Companion agents for enabling B2B culture in SMB´s

Small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) in Mexico represent nearly 97% of the total of industry employment, more than 76% of revenue, and nearly 50% of the GNP. Similar phenomena occur worldwide; SMB´s constitute a huge growth opportunity for high tech companies. However, the technological resources that they employ are - in general - in the early stages, and many of them are underfinanced. Moreover, entrepreneurs rarely possess the appropriate culture for smooth adoption of e-business high tech. In order to ease the process of introduction of business to business (B2B) in an SMB, our objective is to design an intelligent tutoring system (ITS) to help SMB executives familiarize with the critical success factors (CSFs) involved in this process. Our model uses pedagogical agents known as learning companions (LCs) to help business people learn B2B concepts. LC´s are agentified students that motivate learning. These LCs have different expertise levels so an entrepreneur can interact with the agent or agents that best suits them. Our model also uses inspectable student models to allow users of the ITS to reflect on acquired knowledge and update agents knowledge bases.