Design in Tech Report 2026: From UX to AX

This year’s Design in Tech Report is about a major shift for designers. We are moving from UX to AX: from user experience to agentic experience.

In the UX era, designers focused on helping people do things. We designed flows, screens, menus, and paths. We helped users move through software step by step.

In the AX era, that changes. Agents can now act on a user’s behalf. So the design problem shifts. It is no longer just, “How do I help someone do this?” It becomes, “How do I help someone know whether it was done well?”

That is the big move: from the gulf of execution to the gulf of evaluation.

This is why feedback matters so much. An agent is really a loop: action, outcome, feedback, correction. If you understand the loop, you understand where design is going.

That is also why coding changed so quickly. Code is easy to evaluate. It works or it does not. AI improves quickly in domains where feedback is clear. Design is harder because taste, tone, and judgment are more subjective. That does not make design less…