About AIGetting to understand authentic intelligence.

Oh, that Jill. she has a special talent for making customers feel all warm and cozy. With her in-depth knowledge, thoughtful questions and almost uncanny ability to predict what kind of laptop a shopper will want, Jill, a service representative on cozone.com Inc.’s e-commerce site, often gets the undying gratitude of online customers tied up like a pink valentine.

In fact, recently Jill received this customer love note:

“Dear Jill,

Your overview about notebooks is AWESOME. I realized over the holidays that I need to buy a new notebook, but felt overwhelmed at the task. Your notes give me confidence that I can figure out and find what I need. Thanks!”

You’d think all this praise would be enough to make Jill blush. And it probably would if Jill were human. But she’s not. Jill is a virtual shopping assistant.

Her face does happen to belong to a member of cozone.com’s ad agency, but that is as lifelike as Jill gets. Behind the pretty face is actually a heady stew of predictive modeling, demographic and psychographic statistics, and Bayesian pattern recognition algorithms.

All the number-crunching of ones and zeros add up to Jill being smart enough to act like any small-town salesperson who would get to know her customers and offer them recommendations. It may be cold statistics churning behind that smile, but the only thing that the online customer experiences is Jill in her get-to-know- you mode as she asks questions such as, “Do you travel a lot?” or, “Will a child be using this computer?” It all adds up to Jill coming across as, well, a Web site visitor’s best friend.

That may seem like a touchy-feely goal for online transactions. But establishing that kind of deep connection with customers is exactly what many next-generation e-businesses are after. The problem is that it has been difficult to establish a level of trust between a consumer or business partner when all they have to relate to is a Web site built on CRM (customer relationship management) applications that flip through cold, hard data in the background. To humanize the interaction, enterprises are giving their Web sites face lifts-or more accurately, face consolidations.

The Jill persona is just the tip of the iceberg. Behind that bright, friendly image, savvy e-businesses are integrating customer information stored in CRM and ERP (enterprise resource planning) back-end applications. But building a Web site with personality isn’t easy. It requires stitching together multiple tools such as Silknet Software Inc.’s Trusted Advisor-the technology behind Jill-as well as intelligent search engines, e- mail management, Web chat and call-back buttons to give the site its own charm. Because there is no one software suite that does it all, it usually falls to the IT department to write the code that brings it together.

And as companies such as Sun Microsystems Inc., DaimlerChrysler Corp., Proflowers.com and Porsche Cars of North America Inc. work on creating a single corporate identity for customers and partners to relate to, they’re running into another challenge: persuading division managers-who are sometimes reluctant to relinquish control of customer information-to buy in to the idea.

Ultimately, however, creating a friendly corporate persona on the front end and pooling data on the back end means customers avoid having to deal with a corporation’s separate business divisions, which can all have distinct Web personalities, log-ins and passwords. They get more self-serve options and quicker answers, and e-businesses get tighter customer relationships and lower support costs.

Experts say it’s crucial for businesses to determine what technology is needed to put those relationships together now, before competition eats their lunch. “I do believe that although we’re on the leading edge now, and [some of this technology] is rudimentary, a year from now things will be significantly different,” said Peggy Menconi, an analyst with AMR Research Inc., in Boston. “Personalization will be past making the screen look the way you want it to. You’ll see more and more of these virtual assistants.”

Some companies, such as DaimlerChrysler, are working toward such intimate customer relationships. The company is installing online technologies based on Ask Jeeves, Ask Jeeves Inc.’s natural language search technology. The tool will be customized into a corporate persona similar to Dell Computer Corp.’s “Ask Dudley,” which allows users to type technical service and support questions in using plain English to receive instant answers.

It’s all about creating a customer relationship based on trust. “It’s a relationship with the Web,” said AMR’s Menconi. “It doesn’t surprise me that [Jill] gets mail. Rather than being a cold search engine where you put in Boolean logic, she asks questions a real person would ask you.”

Just another pretty, virtual face?

Proflowers.com, an online florist, is now in the process of evaluating Silknet’s Trusted Advisor-a set of technologies and services that can be used to produce a virtual online persona. Jonathan Sills, vice president of strategy and product development at Proflowers.com, in San Diego, said a virtual salesperson makes sense, particularly in the flower business, where a purchase isn’t just a transaction-it’s an intimate experience. “We ship an emotion, not a flower,” Sills said. “Every element of our customer experience should reflect that touchy-feeliness.”

A key part of creating a Web site with personality is doing the research it takes to imbue virtual sales personas with the kind of expertise that will keep customers coming back. An example of that research is Silknet’s Trusted Advisor division’s visits to CompUSA Inc.’s stores, where researchers eavesdropped on exchanges among experienced salespeople and customers. The result was Jill, a persona they developed specifically for cozone, which is CompUSA’s Internet spinoff. For Proflowers.com, the research will involve visiting florists to do similar research.

Based on technology developed through research at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Trusted Advisor uses mathematical curves that assign value to shopper responses, such as whether the site visitor has children and how the visitor self-ranks his or her knowledge. An online persona-aka “bot”-such as Jill then presents products tailored to a customer’s needs, along with third-party reviews and articles.

So do sites with these personas actually manage to sell all that much more than a straight configurator or search engine-enabled site? Jill’s creators say yes.

“We’ve seen healthy conversion rates” in converting browsers to buyers, said David Fowler, vice president of marketing for Silknet. “It’s doubled in Version 2.2 of Jill.”

But comprehensive, next-generation CRM has been a tough row to hoe for many companies. Despite the current consolidation trend among CRM vendors seeking to gain more product functionality, no CRM suite today can deliver both the front-end virtual persona and integrated customer information on the back end.

“There really is a lot of concern about whether you go with a point solution that manages one aspect of CRM, such as something that deals with e-mail management really well, or do you go with one that covers the whole spectrum,” said Proflowers.com’s Sills. “I haven’t seen one out there that can do everything we need to do with customer relationships at the same level of proficiency as the point solutions.”

That’s meant that Proflowers.com has had to write custom code to tie together its CRM environment, which includes Kana Communications Inc.’s Kana Customer Messaging System e-mail management tool as well as LivePerson Inc. technology, which enables “call me now” requests to be typed online alerting a company representative to phone the customer back (see story, below).

Proflowers.com also uses Personify Inc.’s Personify Essentials, a system that links visitor or behavioral data with tracked customer data, such as items purchased, amount of purchase, length of time since previous purchase and items viewed.

Tinkering with the n-tier

At DaimlerChrysler, getting cozy with customers has meant that Mike Mortan, senior manager of interactive communications, has had to get his hands dirty tinkering with every application to retrofit them into state-of-the-art n-tier architecture, a setup that allows Web site user interfaces to be changed without having to fiddle with a long string of code.

Standard site architectures have coding all the way down into the database; when one word in the interface is changed, the code has to be reworked back to the database. N-tier architecture separates codes into levels, each of which can be modified separately. What this means, Mortan said, is content can be changed quicker and is therefore more nimble at responding to customer needs.

The outcome of the tinkering will be a Web site that will not only greet visitors by name but will get downright chummy, asking, for example, “Hey, how’s your Jeep running? You know, you’re due for a tuneup. You want me to set up an appointment now?” Mortan said this ability to schedule service online will be launched later this year, even though it’s not something customers want yet-but Mortan says they soon will.

“As we know, things change quickly on the Web,” pointed out Mortan, in Auburn Hills, Mich. “As we move to the future, a big part of personalizing customer experience on the Web will be knowing [customers] well and knowing when they’ll be ready to shop again, plus their buying habits and shopping and lifestyle preferences. We’ll be able to push to a consumer relevant info they’re interested in, as opposed to making a Web site that’s meant for the masses.”

DaimlerChrysler is also plugging in the friendliness fix of a natural language search engine. The company’s Ask Chrysler is a tool that’s based on Ask Jeeves’ Ask Jeeves Corporate Service. Why not just put in a simple search engine? They just don’t have any personality, Mortan said.

“This [involved] humans sitting down and looking at the Web site as a potential consumer and really writing answers and pointing the questions to the actual Web site where the answer would be found,” Mortan said. “[Where] other products use fuzzy logic to do that … we wanted the ability to sit down as if you had another person on the other end of that scene and open up dialogue through natural language.”

A virtual foot in a virtual mouth

Despite the lure of this type of customer self-service, e- businesses should be aware that they can easily backfire and blow up the site’s credibility. That’s because such transactions require data in ERP and CRM systems to be available so that online visitors actually touch the data in enterprises’ back ends. Unfortunately, many businesses aren’t at liberty to tweak long-standing back-end systems at will.

That’s the case at Porsche Cars North America, which is piloting a relational vehicle/customer database that would provide transparency from a browser into the AS/400 back end to access information such as a car’s service history and a customer’s lifestyle, including how many vehicles a customer has and even how many children.

What hamstrings an effort like that is that the legacy systems- including the half-dozen databases through which information flows sluggishly-can’t be changed, since they’ve been adopted by Dr. Ing. h. c. F. Porsche AG as worldwide standards, according to John Jacobs, manager of Porsche Cars North America’s dealer and field systems, in Atlanta.

“There’s a lot of one-to-one relationship marketing aspects we can leverage with a CRM initiative,” Jacobs said. “[For example,] we could provide service reminders, [set up] service appointments. … [But] we can’t touch that legacy code and modify it for our own use because it upsets the apple cart for the international implementation.”

To get that information to flow more freely, at least for dealers, Porsche has licensed Jacada Ltd.’s Jacada for Java, a tool that applies graphical interfaces to huge databases of information and ERP applications, eliminating the need to rewrite code or move data off the mainframes.

But even after businesses figure out how to hook up legacy systems for next-generation CRM, they still have to make sure their back-end data is squeaky clean, experts say. After all, even Jill gets the occasional less-than-charming e-mail, such as one from a customer who found her technical knowledge lacking. “Several things can make [these personas] annoying,” AMR’s Menconi said. “[Companies] put up bad info, or they don’t update it, so they have old info that’s no longer relevant.”

A company such as Sun knows all about exposing its problems publicly. Like many large companies, Sun initially lurched onto the Web with all its divisions dangling. Fixing that situation so that customers could access one Sun and get what they need without getting shunted from division to division is the reason that Sun created its eSun initiative a year ago.

Uniting disparate divisions will spare Sun’s customers pain and save the company money. For example, an order status check costs about $20 when a customer calls Sun, but just pennies when done by a customer online, according to Bobbi Burns, director of Web commerce at Sun. First, however, Burns had to be able to present customers with information from multiple back-end systems. And that meant she had to fight to get divisions’ upper management to let go of their online fiefdoms. “It was a nightmare,” said Burns, in Chelmsford, Mass. “We were asking divisions that were traditionally very independent and used to making their own choices to do something new. It’s perceived as a threat and a taking away of power.”

It took the eSun initiative six months, even with upper management’s support, to get buy-in to the new deal. Now the challenge is to present Jill-style customer recognition in the world of business-to-business, which is far more complex than business-to-consumer relationships.

For example, presenting customized product catalogs so that customers don’t buy products that would be incompatible with their networks can involve five levels of employee access and buying authority. A service contract may be relevant only to a subset at a company, and information may be off-limits to some employees.

“Having multiple customer management systems gets difficult,” Burns admitted. “We have to make sure we can tie systems together with common identifiers and not have to replace them all at once.”

So why go through the angst? Because customers won’t be putting up with online enterprise schizophrenia much longer. “Our customers know what they want and don’t want to spend time calling someone,” Burns said. “They want access right away … and they want to work with one Sun.”

So where should businesses start to give their online personalities some charm? AMR’s Menconi said the first thing to do is to look at a site from the customer’s point of view and design CRM features accordingly. That means letting customers do whatever they want to do quickly and easily-forget the sticky site syndrome; get them out quickly and only upsell subtlely.

Next, make sure you clean up before you open up. Dirty data is just an embarrassment. Last, don’t wait, because “there’s too much at stake,” Menconi said.

After all, you don’t want to catch Jill winning the hearts of customers on a competitor’s site.

Don’t let them drop before they shop

Consumers want self-service on e-commerce sites that allow them to complete as much as they can, as fast as they can. But businesses have to stitch together a crazy quilt of applications to cover all their visitors’ needs, since no one suite offers all the coddling required for a good customer relationship. Here are some of the functions that will satisfy CRM needs:

Research products: There are many solutions to choose from, but some businesses are using natural-language technology to make sure Internet newbies don’t get scared off by Boolean logic. *(products include: Ask Jeeves, Edify and iPlanet)

Create order: Let customers view products before dumping them in shopping carts, or your site will be littered with abandoned carts. *(products include: Calico, FirePond and Trilogy)

Search solutions: Smart technology takes note of what a visitor is researching and will then use predictive modeling to determine what they might buy. *(products include: Ventix, Silknet and Inference)

Check order status: Link-ups to delivery channels such as FedEx are de rigueur. *(products include: netDialog and Silknet)

Dispatch engineers: The ability to call for service help online is rare but will soon be a must-have feature. *(products include: IET, eDispatch.com and PointServe)

Online buddies vs. big brothers

The Catch-22 in today’s e-economy is that on one hand, to build a deep and lasting relationship with customers or partners, you need to know as much about them as possible. On the other hand, many people are fed up with their personal information being bandied about, since it often results in an e-mail box full of spam. Here is what e-businesses need to collect and analyze to turn the Web site into a visitor’s trusted assistant:

Basic profile. Name, e-mail address, billing and shipping addresses, phone number(s), whether they’re part of a household (for business-to-consumer interactions) or employees of a business (for business-to-business).

Preferred method of communicating. Do visitors prefer communicating via phone, e-mail, Web chat or face to face? Do they prefer different channels at different points in their transactions?

Quality of interactions. If Web site visitors are going away frustrated, you better know about it, and you also better know when and why it’s happening in a transaction.

Searle’s thought is distinctive in that he has long advocated that it is an error to regard these ancient homilies as belonging to common sense. Common sense, according to Searle, delivers itself in the form of beliefs such as that if we want folks to be nice to us, we have to be nice to them, or that if it is very humid, moderately high temperatures can be very uncomfortable. But the existence of a mind-independent reality and the referentiality of our talk and thought belongs to what Searle calls the Background. What is tricky about the Background is that when we philosophise about it, we have no choice but to carry on in a way that makes it appear that we are evincing deep-seated beliefs. But the correct outlook is that these things lie so deep, are so much taken for granted, so much something whose denial never so much as occurs to us, that none of our ordinary cognitive words, such as believe, know, take for granted, assume, presuppose, be certain of, are appropriate to them. Perhaps Wittgenstein in his late work On Certainty is urging something akin to this. He might even have touched on it in his early work when he made the enigmatic distinction between what can be said and what cannot be said but only shown.

Searle characterises these Background matters as “default positions”, by which he means that those who dispute them have to make the running in philosophical debate. It is not that nothing can ever happen which might remove something from the Background and put it up for grabs, even finally dispose of it. But it is so hard to make this happen that those who challenge default positions have to start all the ball-rolling and the rest of us only need to rebut challenges. Searle does acknowledge that most of the great philosophers got that way by attacking default positions and he hints that his own attachment to philosophy is a little embarrassed by that.

SEARLE IS SCRUPULOUS, though his tongue is tempted toward his cheek, to distinguish between rebutting the arguments of the anti-realists and postmodernists, and diagnosing adherent of these arguments as a cultural phenomenon. He thinks diagnosis is called for because the arguments are so bad that it is hard to believe that they can be what sustains the animus against an independent and objective reality. This reviewer, anyway, is inclined to agree with Searle. I will leave it to those who read this book to appreciate most of the detail of Searle’s rebuttals and use most of my allotted words to applaud and even elaborate Searle’s diagnostic efforts.

Searle rightly remarks that the main impetus to idealism or anti-realism has been that realism carries with it a problem about whether the representations we arrive at through perception, memory and inference are reliable and true. This generates global scepticism, always there when philosophy is there, but more prominent since Descartes imagined his powerful and deceptive Evil Demon, and revivified by the Demon’s modern counterpart, the Brain in the Vat. Idealism, classically exemplified by George Berkeley, overcomes scepticism by reducing the content of claims about independent material bodies to the evidence for those claims. Thus tables and chairs are understood by Berkeley and later idealists or phenomenalists as really being more or less regular and organised bits of sensory experience, something available to brains in vats. J.S. Mill said that material objects were “permanent possibilities of sensation”. This also comes to reducing truths about what exists to truths about evidence for them. Since scepticism thrives on the gap between evidence and what it is evidence for, scepticism is thereby overcome; but the price is idealism in one or other of its guises.

Searle, following one of his mentors, John Austin, is happy to rebut scepticism with the observation that it is a mistake to infer from the fact that two experiences are intrinsically alike while one is veridical and the other not, that there really is no such thing as veridical experience in the first place. For who says that in order to determine that experience A was veridical and experience B was not, I may exploit only the resources of the two experiences and not rely on further or prior tests and observations? This is a developed version of the point, often made against Descartes, that he appears to be inferring from the fact that any experience can be deceptive, to the conclusion that all experiences can be. But this is a bad inference. No-one would say that because any runner can win the race, they all can.

Searle observes that these days, the anti-realists (let me use that tag for pragmatists, idealists, linguistic idealists, social constructionists, postmodernist textualists), do not seem to lean so much on scepticism (I think they fall back on it more than Searle suggests), but on an array of other arguments which are shot through with confusions. There is, first, the argument that if you encounter something from a point of view or a perspective (to use the fashionable Nietzschean term) you do not really encounter reality. Then there is the idea that since we have to use words to say what we think, the things we think about are somehow linguisticised or (might one say?) cultured (like a pearl!). Arguments of this genre are often accompanied with sneer caps, as when we are told of “Reality As It Is In Itself”, that it is a notion to be dispensed with as rather adolescent in the growth of thought through Hegel and the pragmatists to the wisdom of various more recent luminaries such as John Dewey, Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. It is fair enough to confront all this with Gottlob Frege’s observation that, of course, you cannot wash the wool without getting it wet. He meant to imply that even if that is so, you have no business to infer that wool does not exist independently of being wetted.

Searle does not use the following example, but he ought to have. It captures most of the point he is after about the way anti-realists confuse words and the world. Some years ago (in the New York Review of Books) I read: “The Pacific Ocean was an invention of 19th century cartography”. It is to me one of the mysteries of intellectual life why some thinkers feel the urge to talk in such a silly way. Cartographers do not invent oceans any more than astronomers invent galaxies. This point holds even if, as I reckon is so, dividing up the waters of the earth into so and so many oceans, seas, lakes, ponds and puddles will lead to borderline cases and a degree of conventionality, though it is almost certainly not as arbitrary as setting out the borderlines among, say, states of Australia.

The mistake involved in that example is of the exact same kind as would be made by someone who expected a river to be blue because blue is the colour used on maps for rivers; or, even sillier, the mistake someone would make if he expected Annabelle to be lovelier than Gertrude because “Gertrude” was a repellent sounding name to him and “Annabelle” a lovely one.

Searle’s rebuttals are effective. But his diagnosis should sting. He judges that the anti-realists are moved by dislike of the idea of a reality to which their thoughts are answerable, some of them seeing the idea of such a reality as the last bastion of the tyranny of an omnipotent and authoritative divine being. (This is very cute, enabling indubitably secular, naturalistic and pro-enlightenment thinkers such as Searle to be tarred with brush of spiritualism.) This dislike, especially in academic life, involves a hatred of natural science. What better way to put science in its place (or remove it from its place) than to say that chemistry and physics too are texts and what they speak of is not really different from fictions? This animus against science, Searle suggests, is not merely envy and dislike, but a will to power. Power is, in a sense, asserted over reality itself (it is a social construction). But equality of status and power, within the academy and in society, is also sought, even if the way to get it is to reduce the prestige of science.

IT IS WORTH REMARKING that Richard Rorty, the most famous pragmatist walking the earth today and a frequent critic of Searle, is on record as saying that the intellectual credentials of literary criticism are on a par with those of biology or physics. I once met a structuralist literary analyst who insisted that her analyses of literary texts (or the texts of matchbooks and T-shirts) were “scientific” and that she had no interest in questions of value, such as what makes Shakespeare so much better than Joyce Kilmer, and no interest either in the truth or falsity of the claim that Shakespeare is better. That conversation took place nearly thirty years ago and structuralists in English departments were claiming kinship with the objectivity of science. That “us too” move was the beginning of the envy of science that Searle speaks of; the idea was, to repeat the point, that humanists were also scientific. Post-structuralism gives up the claim that literary analysis is objective and scientific, but also assimilates the two domains by saying that science is a branch of literature, and by insisting that not even physics is, or can be, objective in the way realists think it is. What has gone on here is interesting. It used to be that the humanities acknowledged a serious difference between what they did and what natural science did; but this acknowledgment was not a matter of accepting some inferior cultural status. It was a matter of the difference between the pursuit and growth of knowledge and the pursuit and growth of sensibility. The humanities also sometimes saw themselves as the major carriers of high cultural traditions. Reason was important and available all round, just as it is available in ethical life via the difference between good reasons and bad reasons for acting or via the difference between emotions that are appropriate and rational instead of inappropriate and irrational.

That happy accommodation was an offspring of enlightenment, no doubt midwived by economic and political liberalism, with its attachment to pluralism and tolerance. J.S. Mill’s awakening to poetry and his recovery from despair, with the aid of Wordsworth, are a marvellous example of the possibility and importance of finding a harmonious relation between science and sensibility. “Only connect the prose and the passion,” says Margaret Schlegel in Howards End. Many of us who got our educations in the fifties lived under this happy dispensation. Many philosophers during the last thirty or so years have been much concerned to criticise those who see a far more radical and sharp divide between reason and emotion than is really visible there.

Even so, it is a sort of Romantic revival, this envious hatred of science that Searle diagnoses. Mill did not lose respect for Newton when he gained so much from Wordsworth. But others, Keats and Blake in the lead, Shelley not far behind, saw Newton as a great beast, a destroyer of sensibility, prophet of a meaningless and mechanical reality, no decent abode for the spirit. Keats (here I follow Mark Abram’s book The Mirror and the Lamp), said that poets were the only real discoverers of truth and (more famously) that truth was beauty. Blake’s loathing of Newton is well recorded. Mill was on the side of mutual respect, as Coleridge seemed to have been, and Wordsworth too. But the depth of the divide between poetry and philosophy (which should be construed in this context as including physics, whose name used to be “natural philosophy”) has reasserted itself at the end of our century.

It has done so in a remarkable way. No Keatsian claim to be the only genuine seekers after truth, no Blakean horror at the meaningless world urged by materialist philosophers; rather a poisoning of the wells of reasoned inquiry by casting suspicion on the motives and putative power-playing of those one criticises. Cultural studies, the newest kid on the academic block, is making its way by claiming to descry causes and motives behind ideas and arguments in a way even more blatant than the Marxists and Freudians of yore. Marx and Freud were as much offspring of the enlightenment as Diderot, Darwin and Bertrand Russell. Their diagnostic moves would normally be prefaced by evidence or argument of a straight kind against the positions or theses they took issue with. Freud surely had an opinion of what was unconsciously sustaining Jung in his views. But he urges the superiority of his own theory in a way that conforms (well enough) to the norms of objective enquiry and proper intellectual debate, even if, with hindsight, we can see in Freud (as we almost always can with any thinker) instances of blindness, oversight or pigheadedness in defence of his own views.

I have devoted this review to the beginning and the end of Searle’s book. In between we are given succinct representations of views for which Searle is well known, written for educated non-philosophers. And well done it is. We are given his views on consciousness and intentionality (the name given to the directedness or the “aboutness” of thought and feeling), and the centrality of this to the nature of the mind as a biological phenomenon. We are given a good taste of Searle on language and speech acts, for which, as I opened by mentioning, he is widely known outside philosophy. Further, we get Searle on human institutionality and on the constructed nature of social institutions (nothing to do, except via gross muddle, with the doctrine of the social constructedness of reality) and the centrality of language to the existence and nature of the social or the institutional. Searle even has a go at explaining to us the nature of money, a secular mystery if there ever has been one. This belongs to Searle’s latest ventures beyond philosophy of mind and language into the realm of philosophy of social science. It is very useful to get clear about the difference between things whose very existence and nature are constituted by our minds and our practices, such things as votes and money, and things which, while our having concepts of them is an outcome of human life and mentality, nevertheless exist and have their nature independently of our minds; such things as rocks.

Judging by the most visible application of artificial intelligence today-intelligent agents-I wouldn’t bet my PC on this. Intelligent agents are software routines designed to retrieve the information you need and perform actions for you based on that information automatically. Also called bots (as in robots), intelligent agents are fascinating in their potential, less so in their current incarnation.

Although bots today can perform research, chat with you, gather news, play games with you, and track stocks, many of the most popular are used by consumers and businesses for comparison shopping over the Web. There are dozens to choose from. Like search sites, which use similar technology, most bots are free.

Shopping bots work simply enough. You type in the product or brand you’re interested in, and the bot tries to find Web merchants offering it at the lowest price. Then you surf to the merchant’s site. I’ve used bots to shop for some time now, more or less successfully.

One problem is that most bots offer only product pricing information, ignoring the other factors, such as a site’s ease of navigation, product quality, warranty, service, shipping charges, delivery time, and whether the product is in stock. Nothing will sour you faster on bots than going to a site a bot suggests only to find, after filling out a detailed order form, that excessive shipping costs make the product more expensive than at other sites.

Sometimes bots don’t perform as advertised. The price a bot lists may not be the same as the price the Web merchant’s actual selling price. Or the lowest price the bot turns up may be higher than what you’d pay in person at your local Wal-Mart.

Regarding bargain hunting, just as in the off-line world, it’s good practice to be wary of a Web merchant offering a price significantly below the norm. Opt instead for sites offering a competitive price along with indications that your shopping experience will be trouble-free.

Another problem is that bots typically aren’t comprehensive. It’s not always their fault. Some shopping sites block bots from accessing their pricing information for fear of diminishing their brand image. But bots are often selective in which shopping sites they’ll search and list. Some list results first from sites they have marketing affiliations with, then from nonaffiliated sites. Others list results only from their affiliated sites. For these and other reasons, sometimes you can’t find products you know are out there.

Still, the best bots today, used judiciously, can save you money over retail without your having to leave the comfortable perch in front of your PC. Examples include general-interest bots such as mySimon at www.mysimon.com, Yahoo Shopping at http://shopping.yahoo.com, and Bottomdollar.com at www.bottomdollar, com and specialized bots such as CNET Shopper at www.shopper.com, MortgageQuotes.com at www.mortgagequotes.com, and InsWeb at www.insweb.com.

Right now, all bots can typically do is try to find good deals for you. You have to do the rest. Work is under way though on interactive bots that can, for instance, negotiate price and other variables and place orders without your involvement. For more information on bots in general, check out BotSpot at www.botspot.com.

Bots, or intelligent agents, will certainly get smarter, as will information technology as a whole. Whether computers will outsmart us is a question that will be answered only as the future boots up.