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It was a common theme in Apple WWDC conferences in the late 80's. Alan Kay has an interesting talk about agents.

I think it could be argued that the low hanging fruit aspect of agents where fulfilled by microservices and web based businesses. The concept of webpages populated with relevant data like google search pages, or Amazon populating products you'd like, could be called agent based. Netflix could be an example of an agent based service.

Or CORBA based intelligent agents in the 1990s

Clippy?

I mean they are truly the dream of every capitalist. Intelligent agents basically mean free money. Of course this is something Microsoft would be talking about for decades.