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 |
Verifiable intent is the mechanism that proves an agentic payment was authorised by a human principal within a defined delegation scope. It bridges the gap between human authority and machine execution, enabling merchants, consumers, and regulators to trust that autonomous transactions are genuine and within scope.
Because the human is absent when the agent makes the payment. Traditional payment authorisation assumes a human is present. When an AI agent transacts autonomously, there must be a mechanism to prove the transaction was genuinely authorised within the scope the human delegated - otherwise merchants face fraud risk, consumers face exposure, and regulators face uncertainty.
Verifiable intent works through cryptographic and protocol-level mechanisms that bind a human's delegation scope to the agent's transaction authority. It addresses the three-party trust relationship between human, agent, and merchant - making delegation verifiable, scope enforceable, and accountability traceable across the entire transaction chain.
Without verifiable intent, agentic commerce faces three critical failures: merchants cannot distinguish legitimate from fraudulent agentic transactions, consumers have no mechanism to dispute transactions that exceeded their delegation scope, and regulators cannot establish accountability for autonomous payments. Verifiable intent is the trust layer that prevents all three.
In traditional commerce, payment authorisation is straightforward: a human presents a card, enters a PIN, or confirms a transaction on their device. The human is present, identifiable, and accountable. But in This creates a fundamental trust problem. When an agent presents payment credentials to a merchant, how does the merchant know the transaction was genuinely authorised? How does the human principal know the agent acted within the scope they delegated? How does a regulator distinguish between a legitimate agentic transaction and an unauthorised one? Current payment infrastructure was designed for human-present transactions. It assumes the entity initiating a payment is either a human or a system acting under direct human supervision. Agentic payments break this assumption entirely, creating a gap that Verifiable intent operates at the intersection of three domains: The concept draws on established principles from cryptographic attestation, capability-based security, and the AXD framework's approach to delegation design. It extends these principles into the specific domain of autonomous commerce, where the stakes are financial and the consequences are immediate. Without verifiable intent, agentic commerce faces three critical failures: Merchants cannot distinguish between legitimate agentic transactions and fraudulent ones. If an agent presents valid payment credentials but acts outside its delegated scope, the merchant bears the risk of chargebacks and disputes. Verifiable intent gives merchants a mechanism to verify that the transaction falls within the human's stated delegation. Without proof of delegation scope, consumers have no mechanism to dispute transactions that exceeded their intent. "I authorised my agent to buy groceries under £50, not a £500 appliance" requires a verifiable record of what was delegated. Verifiable intent creates that record. Regulators need to understand who is accountable when an agent makes a payment. Verifiable intent provides th