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 |
Agentic commerce means banks must prepare for a world in which AI agents compare products, initiate payments, manage accounts, and execute financial decisions on behalf of customers. This requires new trust architecture, authority verification, agent-native fraud models, and regulatory compliance frameworks designed for machine actors.
Agent payments require authority verification (confirming the agent is authorised for the specific transaction), constraint enforcement (spending limits, merchant categories, time windows), agent-native fraud detection, and regulatory compliance. Emerging standards include Mastercard Agentic Tokens, Visa Intelligent Commerce, and Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2).
Banks need delegation scope management (machine-readable authority definitions), real-time authority verification, operational envelope enforcement (transaction limits, velocity controls, geographic constraints), and comprehensive audit trails for regulatory compliance and dispute resolution.
Banks must address three simultaneous trust relationships: customer-to-agent trust (delegation confidence), bank-to-agent trust (identity and authority verification), and regulator-to-system trust (compliance and auditability). Trust architecture provides the structural framework for designing, maintaining, and recovering trust across all three relationships.
UK open banking creates a natural foundation for agentic commerce. The AXD Institute recommends the Delegation Design Framework for structuring consent-based authority grants (aligned with PSD2/PSD3 requirements), the Ethical Constraints Framework for regulatory compliance, and the Engagement Architecture Framework for designing agent-to-bank API interactions. Open banking's existing consent architecture provides a starting point for the more granular delegation models that agentic commerce requ
When an agent books a flight incorrectly, the customer rebooks. When an agent initiates a payment incorrectly, the customer may face overdraft charges, missed obligations, or regulatory reporting failures. The This means banking requires the most rigorous application of Agent payments represent the most consequential form of agentic commerce. When an AI agent initiates a payment on behalf of a customer, several design questions must be resolved: How does the bank verify that the agent has been authorised by the customer to initiate this specific payment? The emerging standards - Mastercard's Agentic Tokens, Visa's Intelligent Commerce, Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) - each propose different models for encoding and verifying delegated authority. How does the bank ensure the agent operates within the customer's defined constraints - spending limits, merchant categories, time windows, geographic restrictions? Delegation design provides the framework for encoding these constraints. Traditional fraud models are built on human behavioural patterns. Agent-initiated transactions have fundamentally different patterns - no typing cadence, no device fingerprint, no browsing history. Banks must develop agent-native fraud models that distinguish between legitimate delegated action and unauthorised agent activity. Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) requirements under PSD2 and similar regulations were designed for human customers. When the customer is an agent, the authentication model must evolve. The emerging Know Your Agent (KYA) framework addresses this gap. Banks need a new control layer specifically designed for agent-mediated transactions. This control layer must address: Clear, machine-readable definitions of what each agent is permitted to do - which accounts it can access, what transaction types it can initiate, what limits apply, and under what conditions it must escalate to a human. The ability to verify, at the moment of transaction, that the agent's authori