At Amazon, I obsessed over customer experience (CX). These days, I obsess over AX: agent experience.
AX should answer two questions:
1. How does the user experience the interaction with the agent?
2. How does the agent experience the interaction with your tools?
On question 1, I've started using the term "interactive copywriting." I might just be renaming something that already has a name: Aurélien Georget reported developers in SF calling themselves "English engineers." Either way, the job is the same. Someone has to own every version of the conversation a customer might have with your agent.
And it pays. In August, Sierra launched Voice Personas, which let a company design how its agent sounds (tone, pacing, how it handles being interrupted) separately from what it does. Sierra reports that for one agent, a large telco according to the Acquired podcast, pairing a natural voice with a persona lifted resolution rates by almost 50%.
I've spent so many years on question 1 that I'm appreciating the uncomfortable stretch, and sometimes mental gymnastics, that comes with question 2.
Want this running in your team?
evoilabs starts with one task, the one your team repeats every week, and builds the system that handles it. Then your team builds the next one.
See how it works →On question 2, the real question is: how does an agent mimic how you already interact with the world? Today, I see three possible answers:
- Open a door. Build for agents directly, with MCP servers.
- Lock the door. Amazon just blocked Meta's Muse agent, saying it "fails to identify itself while browsing."
- Climb through the window. Agents that click through websites the way a human would.
I don't know how the agent will interact with the world tomorrow. What's clear to me is that, as a whole, AX has come down to strong and intentional written communication. Your agent's voice is copy, while your tool descriptions, UI, and error messages are copy too.
Action for you this week: add one paragraph on how your assistant should sound. Be clear. Challenge yourself to use your tools beyond just your website, as if you were an agent yourself.
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My name's Mathieu, and I demystify AI for founders and execs, and help transform their teams from chatting with AI to building systems that compound in value.