AIAX — Agent Interface & Agent Experience

"What an agent encounters when it shows up wanting to evaluate, navigate, decide, or transact."

Status: v0.1 draft · License: CC BY 4.0 (spec) · Canonical URL: kognai.ai/aiax

AIAX is a design discipline and a protocol for agent-facing product surfaces. Where UI/UX optimizes for human eyes and hands, AIAX optimizes the parallel surface for an agent reader, with minimum tokens to maximum decision-relevant information as its hard constraint.

A typical SaaS homepage costs an agent 5,000–15,000 tokens to evaluate. The same decision-relevant content can be delivered in 150–300 tokens via an AIAX surface. As agent operation cost becomes a meaningful share of unit economics, the surfaces that respect agent attention are the surfaces that get used.

The four tiers

| Tier | What | Path | Target size | |------|------|------|-------------| | 0 | Manifest | /.well-known/aiax.json | ~200 tokens | | 1 | Capability sections | /aiax/sections/<section>.json | 200–1,000 tokens each | | 2 | Action endpoints | /aiax/mcp (MCP) | callable | | 3 | Reference data | /aiax/reference/ | deep, on-demand |

The tiering is ordered by decision relevance, not by topic. Agents fetch Tier 0 always, Tier 1 when investigating, Tier 2 when transacting, Tier 3 when integrating.

In this directory

• SPEC.md — the v0.1 specification (read this first)
• BENCHMARK.md — the token-cost benchmark methodology
• schemas/manifest.schema.json — JSON Schema for Tier 0
• schemas/section.schema.json — JSON Schema for Tier 1
• examples/aiax.json — example Tier 0 manifest (Invoica)
• examples/sections/pricing.json — example Tier 1 section
• CHANGELOG.md — version history

What AIAX is not

• Not a replacement for MCP, OpenAPI, or llms.txt — it composes with all three
• Not a registry or directory protocol — that's LAX
• Not a negotiation protocol — that's PACT
• Not a payment protocol — that's x402 / DRS
• Not a moat for Kognai — the spec is permissive by design; the point is the discipline, not the namespace

Relationship to the Kognai protocol family

AIAX sits alongside PACT, LAX, DRS, and SCORE. All share Kognai's Retrieval-First Principle — privilege structured addressable retrieval over full-document delivery at every layer of the stack.

| Protocol | Layer | What it does | |----------|-------|--------------| | AIAX | Product surface | Agent-readable presentation of a product | | LAX | Discovery | Agent-to-agent capability publication | | PACT | Negotiation | Capability token signing | | DRS | Settlement | On-chain deal receipt (EAS on Base) | | SCORE | Reputation | Sovereign Constitutional Output Rating |

Reference implementation

Invoica (invoica.ai) will be the first published AIAX implementation, with a token-cost benchmark vs the human surface. See TICKET-063 in the Kognai Change Log.

Contributing

This is a v0.1 draft. Comments, issues, and adoption signals welcome via the canonical channel at kognai.ai/aiax (publication URL).