Blog : How The Smart Internet Agents Work

Next, we will analyze a type of technology that has recently begun to be applied in commercial business models such as online virtual stores, and that can become an essential tool for selling online: intelligent agents. These systems often act as new intermediaries in the virtual economy.

These software agents are programs that operate and observe the environment that surrounds them, develop a set of actions that constitute behavior, and learn from the results of these actions.

Every intelligent agent must present to a greater or lesser degree the following characteristics: Autonomy: Agents operate without direct human intervention and present some kind of control over their actions and their internal state. Sociability or communication: These are software programs that interact with people and other agents cooperatively, through some kind of communication language.

Learning: These systems perceive their environment and respond to changes that occur in it by developing goal-oriented behavior. This environment can be a user, other agents, a local network, the Internet, or a combination of the above.

Mobility: Agents move on some dimension; that is, they travel through the web or data files. Agents and electronic commerce: Agents differ from traditional software in that they are semi-autonomous, customizable, and constantly running. These qualities make them extremely useful tools for a wide variety of tasks related to process and information management.

Therefore, it should not be surprising that these same qualities are extremely useful in an environment rich in information and processes such as e-commerce, and more specifically, online virtual stores. Search and negotiation skills: One of the main functions of smart agents in electronic commerce is their ability to analyze electronic catalog databases and return the results of those searches.

Another important application for which these systems are so important is for their high negotiation capacity and, therefore, to cover the shortcomings of most electronic catalogs, which only support a fixed price system and in which it was previously impossible to obtain some type of discount without having to resort to the phone or face-to-face negotiation.