AXO. The discipline
of agentic experience.
AXO is the discipline that designs systems built to be actioned by agents, not merely found or cited. Because acting is not finding, and an agent is not a search engine.
Imagine you’re a kid again, and someone sends you out to do the grocery shopping. They give you the address of a supermarket where — they promise — there are great deals and everything on your list.
You’ve got the address, so off you go. You walk in. And every shelf is draped in cloth. You can’t make out what’s behind them, what’s on offer, what’s even for sale. You stand there thinking: what is going on here? The most you can do is go home and report that yes, the supermarket exists. Or try a different one.
Now imagine you walk in and you can see everything. The products on the shelves, the deals — and they’re perfect: there’s the exact Greek yogurt your sister eats every morning, the exact rice your father likes. Except there’s a pane of glass in front of every shelf. You can see it all, but you can’t take any of it; and the checkouts are empty — no cashier, no self-checkout to pay at. All you can do is look, and say: what a magnificent supermarket, for anyone who can reach the products and find someone to pay. You go home, you describe everything you saw, and you finish with: “Mom, you should go there yourself.”
Now imagine the last version. You walk in, and you find a catalogue of every aisle and where each item on your list is shelved; a flyer telling you which deals are right for you and which aisle to find them in; a tool to map yourself a route and shop as fast as you can; and at the end, a checkout of your own, where you can ring it all up. What you have isn’t clearer signage: it’s a model of the store tailored to you — its ontology — that lets you not only understand where you are, but form your own picture of it, experience the supermarket on your own terms, and move through it making informed choices. And the one who builds it isn’t you: it’s the supermarket.
In this scene, you are your mother’s agent. You’ve been given a goal — do the shopping —, information — the list —, tools — the money, the cloth bag. And the three supermarkets are three different ways of putting you in a position to act, or of not putting you there at all. The address is SEO: it gets you to the place. The glass over the shelves is GEO: you can see what’s inside, cite it, describe it to your mother — but act, no; and so you end up handing the action back to her (“go yourself”) instead of carrying it out in her place.
The third supermarket is AXO: access to the shelves, orientation tailored to you inside the store, a checkout where you can ring it all up. Here it’s no longer about seeing. It’s about being able to act. And mind you: it isn’t about handing the agent a self-checkout and leaving it at that. Opening APIs — exposing operations — gives it a checkout that processes the payment but doesn’t tell it what to put in the bag or why, or a clerk who’ll fill a precise order, “three Greek yogurts,” but only if the agent has already figured out the store on its own. That’s execution without understanding. What comes first is the model of the store, the map tailored to the agent: a cognitive system, not one more layer of functions to call. Without it, every checkout is an empty checkout in front of someone who doesn’t know what to buy.
With agentic AI we already have any number of entities that can do things for us, but we haven’t yet designed a world where they can truly act in our place, and do it well. First we built a web shaped for search engines, where the goal was to be found; then, when generative AI began to answer, a web shaped for conversation, where the goal was to be cited. But it isn’t about being found, or being cited, or even putting agents in a position to explain how things are done: it’s about a different discipline — one that puts agents in a position to actually act within a process, not just watch it from the outside.
That’s why I believe it’s time to define AXO as a discipline, through a manifesto, and to start writing the guidelines for designing this new world.
The seven principles that define this discipline live in the manifesto