In March 2026 at SXSW, John Maeda put forward a thesis that challenges the self-image of entire design departments: the era of User Experience is ending. What comes next, he calls Agentic Experience – AX for short. The shift sounds abstract, but the numbers are concrete: according to Deloitte's State of AI in the Enterprise 2026, only 23 percent of companies use agentic AI to any meaningful degree today – yet 74 percent expect moderate to full integration within two years. At the same time, Gartner predicts that by the end of 2026, 40 percent of all enterprise applications will embed task-specific AI agents – up from under five percent the year before. Between those figures lies a design problem most teams haven't recognized yet.
