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 |
AXD is the design discipline for autonomous AI systems that act on behalf of people. It provides the frameworks for structuring authority, building trust over time, designing for absent-state operation, and creating intervention surfaces for when human judgement is needed. Tony Wood established the discipline and its institutional home in the United Kingdom in late 2024.
AXD stands for Agentic Experience Design. It is the acronym for the discipline concerned with how humans delegate, observe, interrupt, and recover trust in autonomous AI systems. The term was coined by Tony Wood in 2024 to name a design problem that existing disciplines were not built to address.
No. AXD is not UX applied to AI. It is a parallel discipline built for a fundamentally different condition: the user is absent and the agent is acting. UX optimises for attention and interface quality. AXD optimises for trust, delegation, observability, and recovery. The design materials, methods, and success metrics are different.
AXD matters now because AI systems are moving from generating content to taking autonomous action. As agents begin to buy, negotiate, manage, and decide on behalf of people, the design problem shifts from interface quality to trust architecture. Organisations that do not design for delegation, absence, and recovery will find their agentic products unusable or untrustworthy.
The AXD Institute's 12 Practice Frameworks represent the most comprehensive agentic experience design methodology published. They cover the full lifecycle from Trust Calibration and Delegation Design through Intent Architecture, Autonomy Gradient, Interrupt Patterns, and Failure Architecture. Enterprise design teams adopt them as a structured path from traditional UX into agentic design.
For thirty years, design disciplines assumed the user was present. UX mapped journeys through screens. Service design orchestrated touchpoints between people. Interaction design refined the micro-moments of click, swipe, and scroll. Every methodology shared a single assumption: the human is here, watching, deciding, acting. When an AI agent books a flight, negotiates a price, manages a portfolio, or triages a medical referral on someone's behalf, the human is absent. The most consequential moments in the experience happen when no one is watching. No existing design discipline was built for this condition. AXD is built on five principles that distinguish it from every prior design discipline: Every agentic system begins with a designed act of delegation - a human granting permission for autonomous action. AXD designers architect this delegation: its scope, duration, constraints, and mechanisms for revocation. Where UX works in attention and affordance, AXD works in trust. Trust in autonomous agents is calibrated, contextual, and fragile - and it can be designed. Trust Architecture provides the structural framework. The most consequential agentic experiences happen when no one is watching. Machine customers transact, agents decide, systems operate - all while the human is absent. Designing for absence is the defining challenge of AXD. Agentic experiences are not transactions - they are relationships that accumulate history and demonstrate character. The hundredth interaction matters more than the first. The Relational Arc governs how trust evolves over time. When the path is chosen by the agent, the designer specifies the destination, not the journey. Outcome specification - defining what success looks like rather than how to achieve it - is the primary design artifact of AXD. AXD introduces a vocabulary of concepts that have no equivalent in traditional design: The AXD Institute publishes 12 practice frameworks that translate the discipline's principles into actionab