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 |
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A New Design Discipline · Est. September 2024 · United Kingdom Agentic Experience Design for the Age of Autonomous AI Agentic Experience Design is the discipline for a world in which AI no longer waits for instructions but acts on behalf of people. It addresses the design of AXD is not UX for AI. It is not conversational UX, not prompt engineering, and not AI ethics. It is a parallel discipline that addresses the design challenges created by For thirty years, designers shaped the experience. We built the flows, mapped journeys, and crafted the affordances through which human intention flowed into action. We became very good at designing for systems that wait. We are now designing for systems that act. Whether you lead an organisation, design products, research agentic AI, or build teams - there is a door for you into the world of agentic experience design. Is your business ready for the agentic economy? The Four Pillars of AXD Readiness provide a strategic framework for businesses preparing for the transition from human-navigated commerce to agent-mediated commerce. Signal Clarity. Reputation via Reliability. Intent Translation. Engagement Architecture. Four capabilities that determine whether autonomous agents can find, trust, match, and transact with your business. Sixty-two long-form essays tracing the emergence of Agentic Experience Design - from the founding theoretical work on trust architecture and delegation design, through the architectural essays on absent-state design and human-agent interaction, to the industry analyses of Stripe, Mastercard, Visa, and Google protocols. The research record of a discipline being built in real time. Issue 032 · Capstone · 18 min read A Strategic Framework for the Agentic Transition. Signal Clarity. Reputation via Reliability. Intent Translation. Engagement Architecture. Four capabilities that determine whether Founding Cohort · Limited to 50 Places The AXD Academy is the world's first str