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 |
The five defining AI commerce trends in 2026 are: (1) the agent payments infrastructure race between Visa, Mastercard, Google, and emerging protocols; (2) the rise of zero-click commerce where purchases happen without the customer visiting a product page; (3) trust architecture emerging as a competitive advantage and binding constraint on adoption; (4) protocol convergence creating a recognisable agentic commerce stack; and (5) the growing merchant readiness gap between infrastructure developmen
Agentic commerce is the shift from human-driven to agent-driven commerce - where AI agents discover, evaluate, negotiate, and purchase products on behalf of human consumers. It matters in 2026 because the transition from experimental to operational agentic commerce is underway: payment networks are building agent-native infrastructure, enterprise adoption is accelerating, and the first constrained autonomous purchase systems are entering pilot programmes. The AXD Institute tracks this transition
AI is changing shopping in 2026 through three mechanisms: AI shopping agents that handle product discovery and comparison (Level 1-2 systems from Google, Amazon, Perplexity, and Klarna); zero-click commerce that enables purchases without visiting product pages; and agent payment infrastructure that enables autonomous transactions within pre-defined constraints. The shift is from human-navigated interfaces to agent-executed mandates, requiring new approaches to trust architecture, delegation desi
The future of AI in retail and eCommerce is the transition from persuasion-based commerce (designed for human attention) to trust-signal-based commerce (designed for agent evaluation). Retailers must prepare by investing in machine-readable product data, verifiable trust signals, API-accessible commerce, and agent-compatible payment processing. The AXD Institute's Five Pillars of Readiness - Signal Clarity, Reputation via Reliability, Intent Translation, Engagement Architecture, and Trust Archit
AI agents can already make constrained autonomous purchases in pilot programmes (Level 3) as of Q1 2026, with Visa Intelligent Commerce and PayPal agent integrations enabling transactions within pre-defined spending limits and merchant categories. Mainstream Level 3 adoption (autonomous purchase within boundaries) is projected for 2027. Level 4 (adaptive autonomous commerce where agents learn and adapt purchasing behaviour over time) is projected for 2028+. The binding constraint is not technolo
The most consequential development in AI commerce during 2025-2026 is not a consumer product - it is infrastructure. The world's largest payment networks are racing to build the financial plumbing that enables AI agents to transact autonomously, and the architectural decisions being made now will shape The AXD Observatory has tracked this infrastructure race across multiple essays. The The agent payments infrastructure is being built with operational efficiency as the primary design goal. The second defining trend of 2026 is the emergence of Perplexity Shopping already enables product discovery and comparison within a conversational interface - the user never leaves the chat. Google's AI Overviews increasingly include purchase-ready product information that bypasses traditional search results. Amazon's automated reordering systems handle routine purchases with no human interaction beyond the initial setup. Enterprise adoption data confirms the acceleration. According to industry surveys, enterprise AI agent pilots surged from 37% to 65% in a single quarter of 2025. Two-thirds of consumers expressed interest in using AI agents for limited-stock purchases and price-triggered auto-buying. These are not speculative projections - they are operational realities. Zero-click commerce is the ultimate absent-state design challenge. When the customer never sees the product, never reads the review, never navigates the checkout, every element of trust must be embedded in the The third trend - and the one the AXD Institute considers most significant - is the emergence of trust architecture as a competitive differentiator. As AI shopping agents move from recommendation (Level 1-2) to autonomous purchase (Level 3), the binding constraint on adoption is not technology but trust. The AXD Institute has been building the conceptual architecture of trust in agentic systems since September 2024. The Organisations that invest in trust architecture now - not as a compliance requirement but