An intelligent agent is an autonomous program that can, unattended, perform mundane, complex, and time-consuming tasks on your behalf. Intelligent agents on the Web, often called bots, find, gather, and filter information.
Bots also help manage networks and improve the collaboration of people via the Internet.
They use a variety of smart technologies, including inference engines, neural networks, genetic algorithms, etc., to perform these and many other tasks. While a lot of hype exists right now about intelligent agents, they are carrying out extremely important tasks on the Internet. Bots are expected to play an even greater role on the Web as the number of documents goes up from the approximately 100 million currently to more than 800 million pages by the year 2001. Managing this growing sea of information requires the creation of ever increasingly smart programs. Some have sophisticated interactive interfaces for dealing with people while others toil behind the scenes with no face at all.