Agents

Anintelligent agent or botis software that will automatically perform repetitive tasks on your computer for you. The tasks usually involve finding and collecting information, rather like a very intelligent, well-trained, tracking "software dog" in your computer.

There are four major types of intelligent agents:

• find-and-retrieve agents or shopping bots
• user agents
• monitor and surveillance agents
• data-mining agents

Intelligent Agents that Help Customers Find Product Vendors

The intelligent agents that you're probably most familiar with are the shopping-bot type. They go out to the Internet and find prices and information on products you're looking for.

One of the most popular shopping bot sites is mySimon , which lets you shop for millions of products at thousands of online stores. This site is easy to use. You first choose a category (from the 16 available) and then a subcategory. You can narrow the search even further to include an upper price limit.

One nice feature of mySimon is that you can sort the products by clicking one of the headings. The first time you click the products will sort in ascending order and the second time they sort again in descending order. You'll also be able to find out more about a product by clicking on its name. You can also find merchant and user reviews of some products.

Sometimes people get anxious because they don't see the browser icon that indicates a secure connection for transmitting your credit card number to buy a product. This is because it's covered up by the mySimon frame around the sellers' information. Just click on the Remove Frames link at the top of the screen and you'll be able to see the icon indicating a secure connection.

Other shopping bots work similarly to mySimon, but may not have some of the extra features. For example, PriceSCAN doesn't give you shopping guides, but it lets you look for functionally equivalent products. Some shopping bots specialize in a particular type of product like electronics. For more on mySimon see Pack, Thomas, "Intelligent Shopping Agents," Link-Up, March/Aoruk 2001, p. 16.

Intelligent Agents that Help Vendors Find Customers

Looked at from the other side, find-and-retrieve intelligent agents can also be used by vendors to help recommend products and services to customers. These are called recommendation agents.

Recommendation agents work together with a technique called collaborative filtering, which is that uses information on a customer to categorize the customer into a group of people with similar tastes and habits. Then the intelligent agent finds products likely to suit that group's taste to offer to the customer.

As more information comes in about a customer -- when the customer buys, requests something, or otherwise has contact with the company -- the more accurately the customer can be classified. And then the likelihood of the customer buying is far greater. In fact, some studies have shown that, if the company has enough information and the collaborative filtering works well, the customer will buy 80% of the time. (for more information on recommendation agents see Kwak, Mary, "Web Sites Learn to Make Smarter Suggestions," MIT Sloan Management Review, Summer 2001, p. 17).