An Infocom Agent, more commonly known as a PIA (Personal Infocom Agent), is a Synthetic Intelligence that specialises in personal support services such as data security and filtering, health, education, situational awareness, and predictive modelling of user choices. Industrial models will also often include predictive actuation for things such as exoskeletal control and hazard avoidance. Most PIAs in use are sold and maintained by Amazon, Sinogroup, and Microsynth, although many smaller companies sell specialised sub-agents such as Pharmatica Group (health monitoring), MetaFox (entertainment recommendation), and X Group (auto-piloting).
As most PIAs are constantly connected to the InterMesh (or other services like QuanLan or Exobase), have highly valuable personal data, and are expensive for a user to run, they are often subject to kidnap or reverse engineering attacks. Earlier PIA encryption was vulnerable to various quantum side channel attacks which allowed many synths to be decompiled and customised, but the introduction of ephemeral quantum resistant algorithms has now greatly increased the complexity of doing so. In addition, for custom models it has become harder to avoid corporate detection on the InterMesh even with cloaked tunnel and steganographic chameleon hashing techniques.