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 |
Grocery and FMCG lead in agentic commerce readiness due to predictable purchasing patterns, established digital infrastructure, and natural fit for autonomous replenishment. Retail and travel follow at medium readiness, with existing e-commerce APIs and structured product data. Banking, healthcare, insurance, automotive, and luxury face greater challenges due to regulatory complexity, high-stakes decisions, and the need for nuanced trust architecture.
The Four Pillars of AXD Readiness provide a consistent framework for comparing agentic commerce readiness across industries: (1) Signal Clarity - how well product and service data is structured for agent consumption; (2) Reputation via Reliability - how trust is established through verifiable performance metrics; (3) Intent Translation - how effectively human needs are interpreted and mapped to offerings; (4) Engagement Architecture - how agents interact with systems to discover, evaluate, and t
Banking faces the hardest edge of agentic commerce because every autonomous action carries financial, regulatory, and reputational weight. The challenge is not technological capability but trust boundary design - balancing agent authority with fiduciary duty, regulatory compliance (KYC, AML, PSD2), and the irreversibility of financial transactions. Open Banking APIs provide a foundation, but graduated authority protocols and regulatory-compliant delegation design remain immature.
B2C agentic commerce (retail, grocery, travel, luxury) centres on individual consumer delegation - preference learning, budget constraints, and personal trust calibration. B2B agentic commerce (healthcare procurement, insurance, automotive fleet) involves multi-stakeholder delegation, compliance-embedded trust, longer decision cycles, and higher transaction values. B2B requires more sophisticated delegation chains, approval workflows, and audit trail architecture than B2C.
The single most important metric varies by industry, but Signal Clarity - specifically, the completeness and machine-readability of product and service data - is the universal foundation. Without structured, agent-parseable data, no other pillar can function. Each industry has a specific key metric: product data completeness (retail), API coverage (banking), FHIR endpoint coverage (healthcare), policy machine-readability (insurance), API response latency (travel), configuration API availability
Agentic Commerce · Industry Analysis · 8 Verticals Agent readiness levels reflect the current maturity of each industry's infrastructure, data standards, and regulatory environment for autonomous AI agent commerce. Select a pillar to compare how each industry addresses that dimension of agentic commerce readiness. Expand any industry to see its full Four Pillars profile, or visit the dedicated page for comprehensive analysis. Signal Clarity Is the Universal Foundation The most heavily regulated industries - banking, healthcare, insurance - face the longest path to agentic commerce maturity. Not because the technology is insufficient, but because Industries with high purchase frequency - grocery, retail - will see agent adoption first because the delegation economics are most compelling. Delegating weekly grocery shopping to an agent saves hours per month; delegating a once-per-decade vehicle purchase saves less time relative to the stakes involved. This is why B2B Complexity Requires Different Architecture Industries with significant B2B components - healthcare procurement, insurance brokerage, automotive fleet - require fundamentally different The AXD Readiness Assessment evaluates your organisation across all Four Pillars - regardless of industry. Discover where you stand and what to prioritise.