Selling to AI Agents — an AXD Institute resource on agentic experience design, agentic commerce, trust architecture, and human agent interaction. Founded by Tony Wood..
| 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 |
Selling to AI purchasing agents requires fundamentally different infrastructure than selling to human buyers. Human buyers respond to relationships, brand reputation, and persuasive sales presentations. AI purchasing agents evaluate by constraint satisfaction against explicit requirements: does the product meet specifications? Is the supplier reliable? Are certifications valid? Is the total cost competitive? To sell to agents, you must make your catalog machine-discoverable (structured data, spe
An agent-discoverable product catalog has four characteristics. Structured data: every product described in machine-readable formats (schema.org JSON-LD) with standardised attribute taxonomies for your industry. Specification-based search: APIs that accept structured requirement queries (material, tolerance, certification, performance rating) and return matching products - not just keyword search. Complete attribute coverage: every comparison-critical attribute published in quantitative, standar
AI purchasing agents evaluate supplier trust through structured, verifiable evidence across four dimensions defined by the AXD Trust Architecture framework. Competence trust: can this supplier deliver correctly? Evaluated through delivery reliability metrics, quality conformance rates, and specification accuracy data. Integrity trust: is this supplier honest? Evaluated through consistency between claims and verified outcomes, certification validity, and disclosure completeness. Benevolence trust
Agent-mediated markets differ from traditional B2B markets in five fundamental ways. Discovery: suppliers are found by specification match, not by brand awareness or sales relationships. Evaluation: proposals are scored against quantitative criteria, not influenced by sales presentations or personal relationships. Speed: agents evaluate multiple suppliers simultaneously and make decisions in seconds, not weeks. Transparency: agents compare structured data directly, making it difficult to obscure
The first step is a machine readiness audit of your current sales infrastructure. Assess four dimensions: catalog structure (are your products described in machine-readable formats with standardised attributes?), API accessibility (can agents query your catalog, request quotes, and place orders programmatically?), trust signal verifiability (are your certifications, reliability metrics, and quality data linked to authoritative verification sources?), and proposal structure (can agents parse your
Agentic Experience Design (AXD) is a new discipline for the age of autonomous AI. It addresses trust architecture, delegation design, and human agent interaction — the core challenges of agentic commerce and agentic shopping.