Tony Wood | AI Agentic Commerce and AXD Consultant
Founder of Agentic Experience Design.
The discipline for designing human-agent trust.
Tony Wood advises organisations on the design challenges created by autonomous AI - trust architecture, delegation design, and the structural systems that govern how humans and agents work together. As founder of the AXD Institute and creator of Agentic Experience Design, he brings a practitioner's perspective to agentic commerce strategy, machine-customer readiness, and human-agent interaction design.
12
AXD Frameworks
Authored and published
64
Canonical Terms
Defined in the AXD Vocabulary
62
Research Essays
Published in the Observatory
Proven
AXD Practitioner
Founding discipline creator
Your AI may be capable but,
do your users trust it?
Organisations are building increasingly autonomous AI agents - agents that negotiate, purchase, manage, and decide on behalf of humans. But the design discipline for governing these relationships does not exist inside most product teams.
The result is predictable: users under-delegate because they don't trust the agent, or over-delegate because the interface failed to communicate risk. Both outcomes destroy value.
Agentic Experience Design is the discipline that solves this. It provides the frameworks, vocabulary, and structural patterns for designing the relationship between humans and autonomous agents - not just the interface, but the trust, the delegation, and the recovery.
As the creator of AXD and author of all 12 Practice Frameworks, Tony Wood is the only consultant who can deliver this discipline at the depth your organisation requires.
How We Work
Trust Before Capability
Every engagement begins with trust architecture. If users cannot form, calibrate, and recover trust in your AI agents, no amount of capability matters.
Design the Delegation, Not Just the Interface
The critical design surface is not the screen - it is the moment a human decides to delegate authority to an autonomous agent. That decision must be designed.
Autonomy is Earned, Not Assumed
Agents should begin with minimal autonomy and earn expanded authority through demonstrated competence. The Autonomy Gradient is a design system, not a settings panel.
Absence is a Design State
When humans delegate to agents, they are absent from the process. That absence must be designed for - with observability, audit trails, and interrupt patterns.
Four Ways to Engage
Every engagement is bespoke. These are the four primary formats through which organisations access AXD consulting - each calibrated to a different stage of agentic maturity.
AXD Diagnostic
2-4 weeks
A comprehensive audit of your current human-agent interaction surfaces. Identifies trust gaps, delegation failures, and autonomy misalignment across your agentic commerce and AI product stack.
Deliverables
- Trust Architecture Assessment
- Delegation Design Audit
- Autonomy Gradient Map
- Priority Remediation Roadmap
Trust Architecture Design
6-12 weeks
End-to-end design of your trust architecture - the structural system that governs how users form, calibrate, and recover trust in your AI agents. From competence signalling to failure recovery.
Deliverables
- Trust Layer Blueprint
- Calibration Protocol Design
- Recovery Pattern Library
- Implementation Specification
Agentic Commerce Strategy
4-8 weeks
Strategic design for organisations entering the agentic commerce era. Covers machine customer readiness, agentic shopping flows, delegation design, and the full agent-to-user interface layer.
Deliverables
- Commerce Autonomy Strategy
- Machine Customer Readiness Assessment
- Delegation Design System
- Agent-to-User Interface Specification
Total Framework Implementation
8-16 weeks
Hands-on implementation of the 12 proven AXD Practice Frameworks within your product and engineering teams. From Intent Architecture to Ethical Constraint, embedded into your design and development workflow.
Deliverables
- Framework Integration Plan
- Team Capability Building
- Design Pattern Library
- Governance & Review Process
Who This Is For
AXD consulting is for organisations where the stakes of human-agent interaction are high - where trust failures have real consequences, and where getting delegation design right is a competitive advantage.
- Enterprise AI product teams building autonomous agent systems
- Commerce platforms preparing for machine customers and agentic shopping
- Financial services firms designing AI delegation and trust systems
- Healthcare organisations implementing autonomous clinical decision support
- Government agencies establishing AI governance and explainability standards
- Venture-backed startups building agent-first products
Built on Proven Results
Every recommendation is grounded in the published AXD body of work - 12 frameworks, 64 canonical terms, and 62 research essays. This is not opinion-based consulting. It is discipline-based upon real results.
The Observatory began in September 2024 with a founding essay arguing that UX was built for a world where the user is present, the screen is the medium, and the interaction is the unit of design - and that agentic AI dismantles all three assumptions. From those theoretical foundations in trust architecture and delegation design, through the architectural middle period on trust dynamics and absent-state design, to the industry response essays analysing Stripe, Mastercard, Visa, Google, and OpenAI protocols, the Observatory is the research record of a field being built in real time.
The AXD Manifesto
The founding declaration of Agentic Experience Design. What the discipline is, what it requires, and what it must not become.
Read the ManifestoThe Observatory
51 long-form research essays on agentic commerce, trust architecture, delegation design, and the emerging landscape of human-agent interaction.
Enter the ObservatoryThe 12 Frameworks
From Intent Architecture to Ethical Constraint - the complete structural toolkit for designing human-agent relationships in production systems.
Explore the FrameworksThe organisations that will lead the agentic era are not the ones with the most capable AI. They are the ones that design the best relationships between humans and agents.
Tony Wood - Founder, AXD Institute
Ready to design the trust layer your AI needs?
Every engagement begins with a conversation. Share your challenge - whether it's trust architecture for a new AI product, delegation design for agentic commerce, or a full AXD capability build - and we'll determine the right approach together.
Based in Manchester, United Kingdom. Available for global engagements.
Typical response time: 24-48 hours.