Humanising e-commerce
One of the hottest frontiers for AI is e-commerce, where e-tailers are hoping to make the online world an ever more human place. Web sites such as Amazon.com already use a process called collaborative filtering to compare our buying patterns with those of other customers and make recommendations.
A new generation of products hope to use AI to one-up Amazon's methods and win customer loyalty for the sites that use them. Products from US startups such as Saffron Technology and Manna aim to learn the individual user's buying patterns and make personalised recommendations accordingly.
Such technology could be the best way of giving retail sites a more personal feel. "You need to have neural technologies in place, constantly updating themselves, so that they can deal with conditionalities," says analyst Derek Brown with Robertson Stephens. "One day I might be interested in Manchester United, but that doesn't mean I always am. Sites need to change depending on what my behaviour is at the time."
But Brown sees a bigger role for AI in making sense of the Internet's chaotic mass of information. Today, companies such as the UK's Autonomy specialise in software that can sift through all sorts of documents used by businesses and put them into a clear order.
The software uses a form of AI to recognise patterns in the documents and guess at the gist of their overall meanings. It can then sort the documents into a hierarchy and link to other relevant documents.
In the future, wide use of XML -- which includes tags identifying a document's content -- could make such software unnecessary. But AI could still be used to replace simple sorting jobs humans do today, such as reading a news story and determining which section of a Web site it belongs in, or listening to a piece of music and deciding whether it's country, pop or jazz.
Web robots don't necessarily carry out tasks for one Web site. Many researchers envision a world of semi-autonomous "agents", roaming the Web and carrying out various tasks for their owners. Present software such as the "mobile agents" of Netherlands-based Tryllian could be the forerunner of intelligent bots making purchases and carrying out other business transactions without human intervention. Such agents could be given a rough idea of what we want, do some comparison shopping and order the best deal, just like a real personal assistant.
Cliff even envisions virtual organisations composed of autonomous agents, which could form spontaneously to carry out a specific task and then disband again.
