Q3. Identify various activities in e-commerce where software agents are currently in use.

Answer:

Haag (2006) suggests that there are only four essential types of intelligent software agents:

1. Buyer agents or shopping bots
2. User or personal agents
3. Monitoring-and-surveillance agents
4. Data Mining agents

Buyer agents (shopping bots) -
Buyer agents travel around a network (i.e. the internet) retrieving information about goods and services. These agents, also known as 'shopping bots', work very efficiently for commodity products such as CDs, books, electronic components, and other one-size-fits-all products. Amazon.com is a good example of a shopping bot.
User agents (personal agents) -
User agents, or personal agents, are intelligent agents that take action on your behalf. In this category belong those intelligent agents that already perform or will shortly perform the tasks, for example, Checking your e-mail, sorting it according to the user's order of preference, and alerting you when important emails arrive.
Monitoring-and-surveillance (predictive) agents -
Monitoring and Surveillance Agents are used to observe and report on equipment, usually computer systems. The agents may keep track of company inventory levels, observe competitors' prices and relay them back to the company, watch stock manipulation by insider trading and rumors, etc.
Data mining agents -
This agent uses information technology to find trends and patterns in an abundance of information from many different sources. The user can sort through this information in order to find whatever information they are seeking. (Wikipedia, 2009)

Gini (1999) also identifies some activities of e-commerce' software agent. The activities are...

• Procurement: obtaining materials, services. managing inflow into the organization towards the end user.
• Brokering Services: finding information about products, sellers, and prices, providing protection for privacy, validating purchasers credit, billing and accounting, etc.
• Digital Libraries and Recommending Services: retrieving information from distributed sources, filtering information on contents, collaborative filtering.
• Notification Services: notifying of new books or CDs, notifying when specific products are available at a specific price.

Reference:

1. Haag Stephen (2006). "Management Information Systems for the Information Age". Pages 224-228
2. Wikipedia (2009). "Software Agent". Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia, Retrieved from URL - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_agent#CITEREFHaag2006
3. Gini Maria (1999). "Agents and other 'Intelligent Software' for e-Commerce". Department of Computer Science and Engineering in University of Minnesota, Retrieved from URL - http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~gini/csom.html#intro