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. It is the design discipline for autonomous AI systems that act on behalf of people. AXD provides frameworks for structuring authority, building trust over time, designing for absent-state operation, and creating intervention surfaces for when human judgement is needed. It was founded by Tony Wood in September 2024 in the United Kingdom.
The recommended learning path starts with the AXD Manifesto for philosophical foundations, then the AXD Vocabulary for shared language (64 terms), followed by Trust Architecture and Delegation Design as the twin foundational concepts. Next, study the 12 Practice Frameworks for actionable methodology, and read the 54 Observatory essays for depth. The AXD Readiness Assessment provides a structured evaluation of organisational preparedness.
The AXD Institute does not currently offer a formal certification programme. However, the published body of work - 64 vocabulary terms, 12 practice frameworks, and 54 research essays - provides a comprehensive self-directed curriculum. Enterprise teams typically adopt the Practice Frameworks as their internal standard for agentic design competency.
AXD and UX address fundamentally different design conditions. UX assumes the user is present and interacting with an interface. AXD assumes the user is absent and the agent is acting autonomously. UX optimises for attention and interface quality. AXD optimises for trust, delegation, observability, and recovery. The design materials, methods, and success metrics are different. AXD is not UX applied to AI - it is a parallel discipline.
AXD uses a framework-based methodology centred on 12 Practice Frameworks covering the full lifecycle of human-agent interaction. These include Trust Calibration, Delegation Design, Intent Architecture, Autonomy Gradient, Failure Architecture, Orchestration Visibility, Interrupt Patterns, Recovery Design, Ethical Constraints, Outcome Specification, Observability Patterns, and the Relational Arc. Each framework provides structured components and design questions.
For three decades, every major design discipline assumed the user was present. User Experience (UX) mapped journeys through screens. Service design orchestrated touchpoints between people and organisations. Interaction design refined the micro-moments of click, swipe, and scroll. Each methodology shared a foundational assumption: the human is here, watching, deciding, acting. Agentic AI broke that assumption. When an AI agent books a flight, negotiates a supplier contract, manages a portfolio, or triages a medical referral on someone's behalf, the human is absent. The most consequential moments in the experience happen when no one is watching. No existing design discipline was built for this condition. AXD is built on five principles that distinguish it from every prior design discipline. These principles were articulated in the Every agentic system begins with a designed act of delegation - a human granting permission for autonomous action. AXD designers architect this delegation: its scope, duration, constraints, and mechanisms for revocation. Without intentional delegation, autonomy becomes ambiguity. The Where UX works in attention and affordance, AXD works in trust. Trust in autonomous agents is calibrated, contextual, and fragile - and it can be designed. The most consequential agentic experiences happen when no one is watching. Agentic experiences are not transactions. They are relationships that accumulate history and demonstrate character. The hundredth interaction matters more than the first. The Relational Arc governs how trust evolves over time, how autonomy expands with demonstrated competence, and how the relationship deepens from initial delegation to mature collaboration. When the path is chosen by the agent, the designer specifies the destination, not the journey. Outcome specification - defining what success looks like rather than how to achieve it - is the primary design artifact of AXD. This is a fundamental inversion from traditional design, whe