Botsourcing

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Botsourcing, a neologism, involves the assignment of tasks to an autonomous, or intelligent, programmed agent - or bot. Consistent with outsourcing, or crowdsourcing, botsourcing reflects the choice to assign tasks traditionally performed by human agents to software agents, whether those agents are located inside or outside the organization.

The origin of the term "botsourcing" is unclear, but a 2004 issue of IEEE Spectrum used the term in an article entitled "From outsourcing to botsourcing"[1] in the context of using bots, or robots, to accomplish otherwise human tasks. Of particular interest to the authors were the new Sony robots, capable of rather complex physical motion.

Examples of possible botsourcing include Internet Bots like the Googlebot, Game Bots in multi-player games, Chatterbots in customer service, Shop Bots for price comparisons, ratings and purchases, Robots for physical tasks, or other software/hardware based agents. Recently, a number of trading firms replaced fund managers with sophisticated trading bots. Thomson Financial also announced that they are using bot scripts to write various news articles for dissemination to traders.