Designing agentic AI into your journeys.
A one-day in-house programme on where an AI agent belongs in your journey, when it hands off to a human, and what the handoff feels like. Run against your service.
Built for teams already shipping agents.
This isn't an introduction to AI. It assumes your team already knows it's building agentic features and needs to make specific design decisions about them.
- •Established design teams shipping agentic features.
- •Product managers and engineers designing agent behaviour without a designer in the room.
- •Service and content designers whose journeys now include a non-deterministic step.
- •Teams with a mature design system whose gap is upstream of the interface.
Six things you have to get right.
Run against your own live journey, not a hypothetical one.
Where an agent belongs, and where it doesn't
Map your journey first, then mark where an agent earns its place, and where it's in the way.
→ a scored shortlist of candidate stepsThe handoff to a human
Decide what triggers the handoff, what context carries across, and what the human on the end receives.
→ handoff specs for at least one real flowTrust, error and recovery
Design what a user sees before they'll trust the agent, and how they take back control.
→ trust and recovery patterns your team agreed onDesigning for non-deterministic behaviour
Design, write and review the states you can't fully specify in advance.
→ states and rules documented for sign-offTesting an agentic flow
Rework usability testing for a flow that behaves differently every time, and measure a range instead of pass or fail.
→ a testing approach you can run without external recruitmentMaking the case internally
Turn the day's decisions into an argument you can take back into the business.
→ an internal argument with the tradeoffs made explicitArtefacts, not just a good discussion.
- •A mapped journey with the agent's role marked on it.
- •A documented handoff design for at least one real flow from your product.
- •A set of trust and recovery patterns your team agreed on together.
- •A testing approach you can run without external recruitment.
Before you enquire.
What does agentic AI in a user journey mean?
Agentic AI in a user journey is an AI agent that takes action on a user's behalf inside a product, rather than only answering questions. Designing for it means deciding which steps the agent should handle, when it should hand control back to a person, and how that handoff is communicated to the user.
When should an AI agent hand off to a human?
There's no universal rule, and part of the day is building one for your own service: usually the trigger is some mix of the agent's own confidence, the stakes of getting the step wrong, and whether the user has signalled they want a person. We work through your journey to decide where that line sits for you, rather than importing someone else's answer.
How do you test a flow when the AI gives a different answer each time?
You stop treating a single session as representative and design the test around a range of plausible agent responses instead of one script. We cover how to pick tasks that expose the range, how many sessions you actually need, and what to measure when "did they complete the task" isn't a stable enough signal on its own.
Do our designers need to know how to build AI to take this?
No. This is a design and product training, not an engineering one. You don't need to know how the underlying model works to make good decisions about where it sits in a journey and how it behaves toward a user.
Have you delivered this programme before?
This is a new programme, built because a team asked us for training we didn't yet have. We have delivered in-house UX training to product, design and technology teams for over a decade, and this curriculum applies that experience to a problem the whole industry is working out at the same time. You'd be among the first teams to run it.
Can this be combined with UX research or service design training?
Yes. It's often run as a second day alongside a UX research day, or alongside our complex journeys and service design programme, since testing an agentic flow properly is itself a research skill. Tell us on the form below and we'll scope both days together.
Enquire about this programme.
Tell us about your team, the journey you want to work on, and your preferred timing. We'll get back to you within 2 business days.