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 banking is the transformation of financial services when autonomous AI agents - acting on behalf of customers, institutions, or regulators - initiate transactions, manage accounts, assess risk, negotiate terms, and execute financial decisions without continuous human supervision. It requires banks to extend their existing trust frameworks (KYC, AML, PSD2) to accommodate machine actors, and to design new trust architecture for the delegation of financial authority to autonomous systems.
Autonomous banking agents are AI systems that perform financial services tasks on behalf of human customers without requiring step-by-step human guidance. They include transaction agents (initiating payments and transfers), advisory agents (comparing financial products and recommending actions), monitoring agents (watching accounts for anomalies and fraud), and negotiation agents (comparing rates across institutions and executing switching). Each category requires distinct trust architecture and
Invisible banking AI refers to financial services that operate autonomously without requiring human attention - bills are paid, savings are optimised, investments are rebalanced, and insurance is renewed without the customer needing to open a banking app. It is the banking sector's version of absent-state design. The trust architecture challenge is acute: when the customer never sees the transactions, the entire trust relationship depends on transparent reporting, exception-based alerting, and a
Agentic AI will change financial services by introducing autonomous agents as intermediaries between customers and institutions. This creates three new trust relationships that must be managed simultaneously: customer-to-agent trust (delegation and oversight), bank-to-agent trust (identity verification and authority validation through Know Your Agent frameworks), and regulator-to-system trust (compliance monitoring and audit trails). Banks must build agent-native interfaces, implement KYA framew
Digital banking moved banking services from physical branches to digital interfaces - mobile apps, websites, and online portals. The human customer still makes every decision and initiates every action. Agentic banking moves the decision-making and action-initiation to autonomous AI agents. The customer delegates authority to an agent that acts on their behalf. This is not a channel shift (branch to app) but an actor shift (human to agent). The design challenges are fundamentally different: digi
Banking has always been a trust business. The entire financial system is built on the premise that institutions can be trusted to hold, move, and manage money on behalf of their customers. What changes in agentic banking is not the centrality of trust - it is the nature of the actors and the mechanisms through which trust is established, verified, and maintained. In traditional banking, the trust relationship is bilateral: customer and bank. The customer trusts the bank to safeguard their assets. The bank trusts the customer's identity through KYC (Know Your Customer) processes. Regulation provides the governance framework. Every element of this system assumes that the actors are humans or human-governed institutions. Agentic banking introduces a third actor: the autonomous agent. When a customer's AI agent contacts the bank to transfer funds, compare mortgage rates, rebalance a portfolio, or dispute a charge, the bank faces a novel trust challenge. It must verify not only the customer's identity but the agent's identity, authority, and operational boundaries. It must determine whether the agent is authorised for the specific action it is requesting, whether that authorisation is current, and whether the action falls within the customer's delegated scope. This is not a theoretical scenario. Visa's Intelligent Commerce initiative, Mastercard's Agent Pay, and emerging fintech platforms are already building the infrastructure for agent-initiated financial transactions. The Autonomous banking agents operate across a spectrum of financial services, each with distinct The concept of invisible banking AI - financial services that operate autonomously without requiring human attention - is the banking sector's version of what the AXD Institute calls Invisible banking AI is already operational in limited forms. Automated savings rules (round-up savings, salary-day transfers), automated bill payments, and automated investment rebalancing are established products. What changes