Jim Mortleman explains how intelligent software robots will act as
the army of staff you can't afford to hire to respond instantly and
meaningfully to customers and a great deal more.
What are intelligent agents?
They are the bastard offspring of research into artificial
intelligence and artificial life, with more than a passing
acquaintance with computer viruses. Essentially, intelligent agents
are self-contained chunks of mobile code which can act
autonomously, respond to changes in their environment and
communicate with users or other intelligent agents. Ideally, they
also have the ability to learn, or at least be trained.
Intelligent agents are best imagined as software robots -
indeed, they are sometimes called 'bots' - that can move around
individual systems or complex networks performing specific tasks.
For instance, a user could instruct an agent to go onto the
Internet and negotiate the best price for a particular product.
Agents that interact with users, rather than just with other
agents, are also typically given a 'personality'. Cute talking
animals seem to be very popular.
Christine Karman, founder-president of Amsterdam-based agent
supplier Tryllian, says, "A change of mindset is the most important
thing: thinking of your software not as something you use but as
something with a life of its own."
Nick Jennings, professor of computer science at the University
of Southampton and an expert in intelligent agent technology, says,
"For me, agents are a natural evolution of objects. You can think
of an agent almost as an object++. I believe we'll see agents in
mainstream computing in the way we see objects in mainstream
computing today."
What areas of business can benefit from intelligent
agents?
Although agents are likely to find their way into many different
areas of business, the key drivers of the technology are e-commerce
and networked open systems. Intelligent agents could allow
organisations to offer a tailored service to many thousands of
individual customers, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and to
hike the speed of transactions up to previously unimaginable
levels.
Jeff Burgett, chief technology officer of AMS's European
e-business division, says, "We've filed for a patent on a set of
agents that would monitor prospective customers coming in on a Web
site. Based on both internal and external information on a
customer, an agent would then establish a profile, or risk level,
for that customer and communicate with a negotiating agent that
would establish a tailored negotiation strategy or pricing
plan."
Organisations that overlay their existing systems with an agent
model can also overcome the problem of different systems not being
able to talk to one another. If one agent is taught to query a
particular system, any other agent can simply instruct it to
retrieve the information it needs.
"Those sorts of applications - which are increasingly common as
companies look to open up their computing infrastructure to take
advantage of the Web - you can only build with agents," says
Jennings.
Can intelligent agents replace human beings?
In a word, yes. In an e-business context, it would be totally
impractical for an organisation to employ the armies of people
needed to offer instantaneous, meaningful responses to every
customer query. Soon, agents will allow businesses to expand to
unprecedented levels without simultaneously employing hordes of
additional staff.
We may not yet be at the stage where we can all get on with
something more strategic while agents run the nuts and bolts of our
businesses, but already we can get a tantalising glimpse of what
the future may have to offer.
Tryllian's Karman cites an agent her company is currently
developing for a major Dutch telecoms supplier: "Imagine there's a
telephone switch connected to a computer network. Currently, if
something goes wrong with the switch, the telco needs to send out a
support engineer, which costs a lot of money. In future, the telco
could send a software agent over the network to diagnose what's
wrong with the switch and repair it. If it can't work out what's
wrong, the agent will simply return to the phone company and obtain
the upgrade it needs from a support agent or expert system."
Should you become an early adopter?
The experts think so. "The sooner you get in, the more of an
advantage you'll have," says Karman. Jennings adds, "I think a lot
of companies are pleased they have been early adopters and are
starting to see the rewards. It's true in telecoms and e-commerce
and I think it's going to be true in the more traditional
customer-focused areas such as the financial sector, because you
get the ability to personalise customer relationships and to build
much more sophisticated open systems."
Burgett says, "Now is the time to become an early adopter of
agents to automate back-end processes and respond more effectively
to customers. The reason we got into agents four years ago was to
solve complex problems. We found an agent approach was much more
effective than the traditional procedural strategy. The technology
allows you to break a problem up into manageable pieces, with
agents collaborating to solve more complex problems."
But the window for getting in early may not be open for long.
Tom Ilube, CEO of agent developer Lost Wax, predicts, "In 18 months
to two years, it will seem odd to be launching an e-commerce
presence - be it business or consumer - without some sort of
dynamic or intelligent agent capability, because customers will
expect to be able to negotiate in some way with your business
online."
What businesses are researching, using and making money from
intelligent agents?
In the IT and telecoms sectors, research into and deployment of
intelligent agents are already fairly well advanced. "You could
name 50 top companies and I could tell you they're all doing agent
research - Sun, Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, BT, IBM - all those
sorts of organisations," says Jennings.
At BT, research into intelligent agents takes around 5% of the
company's £600m annual R&D budget. The company is now at the
stage of commercial implementation of some of the fruits of this
research (for example, using agents to personalise information for
customers). Outside IT and telecoms, take-up has been more limited.
However, Bent Thomsen of ICL's research and advanced technology
department and a veteran of intelligent agent research, says,
"We've been reasonably successful at applying agent technology in
the financial services sector. We're using it for share trading in
the banking sector and at the user interface level for things like
mortgage advice - users can communicate in natural language with a
computer through an animated character and the intelligent agent
goes off and queries databases to find the best mortgage."
Burgett says, "If you loosen up your definition of what you
consider to be an intelligent agent, then they're in broad use
today by most companies: intelligent search engines, intelligent
knowledge management systems, products such as Autonomy and
Excalibur."
What about standards?
If intelligent agents are indeed to become the dominant model
for software development, agents will need to be able to
communicate with one another. Not surprisingly, there are a number
of competing standards.
Thomsen says, "The Federation of Intelligent Physical Agents
[Fipa] has gone a long way towards standardising things such as
KQML [Knowledge Query and Manipulation Language] although it
doesn't look like industry's picking up on those standards. Then
there's the Object Management Group [OMG] , which has a
subcommittee on agent standardisation. It's enriched the Corba
standard for agent interaction, which has had some pick-up,
particularly in the telcoms area, but again it's not really
widespread.
"Personally, I think neither standard will win out because
Microsoft has just launched its .Net infrastructure. Bill Gates has
spoken a lot about agents talking to one another using XML as the
language and .Net as the environment for executing the agents. Our
prediction is that this is going to be where the big take-up in
terms of multi-agent systems and communication standards will
be."
Jennings, on the other hand, thinks all talk of standards is
premature: "For those who think standardisation is a good idea,
there are still lots of ongoing debates about what these standards
should look like and I think that's partly because they're trying
to standardise a moving target."
What potential problems exist with intelligent
agents?
According to many experts, one of the biggest problems with
intelligent agents will be getting people to trust them. People
will be suspicious of agents because they make decisions on their
behalf rather than following set instructions. This could
drastically affect take-up.
Lost Wax's Ilube believes the solution lies in getting people to
take ownership of agents that act on their behalf. "What would be
really interesting is if a body like the Consumers Association or
some other trusted third party offered people agents that acted
genuinely in their best interests," he says. "You can imagine
everyone really trusting those agents."
Of course, having lots of third-party agents trawling your
corporate systems makes clear the other big problem with the agent
model: security. Jennings thinks it's a problem we're going to have
to cope with, like it or not: "Open systems where you have code
from multiple suppliers and buyers are increasingly going to be a
reality," he says. "If you're not going to play in that space,
you're going to struggle to expand. Yes, it's more chaotic. Yes, it
increases security risks. But it's inevitable. You have to deal
with it."
I'm still interested. How can I take things further?
First, make sure you have a clear idea of what agents can do for
your business. "Ask whether the technology opens up new business
models," advises Illube. "Will it result in cost reductions? Are
you expecting it to lengthen the life of customer relationships?"
Jennings recommends anyone interested in tracking developments to
look at www.agentlink.org, a European network of excellence in
agent-based computing. "Membership is free and it gets you access
to the sorts of agent resources that are out there," he says.
When it comes to choosing suppliers in a cutting-edge area such
as this, it's not a simple case of looking at a top 10 list. Use
the Web to talk to other early adopters and ask for
recommendations. Find suppliers in tune with your way of thinking
and that have some experience of your industry. You may prefer to
deal with a large systems integrator such as ICL, a big-name
supplier like Microsoft, or an innovative smaller player such as
Lost Wax or Tryllian, but your choice will depend largely on which
company's approach best fits in with your own organisational
requirements.
In terms of in-house skills, retraining staff in agent
technology and techniques should not be all that difficult.
"Although it's a new way of doing things, it's not completely
radical," Jennings points out. Within five years, he believes,
students will be coming out of university with a good grounding in
agent technology.
BT's secret army
A key mover in the field of intelligent agents, BT has been
researching the technology for five years and is one of the
founding members of agent standards body FIPA. Nader Azarmi, AI
technology manager and technical manager of BT's intelligent
systems research group, says the company is working on agents in
two main areas - personal agents which find and customise
information for users, and multi-agent systems for complex
problem-solving.
"We spent quite a bit of time initially working on a toolkit
called Zeus to enable us to develop agent applications," says
Azarmi. "This won us a BCS innovation award 1997."
The company has used Zeus to develop a number of trial
multi-agent systems. "The three main areas where we've been trying
to apply collaborative agent technology are in network management,
e-commerce and business process re-engineering," he says. "We've
developed a number of prototype systems and we're hoping those
could made available first internally and later commercially."
BT has also been developing a personal agent framework. "The
idea here is to develop a central profile for the user - in which
you identify your interests, expertise, what you're looking for,
etc," explains Azarmi. "Then a number of agents can use that
profile to go and find information for you on the Internet, an
intranet or extranet."
This framework has already borne fruit. "One agent, Bugle, will
generate a daily newspaper based on your interests," says Azarmi.
"Another, called Ivine, facilitiates networking. Essentially, it
tries to put you in touch with a community of people with similar
interests."
Then there's Radar - named after Radar O'Reilly from the
television series M*A*S*H - a just-in-time information delivery
agent. "Essentially, Radar can watch over your shoulder as you're
typing in MS-Word, for example, and find documents relevant to the
paragraph you're typing in real-time."
For more information on BT's agent research and deployment, see
www.labs.bt.com/projects/agents.htm