At some companies, enough tasks are being performed, in fact, to allow some real employees to do other, more valuable things. Even where the gain is not so clear, the time and money being spent on agents is seen by some managers as a necessary long-term investment. Waiting until agents are ubiquitous is hardly the way to gain a competitive advantage, these executives feel. Indeed, the proliferation of computer networks and the explosion of information are turning agents from a technologist's toy into a business necessity. Users find themselves overwhelmed, both by the sheer volume of information and by the babel of multiple operating systems, programming languages and protocols under which the data are stored.
Agents can help.
On the one hand, they can be dispatched to perform tasks that would be tedious for humans, to wait for an event or a transaction to occur and then take appropriate action. They can also act as smart filters in the flow of information, catching only those items of relevance to the user. In these and other ways, agents can play the same role in reengineering information processes that robotics did in manufacturing. By automating repetitive tasks, agents can replace the legions of human data shufflers as surely as robots did assembly-line workers. Downsizing is, of course, one possible application, but many organizations will instead use agents to take over essential, but simple, single tasks, while directing complex, multi-task processes to humans.