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 |
The four AXD practitioner roles are Trust Architect (owns trust architecture across the system), Delegation Designer (owns scope, authority, and constraint design), Observability Lead (owns agent legibility and transparency), and Re-engagement Designer (owns human return paths and recovery experiences). Together, these four roles cover the complete surface area of Agentic Experience Design.
In most organisations today, these are responsibilities distributed across existing design, product, and engineering teams. As agentic systems mature, they will increasingly become dedicated roles. The AXD Institute recommends that any organisation deploying autonomous agents should have at least one person explicitly accountable for each domain - even if they hold other responsibilities alongside it.
The four AXD roles are parallel to, not replacements for, traditional UX roles. A UX designer works in attention, affordance, and screen-based interaction. AXD practitioners work in trust, delegation, observability, and recovery - the design materials of autonomous systems. Some UX professionals will transition into AXD roles. Others will continue in UX while collaborating with AXD practitioners on the agentic layer of their products.
The Trust Architect. Trust architecture is the foundational layer of every agentic system. Without it, delegation has no structural basis, observability has no trust context, and re-engagement has no recovery framework. The Trust Architect establishes the structural foundation on which the other three roles build.
The AXD Academy offers structured learning pathways that cover the knowledge domains of all four practitioner roles. The founding cohort programme provides the first professional credential in Agentic Experience Design - the AXD Practitioner Certification.
The AXD Discipline - Four Practitioner Roles Who Designs the Human-Agent Relationship? Every agentic system requires four distinct design competencies. These are not job titles borrowed from UX. They are new roles for a new discipline - each responsible for a different structural layer of the human-agent relationship. Traditional UX design assumes a single designer can own the entire user experience. That assumption breaks down in agentic systems. When an AI agent acts autonomously on behalf of a human - making decisions, executing transactions, operating while the human is absent - the design surface expands beyond what any single role can govern. These four domains require four distinct competencies. The AXD Institute identifies them as the four practitioner roles of The four AXD roles are not independent silos. They form a continuous design surface where each role's output becomes another role's input. The Trust Architect establishes the structural foundation - the trust model that determines what level of delegation is appropriate. The Delegation Designer takes that trust context and designs the specific authority boundaries, constraints, and escalation conditions. The Observability Lead ensures that everything the agent does within those boundaries is legible to the human principal. And the Re-engagement Designer owns what happens when the loop closes - when the human returns, when trust needs recalibration, when the delegation scope needs adjustment. Consider an agentic shopping agent that manages a household's grocery purchases. The Trust Architect designs the trust formation process - how the agent earns the right to make purchasing decisions. The Delegation Designer defines the spending limits, brand preferences, substitution rules, and the conditions that require human approval. The Observability Lead designs how the agent communicates what it bought and why - not as a transaction log, but as a legible narrative. The Re-engagement Designer owns the return