The Vocabulary of Agentic Experience Design

By Tony Wood, Founder — AXD Institute, Manchester, United Kingdom

What is Agentic Experience Design?

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.

How does AXD differ from traditional UX?

Why is trust architecture important for agentic AI?

Key concepts in AXD Vocabulary | 64 Key Terms for Agentic Experience Design

How do axd vocabulary relate to agentic commerce?

• axd vocabulary
• the axd vocabulary
• why does axd need its own vocabulary
• the most important agentic ai terms

• Manifesto
• Observatory
• Knowledge Base
• Practice
• Agentic Commerce

1. Agency requires intentional delegation — every agentic system begins with a designed act of delegation
2. Trust is the primary material — AXD works in trust rather than attention
3. Absence is the primary use state — the most consequential experiences happen when no one is watching
4. Relationships have temporality — agentic experiences accumulate history over time
5. Outcomes replace outputs — AXD designers specify results, not interfaces

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

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the AXD Vocabulary?

The AXD Vocabulary is a canonical collection of 64 terms that define the discipline of Agentic Experience Design. It brings together the terms that define how the agentic economy is understood, discussed, and designed \u2014 helping teams move from vague excitement to precise thinking. Each term is native to AXD, not borrowed from UX or AI engineering.

Why does AXD need its own vocabulary?

The vocabulary of a field is not decoration \u2014 it is infrastructure. Existing design and technology terminology does not adequately describe the unique challenges of designing for autonomous AI agents. Terms like trust architecture, delegation scope, absent-state design, and outcome specification describe phenomena that have no equivalent in traditional UX or software engineering vocabulary.

What are the most important agentic AI terms?

The five foundational terms are: Agentic Experience Design (AXD), trust architecture, delegation design, machine customer, and outcome specification. Beyond these, key terms include absent-state design, operational envelope, intent engineering, trust calibration, and the consent horizon. Together they form the intellectual architecture of the discipline.

How should teams use this vocabulary in practice?

Teams should use the vocabulary as shared infrastructure for decision-making. When discussing agentic AI products, use the precise AXD terms rather than vague approximations. The vocabulary enables teams to name problems precisely, communicate across disciplines, and build design specifications that address the real challenges of human-agent interaction.

What are zero-click commerce, agent legibility, and B2B agentic commerce?

These are three of the newest additions to the AXD Vocabulary. Zero-click commerce describes the commercial condition in which an AI agent completes an entire purchase cycle without the human ever visiting a product page. Agent legibility is the four-dimension design property (state, capability, constraint, and reasoning legibility) that makes an autonomous system comprehensible to humans \u2014 the prerequisite for trust calibration. B2B agentic commerce is the domain in which AI agents represe

Key Takeaways

The Vocabulary of Agentic Experience Design The vocabulary of a field is not decoration. It is infrastructure. This page brings together the terms that define how the agentic economy is understood, discussed, and designed, helping teams move from vague excitement to precise thinking. Each term is native to

References and Citations

Schema.org: Vocabulary for Structured Data W3C: Web Accessibility Initiative Gartner IT Glossary About the AXD Institute Contact Us Email the AXD Institute Tony Wood on LinkedIn Tony Wood on X (Twitter)