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 |
Trust contagion - the phenomenon where a single high-profile trust failure propagates across the entire user base through social media and news coverage. At scale, one user's bad experience can damage millions of trust relationships simultaneously. Proactive communication infrastructure that addresses systemic concerns before they propagate is the primary mitigation.
Through the trust flywheel: deeper trust leads to deeper delegation, which generates more data, which improves agent competence, which builds more trust. This compounds over time, creating an increasingly insurmountable advantage for trust leaders. Organisations that under-invest in trust trigger the opposite - a trust death spiral of shallow delegation and limited improvement.
A trust-first organisation requires three elements: trust governance (a dedicated function that owns trust metrics and standards), trust engineering (a technical discipline that builds and maintains trust infrastructure), and trust culture (an organisational commitment to treating trust failures as seriously as security breaches). Trust cannot be delegated to the UX team - it must be a first-class organisational concern.
The trust principles of AXD - trust as material, erosion patterns, trust signals, calibration - are defined at the level of the individual human-agent relationship. But organisations do not deploy one agent for one human. They deploy agentic systems that serve thousands, millions, or hundreds of millions of users simultaneously. This is the challenge of trust at scale: designing trust infrastructure that preserves the quality of individual trust relationships while operating at the throughput of a global platform. It is the difference between a craftsman building one chair and a factory producing a million chairs - the principles of good design remain the same, but the methods of production must be fundamentally different. The systems that establish initial trust with new users. At scale, first impressions are not individual - they are systemic. The onboarding flow, the initial delegation ceremony, the first trust signals - these must be designed as infrastructure that delivers consistent trust formation across millions of new relationships. Trust formation infrastructure includes: standardised onboarding sequences that calibrate initial delegation to the user's risk tolerance; default trust parameters that provide safe starting points for new relationships; and progressive disclosure systems that reveal agent capabilities at a pace the user can absorb. Layer 2: Trust Maintenance Infrastructure. The systems that sustain trust across millions of ongoing relationships. This includes: automated trust signal generation that produces personalised trust communications at scale; erosion detection systems that monitor behavioural indicators across the entire user base and flag relationships showing early signs of decline; and adaptive calibration systems that adjust agent behaviour based on individual trust trajectories. The systems that repair trust after failures - which, at scale, are inevitable and frequent. This includes: automated failure detection and disclosure syst