Small and of limited functionality on their own. Agent technology is significant because of the sustained commercial interest surrounding it. Agent technology may not have hit prime time quite yet, but it does seem to be gathering its share of investment money. Take a gander at the Resources section for a host of other companies engaged in agent technology development. Agent technology is also interesting for its potential to solve some nagging productivity problems that pester almost all modern computer users.
Agent technology solves, or promises to solve, several problems on different fronts.
A transaction or query between a client and the server may require many round trips over the wire to complete. Each trip creates network traffic and consumes bandwidth. By creating an agent to handle the query or transaction, and sending the agent from the client to the server, network bandwidth consumption is reduced. So instead of intermediate results and information passing over the wire, only the agent need be sent. Here's a related situation.