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 |
Zero-click commerce is a form of agentic commerce in which a purchase is completed without the human customer ever visiting a product page, reading a review, comparing alternatives, or interacting with a checkout interface. An AI shopping agent receives a delegated mandate, executes the entire purchase cycle autonomously, and reports the outcome. It represents the convergence of agentic shopping and AI-driven discovery, and is the ultimate absent-state design challenge in Agentic Experience Desi
One-click purchasing (pioneered by Amazon) simplifies the checkout process for a human who has already discovered and selected a product. The human is still present, still making the decision, still clicking a button. Zero-click commerce eliminates the human from the entire purchase cycle - discovery, evaluation, selection, and transaction are all performed by an AI shopping agent. The human specifies what they want (outcome specification) and the agent handles everything else. The design challe
The primary risks are: competence failure (the agent buys the wrong product with no human review to catch the error), integrity compromise (the agent's selections are influenced by hidden incentives rather than the human's interest), privacy exposure (the agent shares personal preference data with merchants), and trust erosion (repeated small failures accumulate into a breakdown of the human-agent relationship). The AXD framework addresses these risks through the four layers of trust - competenc
Retailers should prepare by investing in four capabilities: machine-readable product data (structured schema markup and API-accessible product feeds), verifiable trust signals (machine-queryable fulfilment accuracy, return rates, and satisfaction scores), API-accessible commerce (programmatic checkout without human-facing interfaces), and agent-compatible payment processing (integration with emerging agent payment protocols like Visa Intelligent Commerce and Google AP2). The AXD Institute's Five
Elements of zero-click commerce are already operational in 2026 - automated subscription reorders, AI-recommended purchases within conversational interfaces, and constrained autonomous buying in pilot programmes. Full zero-click commerce (where agents handle novel, non-routine purchases autonomously) requires advances in trust architecture, delegation design, and agent payment infrastructure that are currently in development. The AXD Institute estimates that Level 3 zero-click commerce (constrai
For two decades, digital commerce has been organised around a single assumption: the customer will visit a product page. Every element of the eCommerce stack - search engine optimisation, product photography, review systems, comparison tools, checkout flows, abandoned cart recovery - exists to attract a human to a page and persuade them to click "buy." The entire industry is built on clicks. Zero-click commerce eliminates the click. When an AI shopping agent receives a mandate - "reorder my usual coffee beans," "find me a birthday gift for my partner under £50," "replace my running shoes with the same model in the next size up" - and executes that mandate without the human ever seeing a product page, the foundational assumption of digital commerce collapses. The product page still exists, but the customer never visits it. The reviews still exist, but the customer never reads them. The checkout flow still exists, but the customer never navigates it. This is not a theoretical scenario. It is the logical endpoint of trends already visible in 2026. Perplexity Shopping surfaces product recommendations within conversational AI responses - the user never leaves the chat interface. Google's AI Overviews increasingly include purchase links that bypass traditional search results. Amazon's Subscribe & Save automates repeat purchases with no human interaction beyond the initial setup. Each of these systems moves commerce closer to zero-click execution. In traditional commerce, the act of purchasing includes an implicit trust verification step. The customer sees the product, reads the description, checks the price, evaluates the merchant, and makes a conscious decision to proceed. This verification is so embedded in the purchase process that it is invisible - but it is doing critical trust work. The customer is continuously assessing: Is this the right product? Is this a fair price? Is this a trustworthy merchant? Do I actually want this? Zero-click commerce removes every one of