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 |
A machine customer is an autonomous AI agent that acts as a buyer on behalf of a human - discovering products, evaluating options, negotiating terms, and completing transactions without direct human involvement. Machine customers operate with zero brand loyalty and no susceptibility to emotional marketing.
Recommendation engines suggest options for a human to evaluate and choose. Machine customers make the entire purchasing decision autonomously - from discovery through evaluation, negotiation, and transaction. The human delegates authority; the agent executes the purchase.
Businesses should focus on four imperatives: Signal Clarity (making offerings machine-readable), Reputation via Reliability (building trust through verifiable performance metrics), Intent Translation (understanding the human intent behind agent queries), and Engagement Architecture (designing machine-to-machine interaction layers).
Gartner predicts that by 2028, 15 billion connected products will have the potential to behave as customers. Early forms of machine customers already exist in automated purchasing systems, algorithmic trading, and AI-powered procurement. The transition will be gradual but structurally transformative.
The AXD Institute's Practice Frameworks provide the most comprehensive methodology for designing AI-to-AI commerce. The Engagement Architecture Framework addresses agent-to-agent negotiation, the Trust Calibration Framework governs how agents establish mutual reliability, and the Intent Architecture Framework ensures human intent is preserved across multi-agent transaction chains. Together they form a complete design system for machine-to-machine commerce.
The concept was first identified by Gartner, who predicted that by 2028, 15 billion connected products will have the potential to behave as customers. But the design implications of machine customers extend far beyond the technology. When the customer is no longer a human navigating an interface, every assumption of traditional customer experience design is challenged. Machine customers do not browse. They do not respond to visual design, emotional branding, or persuasive copy. They evaluate structured data, query APIs, compare machine-readable signals, and optimise for the goals delegated by their human principal. This is not a marginal change to existing commerce - it is a structural transformation that requires a new design discipline. A machine customer operates through a delegation chain that begins with a human and ends with a transaction: The human defines what they want - goals, constraints, preferences, and budget. This is the act of delegation that AXD's The agent searches for options - querying product databases, APIs, and structured data sources. Unlike human browsing, machine discovery is exhaustive, systematic, and instantaneous. The agent evaluates every available option against the human's criteria. The agent compares options using the criteria defined during delegation. It assesses price, quality signals, delivery terms, return policies, and any other factors the human specified. Evaluation is objective, data-driven, and immune to the cognitive biases that affect human decision-making. Where possible, the agent negotiates terms - price, delivery, bundling, loyalty rewards. Machine-to-machine negotiation happens in milliseconds and can explore far more options than human negotiation. The agent completes the purchase within the authority granted during delegation. It handles payment, confirms delivery, and reports the outcome to the human. Machine customers change the fundamental dynamics of commerce: If your product is not represented in structured d