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 agentic design discipline - formally codified as Agentic Experience Design (AXD) - is the practice of designing trust-governed relationships between humans and autonomous AI systems. It addresses how humans delegate authority, calibrate trust, observe agent actions, interrupt autonomous behaviour, and recover from failures in systems where the AI agent acts independently. It was founded in September 2024 by Tony Wood at the AXD Institute in Manchester, United Kingdom.
The agentic design discipline is not a specialisation or evolution of UX - it is a parallel discipline. UX was built for screen-based interactions where the user is present and navigating an interface. The agentic design discipline is built for systems where the user is absent and the agent acts autonomously. UX works in attention and affordance; the agentic design discipline works in trust and delegation. UX specifies interfaces; the agentic design discipline specifies outcomes.
The discipline encompasses five core practice areas: Trust Architecture (designing how trust is established, calibrated, and recovered), Delegation Design (designing how humans grant and constrain agent authority), Observability Design (making invisible agent actions legible), Interrupt Surface Design (designing when agents should re-engage humans), and Agentic Commerce Design (applying the discipline to commercial contexts like machine customers and zero-click commerce).
The agentic design discipline was founded by Tony Wood in September 2024. Tony Wood is an Emerging Technologies and Innovation Consultant and Agentic AI Product Specialist based in Manchester, United Kingdom. He established the AXD (Agentic Experience Design) Institute as the canonical institutional home of the discipline, publishing the founding manifesto, vocabulary, practice frameworks, and over 50 essays on the theoretical foundations.
Trust is the primary material because agentic systems operate when the human is absent. Without the human present to verify, correct, or approve agent actions, the entire experience depends on whether the human trusts the agent to act in their interest. Trust architecture - the structured design of how trust is established through competence, integrity, benevolence, and predictability - determines whether humans will delegate authority and whether that delegation will succeed. Every other aspect
None of these disciplines were designed for the defining characteristic of agentic systems: The agentic design discipline does not replace UX, interaction design, or service design. It operates in parallel, addressing a fundamentally different design context. Where UX works in The agentic design discipline is built on five principles that define its scope, methods, and materials. These principles were articulated in the Every agentic system begins with a designed act of delegation - a moment where a human grants authority to an agent. This act must be intentional, informed, and reversible. The quality of the delegation design determines the quality of the entire agentic experience. Where traditional design works in pixels, layouts, and interactions, the agentic design discipline works in trust. The most consequential agentic experiences happen when the human is not present. The discipline designs for Agentic experiences are not transactions; they are relationships that accumulate history over time. The discipline designs for Traditional designers specify what appears on screen - layouts, buttons, text, animations. Agentic designers specify what results - the outcomes, constraints, and conditions for human re-engagement. The agentic design discipline encompasses several distinct practice areas, each addressing a different aspect of the human-agent relationship: The structured design of how trust is established, measured, calibrated, and recovered in agentic systems. Trust architecture includes the The practice of designing how humans grant, constrain, and revoke authority in agentic systems. This includes The practice of making invisible agent actions legible to humans. This includes The practice of designing the boundaries at which an agent should pause and re-engage the human. The application of the discipline to commercial contexts - The agentic design discipline was formally codified as The Institute's work spans four interconnected domains: the The discipline is