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 |
The Absent State Audit is an AXD framework for evaluating what an autonomous AI agent does when no human is observing. It provides structured methods for auditing agent behaviour during the absent state - the periods when the agent operates independently - ensuring actions align with delegated authority and trust expectations.
The absent state is where the most consequential agent actions occur, yet it is inherently unobservable in real-time. Without structured auditing, organisations cannot verify that agents are behaving correctly, cannot calibrate trust based on evidence, and cannot detect authority creep or policy violations until damage has occurred.
Framework 08 of 12 · Post-execution Phase · Quality evaluation The discipline of judging what happened while you were away Commerce Application: Transaction review and reconciliation A methodology for evaluating the quality of agentic experiences that unfold without human presence. Assesses integrity, outcome alignment, and return-state design. The discipline of judging what happened while you were away. The most consequential experiences in agentic AI happen when no one is watching. The Absent-State Audit is the discipline of ensuring that what happened in your absence was what you would have wanted to happen in your presence. Absent-State Audit: Implementation Patterns Absent-State Audit: Commerce Applications A transaction history tells you what the agent did. An Absent-State Audit tells you whether what the agent did was what you asked for, within the boundaries you set, achieving the outcomes you specified. Absent-State Audit: Lifecycle Connections The Absent-State Audit evaluates outcomes. The next framework - Explainability & Observability Design Standard Absent-State Audit: The Framework Ecosystem Navigate the complete lifecycle of Agentic Experience Design. Each framework addresses a distinct phase of the human-agent relationship. Multi-Agent Orchestration Visibility Model Agent Memory & Context Continuity Framework Explainability & Observability Design Standard Onboarding & Capability Discovery Framework Ethical Constraint & Value Alignment Architecture