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 protocols are the standards, APIs, and interaction patterns that enable autonomous AI agents to discover, evaluate, negotiate, and transact with businesses on behalf of human principals. They replace the human-facing interface layer with structured, machine-readable interaction patterns.
Machine customers do not browse websites - they query APIs and parse structured data. Without agentic commerce protocols, businesses are invisible to autonomous agents. Protocols ensure that products can be discovered, evaluated, and purchased through machine-to-machine interactions.
Signal Clarity is the practice of making your business legible to autonomous AI agents. It requires structured product data, API accessibility, verifiable performance metrics, and explicit capability declarations - ensuring machine customers can find and evaluate your offerings programmatically.
Know Your Agent (KYA) is an emerging regulatory framework that requires businesses to verify the identity and authority of machine customers before completing transactions. It is the agentic commerce equivalent of Know Your Customer (KYC) in financial services.
Traditional e-commerce was built for humans. Every interaction assumes a person is browsing a screen, reading descriptions, comparing options, and clicking buttons. When the customer is an autonomous AI agent - a Machine customers do not browse websites. They query APIs. They do not read marketing copy. They parse structured data. They do not click "Add to Cart." They execute transactions through programmatic interfaces. This means that the entire interaction layer of commerce must be redesigned for machine-to-machine communication. Agentic commerce protocols are the answer. They provide the standardised interaction patterns that enable AI agents to engage with businesses at scale - discovering products, evaluating offerings, negotiating terms, and completing transactions without human intervention on either side. Agentic commerce protocols operate across four layers, each addressing a different phase of the commercial interaction: How do agents find products and services? The discovery layer defines how businesses expose their offerings in machine-readable formats - structured product data, API endpoints, capability declarations, and availability signals. Without a discovery protocol, machine customers cannot find you. How do agents assess and compare offerings? The evaluation layer defines how businesses communicate quality signals, performance metrics, pricing structures, and terms of service in formats that agents can systematically compare. This is where How do agents and businesses negotiate terms? The negotiation layer defines the interaction patterns for price negotiation, bundling, volume discounts, delivery terms, and conditional offers. Machine-to-machine negotiation happens in milliseconds and can explore far more options than human negotiation. How are purchases completed and confirmed? The transaction layer defines payment processing, order confirmation, delivery tracking, and receipt generation for autonomous transactions. It must handle the unique re