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 |
AXD readiness is the measurable capacity of an organisation to design, deploy, and govern autonomous AI systems that act on behalf of humans. It is assessed across four pillars - Signal Clarity, Reputation via Reliability, Intent Translation, and Engagement Architecture - and four maturity levels from Unready to Optimised.
Readiness is assessed across four pillars: Signal Clarity (machine-discoverability), Reputation via Reliability (verifiable trust signals), Intent Translation (alignment with agent query patterns), and Engagement Architecture (programmatic transaction capability). Each pillar is evaluated at four maturity levels: Unready, Foundational, Competitive, and Optimised.
The AXD Readiness Maturity Model evaluates organisations across four levels for each of the four pillars. It measures structured data quality, verifiable performance metrics, intent alignment, and API-first transaction capability. The model produces a readiness profile with prioritised recommendations for closing gaps.
The assessment is designed for product leaders, digital and technology leaders, strategy and innovation leaders, and customer experience leaders. It should be completed collaboratively across functions because AXD readiness spans technology, design, content, operations, and strategy.
AXD readiness is not a technology audit. It is a design maturity assessment that evaluates whether an organisation's products, services, data, and operating model are prepared for a world in which autonomous AI agents are participants in commerce, service delivery, and decision-making. The assessment examines four pillars, each representing a distinct capability domain: Organisations are assessed across four maturity levels for each pillar: No structured data, no verifiable trust signals, no programmatic transaction capability. The organisation is invisible to autonomous agents and cannot participate in Basic structured data is in place, some performance metrics are available, and limited API capability exists. The organisation is discoverable but cannot support end-to-end agent transactions. Comprehensive structured data, verifiable trust signals, intent-aligned content, and robust API-first transaction surfaces. The organisation can compete effectively in agentic commerce and is selected by agents for routine transactions. Dynamic trust signals, real-time performance data, adaptive intent translation, and fully autonomous transaction capability with designed failure recovery. The organisation is a preferred partner for autonomous agents and benefits from the agentic dividend - the bonus return on readiness investments when agents mediate purchasing at scale. The assessment is designed to be completed collaboratively across functions, because AXD readiness spans technology, design, content, operations, and strategy. The assessment produces a readiness profile that identifies the organisation's maturity level across each pillar, highlights the most critical gaps, and recommends a prioritised action plan. The most common patterns include: The AXD Playbook provides the implementation roadmap for moving from assessment to action, with a 12-week programme grounded in the Five Founding Principles and structured around the TRUST framework (Transparent, Recoverable, Unders