What changes when people hand the work to an agent?
For decades, software design asked one question: how do I help this person complete the task? Once an agent does the task, the question becomes: how does this person know it was done well, and how fast can they fix it when it was not? The person is still accountable for the outcome. The product has to make that outcome legible at a glance.
Teams that design for that shift ship agents people keep using. Teams that bolt an agent onto screens built for manual work get one of two outcomes: an agent that interrupts so often it gets rubber-stamped, or one that acts invisibly until the first expensive mistake. Our longer argument is in Agentic products live or die at the approval step.
Which layers of an agentic product need design?
Every agentic product we work on is designed across the same four layers. Each one maps to a failure we see in shipped products.
- Delegation: what the agent may do, scoped by action and by risk, and what it must hand back to a person
- Verification: review and approval ranked by consequence, with the agent's reasoning and the exact change shown before anything irreversible happens
- Recovery: uncertainty signals, failure states, undo and handoff, designed as first-class flows rather than error toasts
- Consistency: rules that keep agent-generated output on your design system, brand and tone, so the product still feels like one product
Where do agentic products usually break?
Four patterns account for most of the agentic features we are asked to rescue. Each has a design fix.
- Approval fatigue: every action asks for sign-off, so none of them get read. Fix: consequence-ranked gates. See When users trust your AI too much.
- Invisible action: the agent did something and nobody can tell what. Fix: an action history people can scan and reverse.
- Confident wrong answers: output looks equally certain whether it is right or not. Fix: calibrated confidence and a short path to correction. See Your AI will be confidently wrong. Design for it.
- Drift: each agent response invents a new layout or tone. Fix: an agent-ready design system the agent builds from.
How do agentic product design, AI UX and agent UX differ?
These terms get used interchangeably. They describe different jobs.
**AI UX design** is designing an AI feature a person operates: a suggestion, a summary, a chat panel. **Agentic product design** is designing a product where the software acts, and the person supervises. **Agent UX**, sometimes called agent experience, is designing your product so that other companies’ agents, such as a buyer’s shopping assistant, can read and operate it. We work across all three, and most B2B products now need at least two. For the third, see Agentic commerce is coming for your checkout flow.
How does this compare with an agency or AI UX work?
AI UX design covers an AI feature a person operates. We design the layer beyond it, where the software acts and the person supervises: approval rules ranked by consequence, a visible action history, and recovery paths. Where an agency hands over files for your team to integrate, we work inside your product, repository and cadence, so what you test is what ships.
How does an engagement work?
Work happens inside your product, your repository and your team's cadence, not in a separate design file that someone has to translate later.
- Map: every action the agent can take, its consequence if wrong, and the person accountable for it
- Design the gates: autonomy tiers, approval and review flows, reasoning display and recovery paths
- Prototype in your codebase against your design system, so what you test is what ships
- Instrument and hand over: adoption, verification time and override rate wired into your analytics, with the rules documented for your team
Proof and practice
We run our own operations on an agentic system in daily production, with named human approval gates on anything that ships, so the patterns on this page are ones we live with, not ones we only recommend.
Every engagement has a design lead who holds the design judgment at each gate.