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 biggest trust risk is the combination of irreversibility and opacity. Financial commitments are often irreversible, and the negotiation process that led to them is invisible to the human. When a human discovers that an agent overpaid for something - and cannot undo the transaction - the trust damage is both financial and relational. Designing for transaction transparency and robust rollback mechanisms is the primary mitigation.
Spending limits should follow the Autonomy Gradient - starting narrow and expanding as the agent demonstrates financial competence. A new agent might be limited to £20 per transaction with mandatory approval above that threshold. After six months of competent performance, the limit might expand to £100. After a year, to £500. The expansion should be visible to the human and reversible at any time.
Existing financial regulations were designed for human-initiated transactions. Agentic payments create novel regulatory challenges around authorisation, liability, and consumer protection. The Trust and Regulation page in this section explores the intersection of trust architecture with the emerging regulatory landscape for autonomous financial agents.
Agentic payments are financial transactions initiated, negotiated, or completed by autonomous AI agents on behalf of human principals. Unlike traditional digital payments (where a human clicks \u2018pay\u2019) or automated payments (where a rule executes a predefined transaction), agentic payments involve an intelligent agent exercising financial judgement within delegated authority boundaries. The agent may compare prices, negotiate terms, select payment methods, and execute transactions autono
There is a hierarchy of delegation in agentic systems. A human will delegate information retrieval before they delegate communication. They will delegate communication before they delegate negotiation. And they will delegate negotiation before they delegate Payment is the final trust threshold - the point at which the human grants the agent authority to make irreversible financial commitments. Crossing this threshold requires the deepest Traditional payment UX was designed for a human who is present at the moment of transaction - confirming the amount, reviewing the details, clicking "pay." Agentic payments eliminate this presence. The agent negotiates, the agent commits, the agent pays - and the human learns about it afterwards. This is not an incremental change to payment design. It is a structural transformation that requires a fundamentally different trust architecture. Challenge 1: Pre-authorisation ambiguity. When a human delegates financial authority to an agent, the scope of that authority must be precisely defined. But financial decisions are contextual - the "right" price depends on market conditions, urgency, alternatives, and preferences that shift over time. A rigid pre-authorisation ("never spend more than £50") is too constraining. A flexible one ("spend what seems reasonable") is too vague. The trust architecture must support When an agent negotiates on behalf of a human, the negotiation process is invisible. The human sees only the outcome - the final price, the agreed terms. But trust in financial delegation depends not just on the outcome but on the Most agentic actions can be undone or corrected. Financial commitments often cannot. A payment made, a contract signed, a subscription committed - these create obligations that persist beyond the moment of execution. The trust architecture for agentic payments must account for this irreversibility by implementing higher verification thresholds, more granular consent mechanisms, and more robust rollback