Few businesses gain a competitive advantage simply by using the Internet. Today, businesses need a unique online strategy to gain a competitive advantage. Unfortunately, most businesses limit their online strategy to a website—which, barring some visual design differences, essentially functions like all the other websites within their industry. Webbots, in contrast, allow business people to automatically gather and process online information. The first time you use an automated web agent to perform a specific business task, you will never again be satisfied with an online strategy that consists only of a traditional website.
Most of the webbot projects I’ve developed are for business leaders who’ve become frustrated with the Internet as it is. They want added automation and decision-making capability on the websites they use. Essentially, they want webbots that customize other people’s websites (and the data those sites contain) for the specific way they do business. Progressive businesses use webbots to improve their online experience, optimizing how they buy things, how they conduct corporate intelligence, how they’re notified when things change, and how to enforce business rules when making online purchases.
Businesses that use webbots aren’t limited to a set of websites that are accessed by browsers. Instead, they see the Internet as a stockpile of varied resources that they can customize (using webbots) to serve their specific needs.
Most people have very little experience using the Internet with anything other than a browser, and even if people have used other Internet clients like email or mobile apps, they have never thought about how their online experience could be improved through automation. For most, it just hasn’t been an issue.
For businesspeople, blind allegiance to browsers is a double-edged sword. In one respect, it’s good that people aren’t familiar with the benefits that webbots provide—this provides opportunities for you to develop webbot projects that offer competitive advantages. On the other hand, if your supervisors are used to the Internet as seen through a browser alone, you may have a hard time selling your innovative webbot projects to management.
Webbots can achieve amazing results without elaborate setups. I’ve used obsolete computers with slow, dial-up connections to run webbots that create completely new revenue channels for businesses. Webbots can even be designed to work with existing office equipment like phones, fax machines, and printers.