Product Description
A practical guide for implementing agent technology into business applications
This book shows businesses how they can develop and use agent technology to improve business efficiency and lower costs. It describes the different commercial agents currently in use, strategic benefits, and integrating agents into existing systems. The authors use real case studies to show how to successfully deploy agents for specific business purposes.
From the Author
Agent personalization of Web commerce is the Next Big Thing.I hope this book will reach most of the IS managers involved in building on-line businesses or on-line businesses of standing corporations.
We hope to excite the maximum number of people about what personalization can do. There is so much emphasis on the perils of collecting personal information -- and I think you should really respect that, make sure the privacy is respected, make sure this information is not used to harm consumers -- but while doing that, let's not forget that on the up-side there's tremendous potential, that we can really enrich their experience by personalizing a business.
In fact, off the Web you couldn't duplicate the level of personal service that software agents can provide on the Web, because it would be tremendously labor intensive. Most on-line businesses should at least think about implementing personalization.
The book goes all the way from the desktop to the Intranet and Internet
kinds of domains. It demystifies software agents, and says these things are not magic -- they might do magical things -- but they are, after all, programs. The public intuitively understand very well the notion of a software agent, and they have very high expectations of it; but it's hard to deliver at that level of promise. This makes it easy to hype, even without spending a lot of money. I hope that doesn't happen. I hope the agents industry keeps its feet on the ground, and that we actually deliver real benefits to consumers rather than just sell hype.
The book has an appendix and a companion web site (http://www.opensesame.com/agents), which lists an ongoing current set of commercial software tools, which I hope will in turn promote more tools
from commercial software vendors.
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