What are Intelligent Agents | Features | Importance | Advantages

What are Intelligent Agents

An intelligent agent is a software program that supports a user with the accomplishment of some task or activity by collecting information automatically over the internet and communicating data with other agents depending on the algorithm of the program.

Intelligent agents - Features, Importance, Advantages
Intelligent agents – Features, Importance, Advantages

IBM defines

Intelligent agents are software entities that carry out some set of operations on behalf of a user or another program with some degree of independence or autonomy, and in so doing, employ some knowledge or representation of the user’s goals or desires.

Business establishments want to improve sales by pulling the right shoppers to their websites. Consumers are generally interested in comparing various products and services to find the best product at best price. These have led to the emergence of variety of intelligent agents working for buyers and sellers of products and services over the web.

Importance of Intelligent agents

Intelligent agents play an important role in e-marketing and enhancing the eCommerce aspect of an organization. It enables both buyers and sellers in eCommerce transactions by providing efficient, precise, and enhanced comprehensive searches on the web and information repository. Intelligent agents are very interactive and can perform multiple tasks at a variety of locations. They are very powerful and versatile than traditional search engines, spiders, and web crawlers.

Features of Intelligent Agents

1. Mobility: Intelligent agents engaged in eCommerce travel from computer to computer, across different system architecture and platforms and gather information until search parameters are exhausted.

2. Goal oriented: Intelligent agent has the ability to accept the user statement of goals and carry out the task delegated to it. It can move around from one machine to another and can act proactively in response to their environment, and can exhibit goal-directed behavior by taking the initiative.

3. Independent: Intelligent agents function on its own without human intervention and must have the ability to make decisions and to initiate action without direct human supervision. They communicate independently with repositories of information and other agents and accomplish the objectives and tasks on the behalf of the user.

4. Intelligent: Intelligent Agents are able to crawl for data more intelligently. They have intelligence to reason things out based on the existing knowledge of its user and environment and on past experiences. Intelligent agents follow preset rules to evaluate conditions in the external environment.

5. Reduces net traffic: Agents can communicate and cooperate with other agents quickly. This enables them to perform tasks, such as information searches quickly and efficiently and reduces network traffic.

6. Multiple tasks: An intelligent agent can perform multiple tasks simultaneously. It relieves the human user from monotonous clerical work.

Advantage of Intelligent Agents to Buyers

Intelligent agents can do shopping for a buyer, taking down specifications and returning with recommendations of purchases which meet those specifications. Intelligent agents can be sent by buyers to identify stores, brands, product or categories of service, and the desired prices. These capabilities enable the buyers to make comparisons even before visiting a particular seller’s site. Intelligent agents pull down down eCommerce costs and make web-shopping more transparent.

Advantages of Intelligent Agents to Sellers

Intelligent agents can act as “sales representatives” for sellers by providing product or service and sales advice, and enabling to tackle customer problems. Sellers can use intelligent agents

  1. to track the demand for the product,
  2. to know the market share changes,
  3. to engage in competitive knowledge mining, and
  4. to even obtain knowledge through collaboration from buyer agents.

Agents help business organizations in electronic environment to gain intelligence on the market to create intimate relationship with every customer. More sophisticated intelligent agents also have the capability to negotiate with and learn from buyer agents.