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Agents have been applied to e-commerce, promising a revolution in the way people conduct transactions business-to-business, business-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer. The Internet and the World-Wide Web represent an increasingly important channel for retail commerce as well as business-to-business transactions. Recent studies by Forrester Research, International Data Corp. and Nielsen Media Research, have found that numbers of people buying, selling and performing transactions on the Web are increasing at a phenomenal pace. To some extent, agent technology can be helpful in automating or assisting the buyer with the need-identification stage. Supplies or predictable, such as habits. Software agents are helping buyers and sellers combat information overload and expedite specific stages of the online buying process. Today's first-generation agent-mediated e-commerce systems are already creating new markets, such as low-cost consumer-to-consumer goods, and beginning to reduce transaction costs in a variety of business processes.

Computers are becoming the vehicle for an increasing range of everyday activities. Acquisition of news and information, mail and even social interactions and entertainment have become more and more computer based. At the same time, an increasing number of untrained users are interacting with computers, and this number will continue to rise as technologies such as hand-held computers and interactive television become popular. This article focuses on a novel approach to building interface agents. It presents results from several prototype agents that have been built using this approach, including agents that provide personalized assistance with meeting scheduling, email handling, electronic news filtering and selection of entertainment. Techniques from the field of artificial intelligence, in particular so-called "autonomous agents," can be used to implement a complementary style of interaction, which has been referred to as indirect management. Instead of user-initiated interaction via commands and/or direct manipulation, the user is engaged in a cooperative process in which human and computer agents both initiate communication, monitor events and perform tasks.

The relatively new field of artificial life attempts to study and understand biological life by synthesizing artificial life forms. To paraphrase Chris Langton, the founder of the field, the goal of artificial life is to "model life as it could be so as to understand life as we know it." Artificial life is a very broad discipline which spans such diverse topics as artificial evolution, artificial ecosystems, artificial morphogenesis, molecular evolution and many more. Artificial life shares with artificial intelligence (AI) its interest in synthesizing adaptive autonomous agents. Autonomous agents are computational systems that inhabit some complex, dynamic environment, sense and act autonomously in this environment, and by doing so realize a set of goals or tasks for which they are designed. Autonomous agents can take many different forms, depending on the nature of the environment they inhabit. If the environment is the real physical environment, then the agent takes the form of an autonomous robot.