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 Intent Architecture framework is an AXD methodology for designing how human intentions are captured, structured, and translated into agent-executable instructions. It addresses the fundamental challenge of agentic AI: converting ambiguous human desires into precise machine actions while preserving the spirit of the original intent.
Intent architecture handles ambiguity through progressive clarification: the system identifies ambiguous elements, generates clarifying questions ranked by impact, and presents them to the human in a natural dialogue. For recurring intents, the system learns from past clarifications to reduce ambiguity over time.
Framework 01 of 12 · Pre-delegation Phase · Mission Quality The design of the pre-execution contract between human and agent Commerce Application: Purchase goal specification Domains: Financial Services · Healthcare · All Domains Every agentic experience begins with a moment of translation. A human has something they want to achieve - a financial goal, a purchase decision, a healthcare outcome - and they must communicate that intention to a system that will act autonomously on their behalf. The quality of that translation determines everything that follows. A poorly specified intent produces a perfectly executed wrong outcome. A well-specified intent enables the agent to act with confidence, within boundaries, toward results the human actually wanted. The Intent Architecture Framework addresses this foundational challenge. It sits before delegation in the agentic experience lifecycle - the moment before authority is granted, when the human and agent negotiate what "success" actually means. Traditional interface design assumed the user would be present throughout the interaction, correcting course in real time. In agentic systems, the user is absent during execution. The intent specification is the only design input the agent has to work with. If it is incomplete, ambiguous, or misunderstood, there is no interface for the human to correct course mid-flight. This framework is not about natural language processing or prompt engineering. It is about the design of structured conversations between humans and agents that produce high-fidelity intent objects - complete specifications of goals, constraints, success criteria, exceptions, and what must never happen. It is the architecture of the pre-execution contract that governs everything the agent will do. Six principles that govern intent specification These principles define how intent should be captured, structured, and validated before any agent acts. They are drawn from the founding princip