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A new role is emerging, not for humans, but for agents. We’re calling it AX — Agent Experience.

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We’ve had UX for decades. But in 2026, something fundamental has changed. And most products haven’t caught up yet.

So what is AX? And why does it matter?

A Short History of Experience Design

To understand AX, it helps to look back.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, websites were designed almost entirely for humans sitting at desktop PCs. Everything — layout, forms, navigation, interactions — assumed a mouse, a keyboard, and a large screen. You pointed. You clicked. That was the experience.

Then in 2007, smartphones changed everything.

Websites and web apps had to be completely rethought. Screens got smaller. Fingers replaced cursors. Responsive design emerged so a single site could reformat itself across phones, tablets, and desktops.

Buttons changed. Typography changed. Forms changed. Interactions changed.

Over the next decade, we added gestures, swipes, animations, transitions, richer components — a whole new interaction language. From roughly 2010 through to 2025, this became the dominant way we designed digital products: human-first, screen-first, interaction-first.

And it worked.

What Changed Again

Today, something else is happening, mostly out of sight.

AI agents are starting to interact with our websites and applications on our behalf.

They’re reading content. They’re ingesting pages. They’re testing flows. They’re triggering actions. They’re integrating systems.

But here’s the strange part:

They’re doing all of this through interfaces that were designed for humans.

Text. Buttons. Forms. Visual hierarchies. Click-based interactions.

Agents are effectively pretending to be humans by scraping pages, interpreting layouts, clicking buttons — because that’s all we’ve given them.

And that raises an important question:

Is this actually efficient?

I would argue it’s not.

UX Was Never Designed for Agents

Right now, an agent’s “experience” is just a human experience, interpreted programmatically.

That works — but only in the same way that forcing mobile users to pinch-and-zoom desktop sites worked before responsive design existed.

It’s a mismatch.

Agents don’t need visual hierarchy. They don’t need animations. They don’t need buttons that look tappable. They don’t need content optimized for human scanning.

They need clarity, structure, predictability, and efficiency.

And that’s where AX comes in.

What Is Agent Experience (AX)?

AX is the practice of designing systems specifically for non-human users — AI agents that read, act, decide, and execute.

That might include things like:

• Semantic, machine-readable content written intentionally for AI
• Explicit action schemas instead of inferred UI flows
• API-forward product design
• Clear command structures for how an agent should interact with a system
• Stable interfaces that prioritize reliability over visual polish
• Websites and apps that expose intent, state, and capability clearly

In some cases, this might mean skipping the UI entirely and designing directly around APIs, authentication, and permissions.

In others, it could mean dual-layer experiences:

• UX for humans
• AX for agents

Not unlike how we once designed desktop and mobile experiences side by side.

Why This Is a New Role

This isn’t just “backend work.” And it’s not traditional UX either.

AX sits somewhere between:

• Product design
• System architecture
• API design
• AI behavior modeling

It asks different questions:

• How does an agent understand this system?
• What assumptions are we forcing it to make?
• What friction are we creating unintentionally?
• What would an optimal agent flow actually look like?

These are design problems — just not visual ones.

And that’s why I think AX becomes a real, distinct role.

The Question We Should All Be Asking

Most websites and web apps today are still built as if humans are the only users that matter.

But that’s no longer true.

Agents are already here. They’re already interacting with our products. And they’re doing it through layers that were never designed for them.

So the real question is:

How is your website or application set up to handle agents right now?

And looking ahead:

What do you think the role of AX will actually entail?

Because in the same way UX defined the last two decades of digital products, I think Agent Experience is about to define the next one.