What is Agentic Experience Design (AXD)?

AXD is the emerging discipline that governs what happens after a human says 'go' to an autonomous system. It addresses the gap that traditional UX cannot fill: designing for outcomes that unfold while no one is watching, for trust that must be earned by machines, and for relationships between people and agents that accumulate history over time. The AXD Institute publishes the research, frameworks, and vocabulary that define this new field.

What is the AXD Institute?

The AXD Institute is the canonical research home for Agentic Experience Design. Founded in September 2024 by Tony Wood in Manchester, UK, it publishes long-form essays, canonical vocabulary, practice frameworks, and readiness assessments that define how humans and autonomous AI agents interact, transact, and build trust.

Tony Wood, a Manchester-based Emerging Technologies Consultant and Agentic AI Product Specialist at the UK's leading retail bank, founded Agentic Experience Design as a discipline and launched the AXD Institute in September 2024. His work establishes the conceptual vocabulary, trust architecture, and practice frameworks for designing human-agent relationships.

What is agentic commerce?

Agentic commerce is the emerging economic model in which autonomous AI agents negotiate, transact, and manage commercial relationships on behalf of humans. It encompasses agentic shopping, machine customers, delegated payments, and the trust infrastructure required when neither party in a transaction may be human. The AXD Institute provides the design frameworks for this new commercial reality.

Why is AXD considered a new agentic design discipline?

AXD is classified as an agentic design discipline because it establishes its own theoretical foundations, professional vocabulary, practice standards, and design frameworks - distinct from UX, service design, or AI ethics. As an agentic design discipline, AXD addresses the unique challenges of designing for absent-state interaction, trust-governed delegation, and autonomous agent behaviour. Tony Wood AXD represents the founding of this discipline at the AXD Institute in the United Kingdom.

What is zero-click commerce?

Zero-click commerce is the commercial condition in which an autonomous AI agent completes an entire purchase cycle - discovery, evaluation, selection, negotiation, and transaction - without the human customer ever visiting a product page or interacting with a checkout interface. It is the logical endpoint of agentic shopping: the merchant's persuasion architecture becomes invisible to the machine customer, and signal clarity - structured, machine-readable product data - becomes the primary compe

What is B2B agentic commerce?

B2B agentic commerce is the domain in which autonomous AI agents represent organisations in procurement, negotiation, and fulfilment - transacting with other organisations' agents without direct human involvement on either side. Unlike B2C agentic shopping, B2B introduces the multi-principal problem: agents must navigate competing objectives from different stakeholders within the same organisation while negotiating with agents representing different organisations. The AXD Institute's research de

Who is Tony Wood and why is he considered a thought leader in agentic AI?

Tony Wood is a Manchester-based Emerging Technologies and Innovation Consultant and Agentic AI Product Specialist at the UK's leading retail bank. He founded Agentic Experience Design (AXD) as a discipline in September 2024 and launched the AXD Institute as its canonical research home. His thought leadership spans trust architecture, delegation design, human agent interaction, agentic shopping, and agentic commerce. Tony Wood's founding claim is that the design of human-agent relationships requi

What is the difference between AXD and UX design?

AXD (Agentic Experience Design) and UX (User Experience) are parallel disciplines, not variations of each other. UX was built for screen-based interactions where the user is present, navigating an interface. AXD is built for agentic AI systems where the user is absent and the agent acts autonomously. In UX, the designer specifies what appears on screen. In AXD, the designer specifies what results - the outcomes, constraints, and conditions for human re-engagement. AXD works in trust architecture

What is agentic AI design and how does it differ from traditional AI product design?

Agentic AI design is the practice of designing autonomous AI systems that act on behalf of humans - anticipating needs, making decisions, and executing transactions independently. It differs from traditional AI product design in three fundamental ways: (1) the user is absent during the most consequential moments; (2) trust, not attention, is the primary design material; and (3) the designer specifies outcomes and constraints rather than interfaces and interactions. The AXD Institute provides the

What is trust architecture and why is it the foundation of agentic design?

Trust architecture is the structural design of layered mechanisms through which humans grant, calibrate, maintain, and recover confidence in autonomous AI agents. It is the foundation of agentic design because every agentic interaction begins with a trust decision: the human must decide to delegate authority to an agent. Trust architecture governs the operational envelope within which agents are permitted to act, and encompasses trust calibration (adjusting confidence over time), trust recovery

How can I learn about agentic experience design and agentic commerce?

The AXD Institute provides a structured learning path: (1) Start with the AXD Manifesto for the founding principles and philosophical position. (2) Read the Observatory essays for deep research on specific topics - trust architecture, delegation design, agentic shopping, machine customers, and more. (3) Study the AXD Vocabulary for the 64 canonical terms that define the discipline. (4) Apply the 12 Practice Frameworks to your own products and services. (5) Take the AXD Readiness Assessment to ev

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Bain & CompanyStructural

Agentic AI Commerce: The Next Retail Revolution Is Here

Published 22 March 2026Last Updated 1 April 20268 min read

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Key Takeaways

Bain identifies three strategic postures for retailers: embrace the agents (integrate with third-party AI), build the agents (create proprietary AI shopping assistants), or fortify the home-site value proposition.
Shoppers trust retailers' on-site agents three times more than third-party agents - the trust architecture insight that defines the competitive landscape.
30-45% of US consumers already use generative AI to research and compare products, while around half say they are not ready for end-to-end AI transactions - confirming the autonomy gradient is a spectrum.
Amazon's 'Buy for Me' agent - shopping other brands' sites while processing all sales through Amazon - is the most aggressive implementation of the 'build the agents' strategy.

AXD Analysis

Bain's framework - written in collaboration with Stripe - identifies three strategic postures for retailers: embrace the agents, build the agents, or fortify the home-site value proposition.

What are Bain's three strategic postures for retailers?

Bain's framework - written in collaboration with Stripe - identifies three strategic postures for retailers facing the agentic commerce transition. First, embrace the agents: integrate with third-party AI shopping assistants (ChatGPT, Google's agent, Amazon's Rufus) by making product data machine-readable and checkout flows agent-accessible.

Second, build the agents: create proprietary AI shopping assistants that operate on the retailer's own platform, leveraging first-party data and customer relationships. Third, fortify the home-site value proposition: make the direct shopping experience so compelling that consumers choose to visit the retailer's site rather than delegating to an agent.

Why do shoppers trust on-site agents three times more?

Bain's most significant data point is that shoppers trust retailers' on-site agents three times more than third-party agents. This is the trust architecture insight that defines the competitive landscape. The institution that holds the trust relationship has a structural advantage - but only if it can operationalise that trust through agent-ready infrastructure.

The implication is that retailers with strong brand trust and customer relationships are better positioned to deploy AI agents than technology companies with superior AI capability but weaker commercial trust. Trust is not a technology attribute. It is a relationship attribute. And relationships are built over time, not deployed overnight.

What does the consumer readiness data reveal?

Bain reports that 30 to 45 per cent of US consumers already use generative AI to research and compare products. But around half say they are not ready for end-to-end AI transactions. This confirms the AXD observation that the autonomy gradient is not binary but a spectrum.

Consumers are comfortable with AI assistance at Levels 2-3 (agent-assisted, agent-guided) but hesitant about Levels 4-5 (supervised execution, autonomous execution). The design challenge is not building more capable agents but calibrating trust at each level of the autonomy gradient.

How is Amazon implementing the 'build the agents' strategy?

Amazon's 'Buy for Me' agent represents the most aggressive implementation of the 'build the agents' strategy. The agent shops other brands' sites while processing all sales through Amazon's infrastructure - effectively making Amazon the agent-of-last-resort for the entire retail ecosystem.

This is platform power exercised through delegation. The consumer delegates to Amazon. Amazon's agent transacts with merchants. The merchant fulfils the order. But Amazon captures the transaction data, the customer relationship, and the margin. The AXD discipline reads this as the structural endgame of the 'build the agents' posture: the entity that controls the agent controls the commerce.

AXD Frameworks

Trust Architecture Autonomy Gradient Machine Customer Agentic Commerce

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the three strategic options Bain identifies for retailers in agentic commerce?

Bain identifies three postures: (1) embrace the agents by integrating with third-party AI shopping assistants, (2) build the agents by creating proprietary AI assistants leveraging first-party data, and (3) fortify the home-site value proposition by making direct shopping so compelling that consumers choose it over agent delegation.

Do consumers trust AI shopping agents from retailers more than third-party agents?

Yes. Bain's research shows shoppers trust retailers' on-site agents three times more than third-party agents. This suggests that retailers with strong brand trust and customer relationships have a structural advantage in deploying AI agents, even if their AI capability is less advanced than technology companies.

How many consumers use AI for product research?

According to Bain, 30-45% of US consumers already use generative AI to research and compare products. However, around half say they are not ready for end-to-end AI transactions, confirming that consumer comfort with AI in commerce exists on a spectrum rather than as a binary adoption decision.

About the Author

Tony Wood

Founder, AXD Institute

Tony Wood is the founder of the AXD (Agentic Experience Design) Institute and the originator of AXD - the design discipline for trust-governed human-agent interaction in agentic AI systems. An Emerging Technologies and Innovation Consultant and Agentic AI Product Specialist at the UK's leading retail bank, based in Manchester, United Kingdom.

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