Software agent

Franklin & Graesser (1997)[4] discuss four key notions that distinguish agents from arbitrary programs: reaction to the environment, autonomy, goal-orientation and persistence.

Software agents may offer various benefits to their end users by automating complex or repetitive tasks.

[6] However, there are organizational and cultural impacts of this technology that need to be considered prior to implementing software agents.

The effort freed up serves for a higher degree of engagement in the substantial tasks of individual work.

Hence, software agents may provide the basics to implement self-controlled work, relieved from hierarchical controls and interference.

The cultural effects of the implementation of software agents include trust affliction, skills erosion, privacy attrition and social detachment.

Those who start relying solely on intelligent agents may lose important skills, for example, relating to information literacy.

John Sculley's 1987 "Knowledge Navigator" video portrayed an image of a relationship between end-users and agents.

Being an ideal first, this field experienced a series of unsuccessful top-down implementations, instead of a piece-by-piece, bottom-up approach.

Buyer agents are typically optimized to allow for digital payment services used in e-commerce and traditional businesses.

For example, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has an agent that monitors inventory, planning, schedules equipment orders to keep costs down, and manages food storage facilities.

Some other examples of current intelligent agents include some spam filters, game bots, and server monitoring tools.

These access methods may include setting up news stream delivery to the agent, or retrieval from bulletin boards, or using a spider to walk the Web.

The agent next may use its detailed searching or language-processing machinery to extract keywords or signatures from the body of the content that has been received or retrieved.

Finally, the agent may decide to take an action based on the new content; for example, to notify the user that an important event has occurred.