Smart Agents

A smart agent might be an interesting thing to consider for the project, it would provide a more 'human' interface, which would be good for our target audience, wealthy middle aged men, who would generally be dealing with P.A's or secretaries, rather than doing so much work on the computer themselves (the brief states they are 'low-skilled' web users).
The smart agent would be their personal customer service advisor on the website, they can ask her (it would make most sense for it to be female), questions about the clients products/services and get a personal response.
A female virtual agent is backed up by research that most secreterial/P.A roles are undertaken by women,

From dept. of trade and industry ‘WOMEN AND EQUALITY UNIT WOMEN AND MEN IN THE WORKPLACE’ Jan 2005 Report:
Administrative and secretarial occupations: WOMEN:22% ,MEN:5%

As a selling point in our pitch, I think as long as we could show it wouldn't be stupidly expensive, incorporating Artificial Intelligence technology into the website, which would enhance the customers interaction with the site (and therefore the compnay) may sound quite impressive.

The technological level of these agents is varied. I've found 2 main options-

1. Alice bot:
http://www.alicebot.org/
This is the free 'open source' original chat-bot. I'm not sure if more development skills would be needed to make her work, but it is a very sucessful example of Artificial Intelligence.. She is like an ongoing experiment, and hosting for her can be found (for free, I think) at-
http://www.pandorabots.com/botmaster/en/faq

2. Synthetix smart agent:
http://www.synthetix.com/smartagent.php
This is software developed from the 'Alice' code. It's a pre-packaged solution, which means it would cost more than using the 'open source' option, but it should be easier to set up, with less technical knowledge needed. They have many large clients such as BBC, Egg, Curries etc, who use it to enhance navigation and enable personal responses to customer enquiries.
Syntetix host these bots for £79 a month, we'd need to compare this to other hosting prices.
http://www.synthetix.com/smartagent_hosting.php

Here are some more options-

http://www.agentland.com/

http://www.verbots.com/

http://www.intellibuddy.com/

http://vhost.oddcast.com/vhost_minisite/index.php?email=1&affId=15630