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 |
Designing for AI agents requires a fundamentally different approach from human-centred design. Start with the AXD Manifesto to understand the founding principles, then learn the core frameworks: Trust Architecture, Delegation Design, Intent Architecture, and the Autonomy Gradient. The How To hub organises all practical pathways into structured learning sequences for different roles.
Implementation begins with the AXD Readiness Assessment across four pillars, followed by the AXD Playbook - a structured 12-week programme covering trust architecture, delegation design, observability, and rollout. Role-specific pathways guide product leaders, designers, engineers, strategists, and commerce teams through the frameworks relevant to their work.
Teams should begin with the Four Pillars of AXD Readiness - Signal Clarity, Reputation via Reliability, Intent Translation, and Engagement Architecture. The AXD Readiness Assessment provides a scored evaluation with personalised recommendations. From there, the Playbook provides the implementation roadmap, and the case studies show the frameworks applied to real industry contexts.
It depends on your role and starting point. Product leaders should start with the AXD Playbook. Designers should begin with Trust Architecture and Delegation Design. Engineers should explore the Developers guide. Commerce leaders should start with the Four Pillars and the Readiness Assessment. Strategists should begin with the Manifesto and the Observatory essays.
Use the Four Pillars of AXD Readiness framework, which evaluates organisations across four dimensions: Signal Clarity (are your products machine-readable?), Reputation via Reliability (can agents verify your trustworthiness?), Intent Translation (can agents match mandates to your products?), and Engagement Architecture (can agents transact without a browser?). Take the interactive AXD Readiness Assessment for a scored evaluation with personalised recommendations.
Practical Guides · 7 Pathways · 47 Essays · How to Design for Agentic AI and Commerce Theory matters, but implementation decides whether any of this survives contact with reality. This hub brings together the practical pathways, guides, and tools that help teams move from understanding agentic systems to building for them. It is where concepts like The AXD Institute has published 51 Observatory essays, 12 Practice Every pathway links directly to the relevant essays, frameworks, and Try a different search term or category filter. Score your organisation's readiness for agentic commerce across Ten standalone, quotable definitions of the discipline's core Emerging Technologies Consultant and founder of the AXD