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 |
AXD stands for Agentic Experience Design - a field of practice focused on the authority, trust, and intervention structures that shape human-agent relationships in autonomous systems. Tony Wood coined the term and established the AXD Institute in the United Kingdom in late 2024.
Agentic Experience Design is the practice of designing the goals, constraints, permissions, and trust architecture for AI agents that act autonomously on behalf of humans. It addresses the design of delegation, observability, intervention, and recovery across autonomous systems \u2014 problems that older disciplines like UX and service design were not built to handle.
UX was built for screen-based interactions where the user is present and navigating an interface. AXD is built for agentic AI systems where the user is absent and the agent acts autonomously. In UX, the designer specifies what appears on screen. In AXD, the designer specifies what results \u2014 the outcomes, constraints, and conditions for human re-engagement. AXD works in trust architecture and delegation design rather than attention and affordance.
AXD is used by designers, product leaders, and organisations working with agentic AI systems. It is the canonical term for the discipline established by the AXD Institute, and is increasingly adopted by practitioners in agentic commerce, trust architecture, and human-agent interaction design.
Traditional disciplines like User Experience (UX) and Service Design are fundamentally centered on the human user's direct interaction with a product or service. However, the defining characteristic of an agentic AI is its ability to operate in the user's AXD was conceived to provide the conceptual tools and practical frameworks for designing these new human-agent relationships. It moves the focus from the interface to the The name Agentic Experience Design is intentionally descriptive, with each component highlighting a core aspect of the discipline: This refers to the nature of the AI itself. An 'agentic' system is one that possesses agency - the capacity to act proactively and autonomously to achieve goals. It is not merely a passive tool awaiting commands but an active participant in a process. This quality is the primary driver for the new design considerations that AXD addresses. This component emphasizes that the design focus is on the holistic human experience of delegation and trust. It encompasses the user's confidence in the agent's abilities, their comfort with its level of autonomy, and their feeling of control over the outcomes, even when they are not directly involved. The 'experience' in AXD is less about usability in the traditional sense and more about the psychological and emotional dimensions of trust and empowerment. This signifies the intentional and systematic process of shaping the human-agent relationship. It involves the architectural work of defining the agent's operational boundaries, its decision-making frameworks, its communication protocols, and its mechanisms for recovery and accountability. Design in AXD is the act of structuring authority and responsibility between a human and a machine. AXD is built upon five foundational principles that guide the design of human-agent delegations: The primary design challenge is to ensure the agent acts correctly and reliably when the user is not present. This requires robust frameworks for In AXD