Agents may specialize in or focus on different problems and sub-problems. An important goal is convergence on solutions despite incomplete or inconsistent knowledge or data. Intelligent agents are similar to objects in a number of ways. Different agents can respond to the same service request differently without the requester needing to know about such differences. Intelligent agents differ from objects in a number of ways.
Intelligent agents can be autonomous, can reason about themselves and can be mobile.
Business objects make a major contribution to modeling information in the enterprise. Intelligent business agents extend this capability to provide the breakthrough in modeling knowledge in the enterprise. A major reason for the apparent failure of OO to deliver on reuse is insufficient attention to the issue of domain understanding and the representation of this understanding in an unambiguous and precise way so it can be validated by business people. Arguably, OO methods focus too much on notation and not enough on content. OO notions such as class, association, and message are too biased toward the implementation of software systems.