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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Visa / Wolfe Research FinTech ForumStructural

Visa CPSO Jack Forestell: 'The Agentic Web Is the Biggest Opportunity in My 20+ Years in Payment Technology'

Published 17 March 2026Last Updated 30 March 20268 min read

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Key Takeaways

Visa's Chief Product and Strategy Officer calls the agentic web 'the biggest opportunity in my 20+ years in payment technology' - the most aggressive endorsement from a card network executive to date.
Visa projects a $300-500 billion opportunity by 2030, backed by four pillars: reduced payment friction, accelerated transaction density, B2B modernisation, and expanded economic activity.
E-commerce fraud is projected to grow from $56 billion (2025) to $131 billion (2030). Visa's AI-powered fraud detection - analysing 300 billion transactions annually - positions the network as the trust verification layer for autonomous commerce.
Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol - a digital handshake confirming an AI agent's identity before money moves - is the Know Your Agent infrastructure the AXD Institute has been advocating.

AXD Analysis

Jack Forestell's declaration at the Wolfe Research FinTech Forum - that the agentic web is the biggest payments opportunity he has seen in over two decades - carries the weight of Visa's $592 billion market capitalisation and $16.7 trillion in annual payment volume.

What did Visa's Jack Forestell say about the agentic web?

Speaking at the Wolfe Research FinTech Forum in March 2026, Visa's Chief Product and Strategy Officer Jack Forestell declared that the agentic web represents the biggest opportunity he has seen in over twenty years in payment technology. This is not a speculative statement from a startup founder. It carries the weight of Visa's $592 billion market capitalisation and $16.7 trillion in annual payment volume.

Forestell articulated four pillars of Visa's agentic thesis, each representing a distinct commercial opportunity that autonomous agents unlock for the payments ecosystem.

What are Visa's four pillars of the agentic payments opportunity?

First, agents reduce payment friction by optimising routing and retrying failed authorisations - turning abandoned transactions into completed ones. Second, transaction density accelerates as agents enable microtransactions and pay-per-second models that humans would never execute manually.

Third, B2B payments finally modernise. The stubbornly manual $120 trillion B2B payments market - still dominated by invoices, purchase orders, and manual reconciliation - becomes automatable when agents can negotiate, authorise, and settle on behalf of businesses. Fourth, overall economic activity expands, following the historical pattern of every payments innovation growing the total pie.

Friction reduction: agents optimise routing and retry failed authorisations
Transaction density: microtransactions and pay-per-second models become viable
B2B modernisation: the $120 trillion manual payments market becomes automatable
Economic expansion: agentic payments grow the total addressable market

How does Visa address the fraud challenge in agentic commerce?

E-commerce fraud is projected to grow from $56 billion in 2025 to $131 billion by 2030. Visa's response is to position itself as the trust verification layer for autonomous commerce. The network already analyses 300 billion transactions annually and prevented $40 billion in fraud last year.

Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol provides a digital handshake that confirms an AI agent's identity before money moves. This is the Know Your Agent (KYA) infrastructure the AXD Institute has been advocating since its founding - the principle that every agent acting in commerce must be identifiable, verifiable, and accountable.

AXD Frameworks

Visa Intelligent Commerce Trust Architecture Agentic Payments Machine Customer

Frequently Asked Questions

How big is the agentic payments opportunity according to Visa?

Visa projects a $300-500 billion opportunity by 2030, making it the most aggressive market projection from a card network executive to date. This is based on four pillars: reduced payment friction, accelerated transaction density, B2B payments modernisation, and expanded economic activity.

What is Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol?

Visa's Trusted Agent Protocol is a digital handshake that confirms an AI agent's identity before money moves. It verifies that the agent is authorised to transact, that it is operating within its delegated authority, and that it represents the consumer it claims to represent. This is the Know Your Agent (KYA) infrastructure that enables trust in autonomous commerce.

How much fraud does Visa prevent in e-commerce?

Visa analyses 300 billion transactions annually and prevented $40 billion in fraud last year. With e-commerce fraud projected to grow from $56 billion in 2025 to $131 billion by 2030, Visa's AI-powered fraud detection positions the network as the trust verification layer for the agentic commerce era.

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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