The internet has experienced a rapid shift from information and entertainment to electronic commerce. The amount of information available on the web, as well as the number of e-businesses and web shoppers, has been growing exponentially and the influx is difficult to process. A major challenge for marketspace participants has become sifting through an unwieldy amount of information to find products, services, and even each other – often relegating e-commerce a hit or miss experience. Intelligent agents are a major evolution toward solving this difficult problem.Intelligent agents empower both buyers and sellers to accomplish e-commerce transactions by enabling efficient, precise, and comprehensive searches on the vast web community and information repository.
Because of user simplicity and thoroughness, intelligent agents enhance user experience and satisfaction. By operating in the background in lieu of user intervention, intelligent agents also circumvent problems related to slow internet access and free up prohibitively expensive “surf” and data mining time.The technology has evolved and the internet has matured to a point where sophisticated new generation intelligent agents proliferate. This page examines intelligent agents and their use by buyers and sellers in the e-commerce marketspace. What is an intelligent agent? Intelligent agents are software applications that have a predefined knowledge base and/or learning system about their user's goals and wishes and, through adaptive reasoning, use this information to execute their user's request.The concept has been around for many decades, ranging in functionality from a simple macro with prescriptive directions to new generation software that truly exhibits learning and artificial intelligence.
The continuum of intelligent agents may be characterized along three dimensions: agency, intelligence, and mobility. Agents typically act independently of the user, learn and adapt from actions or the environment and are highly mobile and autonomous in their actions.For these reasons, intelligent agents are more interactive and can accomplish multiple tasks at a variety of locations. This characteristic differentiates intelligent agents, making them much more powerful and versatile applications than traditional search engines, spiders, and web crawlers.
How does it work? Intelligent agents operate according to a Remote Programming Paradigm, or computer-to-computer programming. Remote programming enables the client (user) to store on the server (host) not only the procedures but also any accompanying instructions and peripheral data.Each time the events specified in the instructions occur, the server calls the procedures and executes on-site the instructions, without any further intervention from the client computer. As directed, the agent returns the results to the client either at the end of the session with a single host or after conversing with all hosts in the target community.
The intelligent agent network infrastructure has five components working together: an execution facility, a communication facility, a transport facility, a packaging facility, and an integrated security facility.How is it applicable to e-commerce? E-commerce has grown at an astounding rate over the last few years and so has the number of participants. Although web business models differ from the traditional brick and mortar models in many ways, the fundamental needs of consumers and businesses remain much the same: consumers want to comparison shop products and services side by side for the best price; businesses want to grow sales by driving the right shoppers to their sites. These needs give rise to a variety of intelligent agents working for buyers and sellers of products and services over the web.
Buyer agents According to a recent report from Deloitte Research, online shoppers will routinely use intelligent agents to e-shop by 2002. At that time, more than 70 percent of large companies are expected to be selling goods online. Rather than getting in a site you never wanted or playing a hit or miss guessing game regarding which keyword search result might match your needs, a variety of intelligent agents can be sent out by buyers to help locate stores, brands, product or service categories, products and services, and desired prices.These capabilities will drive a shift from a web-centric to user-centric e-commerce model, whereby buyers will be empowered to comparison shop even before going in to one particular seller's site.
Moreover, the buyer agents perform the work without user intervention, thereby simplifying life while improving the end results obtainable by the user. With more efficient and powerful search capabilities, agents also are expected to help further drive down e-commerce costs and make web-shopping more transparent.These effects will make e-commerce increasingly attractive to reluctant consumers, since convenience, costs, and on-the-fly availability of peripheral information are the major hooks of the digital marketplace. Seller agents In turn, buyer agents affect how vendors on the web need to operate their online businesses. In a more competitive and transparent marketplace, vendors of products and services on the web will need to hone and logically organizate their information so that buyer agents will be attracted.Sellers can use intelligent agents to track demand and market share changes, engage in competitive knowledge mining, and even learn through collaboration from buyer agents.
Learning agents deployable by sellers are less obtrusive and typically receive greater acceptance than filtering agents that require users to make ratings and answer lots of questions. These capabilities mean new a era in e-commerce, not easily replicated in the brick and mortars environment: mass personalization. Agents enable businesses to efficiently gain intelligence on the market to create personalized relationships with every single one of its customers.Thus, e-businesses have the advantage of being about to use intelligent agents to present the perfect sales pitch.
To do so, businesses will need to deploy a team of seller agents in a multi-agent system. Multi-agent systems comprised of buyer and seller intelligent agents are essential to open digital marketspaces, given the many dynamic roles driving transactions. Buyers may need decision agents to comparison shop, while sellers may need a broker, provider, and merchant agent to sell a product. More sophisticated seller agents also may negotiate with and learn from buyer agents.
