The AXD Playbook

What is Agentic Experience Design?

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.

What is Implementation Summary?

Key concepts in The AXD Playbook | Complete Agentic AI Implementation Guide

How do the axd playbook relate to agentic commerce?

  1. Agency requires intentional delegation — every agentic system begins with a designed act of delegation
  2. Trust is the primary material — AXD works in trust rather than attention
  3. Absence is the primary use state — the most consequential experiences happen when no one is watching
  4. Relationships have temporality — agentic experiences accumulate history over time
  5. Outcomes replace outputs — AXD designers specify results, not interfaces
DimensionTraditional UXAgentic Experience Design (AXD)
Primary materialAttention and affordanceTrust and delegation
User statePresent, navigatingAbsent, delegating
Design outputScreens and interfacesOutcomes and constraints
Temporal modelSession-basedRelationship-based
Success metricTask completionTrust calibration

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the AXD Playbook?

The AXD Playbook is a structured 12-week implementation programme for organisations adopting Agentic Experience Design. It covers readiness assessment, trust architecture, delegation design, observability, and measurement - sequenced for cross-functional teams moving from understanding to operational capability.

How long does the Playbook take?

The Playbook is designed as a 12-week programme, structured in three phases: Foundation (weeks 1–4) establishes trust architecture and readiness baselines, Implementation (weeks 5–8) builds delegation systems and observability, and Optimisation (weeks 9–12) refines based on real-world performance data and prepares for operational launch.

Who should use the AXD Playbook?

The Playbook is designed for cross-functional teams: product leaders use it to plan agentic features, designers use it to create trust-governed experiences, developers use it to implement delegation systems, and executives use it to assess strategic readiness for agentic commerce. It works best when all four roles engage simultaneously.

How does the Playbook relate to the AXD Readiness Assessment?

The Readiness Assessment is the diagnostic that precedes the Playbook. It evaluates an organisation across the four pillars and produces a prioritised action plan. The Playbook then provides the structured implementation programme for addressing the gaps identified in the assessment.

Key Takeaways

Train your organisation on AXD principles - move beyond the core team to embed trust architecture, AXD Programme Lead: Coordinates the cross-functional implementation, manages the 12-week roadmap, and ensures alignment between The AXD Playbook: 12-Week Agentic Readiness Programme The Playbook is the structured bridge between understanding agentic systems and operating them. It takes organisations from readiness assessment through trust architecture, delegation design, and observability to operational launch - in a sequenced 12-week programme designed for cross-functional teams. It does not assume you have done this before. It assumes you need to start now. This playbook assumes familiarity with the

References and Citations

Gartner: Machine Customers Will Be a Multibillion-Dollar Opportunity Harvard Business Review: The Age of AI Agents McKinsey: The State of AI in 2024 About the AXD Institute Contact Us Email the AXD Institute Tony Wood on LinkedIn Tony Wood on X (Twitter)