Agentic Experience Design (AXD) is the discipline for designing trust-governed relationships between humans and autonomous AI systems. Founded in September 2024 by Tony Wood in Manchester, United Kingdom, AXD addresses how humans delegate, calibrate, observe, interrupt, and recover trust in agentic AI.
| Dimension | Traditional UX | Agentic Experience Design (AXD) |
|---|---|---|
| Primary material | Attention and affordance | Trust and delegation |
| User state | Present, navigating | Absent, delegating |
| Design output | Screens and interfaces | Outcomes and constraints |
| Temporal model | Session-based | Relationship-based |
| Success metric | Task completion | Trust calibration |
Agentic commerce is the next shift in digital trade. Instead of a person browsing, comparing, and clicking through every decision, an AI agent can search, evaluate, negotiate, and transact on that person's behalf. This changes what discovery means, what trust means, and what brands must do to become visible, legible, and credible to machine customers.
E-commerce is designed for humans navigating screens. Agentic commerce is designed for AI agents that act autonomously on behalf of humans \u2014 discovering, negotiating, and transacting through protocols, APIs, and structured data. In e-commerce, the customer is always present. In agentic commerce, the customer may be absent entirely, with an autonomous agent executing delegated authority within a trust architecture.
A machine customer is an autonomous AI agent that acts as a buyer on behalf of a human principal. It receives delegated authority including goals, constraints, and budget parameters, then searches for options, evaluates them against the human's preferences, negotiates where possible, and completes transactions autonomously. Machine customers operate with zero brand loyalty, infinite patience for optimisation, and no susceptibility to emotional marketing - fundamentally changing how commerce work
Agentic shopping is the practice of autonomous AI agents acting as customers on behalf of humans \u2014 negotiating, purchasing, comparing, and transacting in markets without direct human involvement. The agent that performs agentic shopping is called the machine customer. It operates with zero brand loyalty, infinite patience for optimisation, and no susceptibility to emotional marketing.
Zero-click commerce is the commercial condition in which an autonomous AI agent completes an entire purchase cycle \u2014 discovery, evaluation, selection, negotiation, and transaction \u2014 without the human customer ever visiting a product page or interacting with a checkout interface. It is the logical endpoint of agentic shopping and the purest expression of absent-state design in agentic commerce. The merchant\u2019s persuasion architecture becomes invisible to the machine customer; signal
By Tony Wood · AXD Institute · Emerging Technologies and Innovation Consultant · Agentic AI Product Specialist, the UK's leading retail bank Agentic commerce is the next shift in digital trade. Instead of a person browsing, comparing, and clicking through every decision, an AI agent can search, evaluate, negotiate, and transact on that person's behalf. This changes what discovery means, what trust means, and what brands must do to become visible, legible, and credible to machine customers. We are entering an era where autonomous agents - software systems that can perceive, reason, plan, and act on behalf of humans and organisations - are becoming participants in commercial relationships. Not tools that humans use to transact. Not interfaces that mediate between buyer and seller. This is not a speculative future. Gartner predicts that by 2028, 15% of day-to-day work decisions will be made autonomously through The implications are architectural. Every commercial system - from e-commerce platforms to banking services, from insurance products to subscription management - must now be designed for a world in which the entity on the other side of the transaction may not be human. The interface may be an API. The decision-maker may be an algorithm. The loyalty may be calculated, not felt. And the Commerce is no longer a human activity mediated by technology. It is becoming a technological activity governed by human intent. Consider the trajectory in financial services. Today, a customer logs into their banking app, reviews their savings rate, compares alternatives, and manually switches to a better product. Tomorrow, their financial agent monitors rates continuously, evaluates switching costs, assesses the reputational risk of the new provider, calculates the net benefit after tax implications, and executes the switch - notifying the customer after the fact. The customer's role shifts from This creates three categories of machine customer that designers