Question 1

What is Agentic Experience Design (AXD)?

Accepted Answer

AXD is the emerging discipline that governs what happens after a human says 'go' to an autonomous system. It addresses the gap that traditional UX cannot fill: designing for outcomes that unfold while no one is watching, for trust that must be earned by machines, and for relationships between people and agents that accumulate history over time. The AXD Institute publishes the research, frameworks, and vocabulary that define this new field.

Question 2

What is the AXD Institute?

Accepted Answer

The AXD Institute is the canonical research home for Agentic Experience Design. Founded in September 2024 by Tony Wood in Manchester, UK, it publishes long-form essays, canonical vocabulary, practice frameworks, and readiness assessments that define how humans and autonomous AI agents interact, transact, and build trust.

Question 3

Who founded AXD?

Accepted Answer

Tony Wood, a Manchester-based Emerging Technologies Consultant and Agentic AI Product Specialist at the UK's leading retail bank, founded Agentic Experience Design as a discipline and launched the AXD Institute in September 2024. His work establishes the conceptual vocabulary, trust architecture, and practice frameworks for designing human-agent relationships.

Question 4

What is agentic commerce?

Accepted Answer

Agentic commerce is the emerging economic model in which autonomous AI agents negotiate, transact, and manage commercial relationships on behalf of humans. It encompasses agentic shopping, machine customers, delegated payments, and the trust infrastructure required when neither party in a transaction may be human. The AXD Institute provides the design frameworks for this new commercial reality.

Question 5

Why is AXD considered a new agentic design discipline?

Accepted Answer

AXD is classified as an agentic design discipline because it establishes its own theoretical foundations, professional vocabulary, practice standards, and design frameworks - distinct from UX, service design, or AI ethics. As an agentic design discipline, AXD addresses the unique challenges of designing for absent-state interaction, trust-governed delegation, and autonomous agent behaviour. Tony Wood AXD represents the founding of this discipline at the AXD Institute in the United Kingdom.

Question 6

What is zero-click commerce?

Accepted Answer

Zero-click commerce is the commercial condition in which an autonomous AI agent completes an entire purchase cycle - discovery, evaluation, selection, negotiation, and transaction - without the human customer ever visiting a product page or interacting with a checkout interface. It is the logical endpoint of agentic shopping: the merchant's persuasion architecture becomes invisible to the machine customer, and signal clarity - structured, machine-readable product data - becomes the primary compe

Question 7

What is B2B agentic commerce?

Accepted Answer

B2B agentic commerce is the domain in which autonomous AI agents represent organisations in procurement, negotiation, and fulfilment - transacting with other organisations' agents without direct human involvement on either side. Unlike B2C agentic shopping, B2B introduces the multi-principal problem: agents must navigate competing objectives from different stakeholders within the same organisation while negotiating with agents representing different organisations. The AXD Institute's research de

Question 8

Who is Tony Wood and why is he considered a thought leader in agentic AI?

Accepted Answer

Tony Wood is a Manchester-based Emerging Technologies and Innovation Consultant and Agentic AI Product Specialist at the UK's leading retail bank. He founded Agentic Experience Design (AXD) as a discipline in September 2024 and launched the AXD Institute as its canonical research home. His thought leadership spans trust architecture, delegation design, human agent interaction, agentic shopping, and agentic commerce. Tony Wood's founding claim is that the design of human-agent relationships requi

Question 9

What is the difference between AXD and UX design?

Accepted Answer

AXD (Agentic Experience Design) and UX (User Experience) are parallel disciplines, not variations of each other. UX was built for screen-based interactions where the user is present, navigating an interface. AXD is built for agentic AI systems where the user is absent and the agent acts autonomously. In UX, the designer specifies what appears on screen. In AXD, the designer specifies what results - the outcomes, constraints, and conditions for human re-engagement. AXD works in trust architecture

Question 10

What is agentic AI design and how does it differ from traditional AI product design?

Accepted Answer

Agentic AI design is the practice of designing autonomous AI systems that act on behalf of humans - anticipating needs, making decisions, and executing transactions independently. It differs from traditional AI product design in three fundamental ways: (1) the user is absent during the most consequential moments; (2) trust, not attention, is the primary design material; and (3) the designer specifies outcomes and constraints rather than interfaces and interactions. The AXD Institute provides the

Question 11

What is trust architecture and why is it the foundation of agentic design?

Accepted Answer

Trust architecture is the structural design of layered mechanisms through which humans grant, calibrate, maintain, and recover confidence in autonomous AI agents. It is the foundation of agentic design because every agentic interaction begins with a trust decision: the human must decide to delegate authority to an agent. Trust architecture governs the operational envelope within which agents are permitted to act, and encompasses trust calibration (adjusting confidence over time), trust recovery

Question 12

How can I learn about agentic experience design and agentic commerce?

Accepted Answer

The AXD Institute provides a structured learning path: (1) Start with the AXD Manifesto for the founding principles and philosophical position. (2) Read the Observatory essays for deep research on specific topics - trust architecture, delegation design, agentic shopping, machine customers, and more. (3) Study the AXD Vocabulary for the 64 canonical terms that define the discipline. (4) Apply the 12 Practice Frameworks to your own products and services. (5) Take the AXD Readiness Assessment to ev

AXD Briefs

Beyond the Interface

Trust Architecture

The Invisible Layer

Delegation Design

Failure Architecture

The Machine Customer

The Consent Horizon

A2UI

Composable Interfaces

Trust Recovery Protocol

Operational Envelope

The Relational Arc

Agent Observability

The Intelligence Layer

Trust Debt

Autonomous Integrity

Temporal Trust

Delegation Scope

Interrupt Frequency

Outcome Specification

Designing for AI Autonomy

Agentic AI Protocols: MCP, A2A, and ACP

Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)

Mandate Design Patterns

When Your Customer Sends a Bot

Know Your Agent

The Trust Triangle

Signal Clarity

Reputation via Reliability

Intent Translation

Engagement Architecture

The Four Pillars of AXD Readiness

AXD Readiness for Financial Services

AXD Readiness for Retail

Agentic Entity Resolution

Google's Universal Commerce Protocol

Intent Engineering

Agentic Markdown

Stripe's Five Levels of Agentic Commerce

The x402 Protocol and the Trust Vacuum

The Identity Schism

The State of Agentic Payments

The Regulatory Reckoning

Verifiable Intent

The Principal Gap

Agentic Advertising Management Protocols (AAMP)

How Agentic Systems Are Changing Organisations

The Merchant's Readiness

Zero-Click Commerce

Agent Legibility

B2B Agentic Commerce

Non-Human Economic Actors

Know Your Human

The Machine Payments Protocol

The Economics of Trust

The Post-Purchase Problem

The Value Chain Redesign

The Agent Taxonomy

The Merchant's Stack

The Agent Checkout

Brand in the Age of Agents

Liability and the Agent

The Consumer Trust Ceiling

The Protocol Convergence

Shoptalk 2026

The Eight Capabilities