Intelligent Agents in E-commerce

Intelligent agents represent a new breed of software with significant potential for a wide range of Internet applications. They have been successfully used for personal assistants, intelligent user interfaces, and managing electronic mail. Recently, agents have been applied to electronic commerce, promising a revolution in the way we conduct business, whether business-to-business, business-to-customer or customer-to-customer. This article gives a brief introduction to intelligent agents and electronic commerce, followed by a review of agent technologies involved in buying and selling. Typology, taxonomy, and classification of agents are presented. Several agent-mediated electronic commerce systems are analyzed in the context of a general model of the buying process. Several lists of related Internet links should help readers to gather additional relevant information.