Autonomous software agents are rapidly moving from the development stage to providing industrial-strength help in everyday environments. Gartner forecasts that enterprise automation, which includes autonomous software agents and artificial intelligence software, will account for almost 50 per cent of total IT spending in 10 years.

As their tasks become more complex, the smartest software agents will learn to be team players, cooperating with other agents to find optimal solutions.

Researchers from the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics in Russia have shown that purposeful behavior, or motivation can emerge naturally in a software simulation that has simple software beings, or agents, evolving over many generations.

In the new war against terrorism, with its infinite possibilities for unpredictable violence, the military is attempting to understand jihad through the infinitely patient and dogged computer. The new breed of virtual war game is attempting to push into that unexplored terrain, drawing from a burgeoning field of artificial intelligence known as "agent technology."

The military is testing software robots that can identify targets and present them to commanders much more quickly than a human could.

The software, known as the Control of Agent-Based Systems or CoABS, uses artificially intelligent "agents" to sift through troves of images and intelligence data to find viable targets.

The military is testing software robots that can identify targets and present them to commanders much more quickly than a human could.

The software, known as the Control of Agent-Based Systems or CoABS, uses artificially intelligent "agents" to sift through troves of images and intelligence data to find viable targets.

Researchers are developing software agents to help decision makers sort through changing and sometimes conflicting information.

Jeffrey Kephart at IBM\'s research centre has discovered that software agents can make more cash than people when they trade commodities.

In the first ever test of its kind, a team of robots has beaten humans in
simulated financial trading. Computer giant IBM pitted robotic trading agents, known as \"bots\", against humans in trading commodities such as pork bellies and gold.

The author argues for the deployment of intelligent agent technologies to crawl the web and perform the threat detection, intrusion detection, and intrusion prevention functions necessary to "addresses a gap in current computer security technology and a growing deficiency in the fabric of our national security and homeland defense."