The UX Reckoning: Designing for an Agentic AI World with Drew Burdick, Founder of StealthX

For decades, user experience has been built around a simple assumption: the human is the operator. We click, swipe, navigate, and tell systems what to do. But that assumption is breaking down.In this episode of Signal & Noise, hosts Rio Longacre and Brett House sit down with Drew Burdick to explore what happens when AI systems stop waiting for instructions and start acting on our behalf. As agentic AI moves from experimentation to production, UX is no longer about screens and flows—it’s about designing relationships, trust, and alignment between humans and autonomous systems.Drew brings a practitioner’s perspective on how UX must evolve when agents anticipate intent, take action across systems, and reason about outcomes. We dig into what “Agentic UX” really means, which long-held UX assumptions no longer apply, and why the next generation of interfaces may be invisible, conversational, or entirely new in form.The conversation covers emerging interaction models, transparency and control, trust calibration, failure states, and the ethical responsibilities designers inherit when machines begin making decisions. We also discuss how UX teams, designers, and organizations need to restructure skills, roles, and workflows to stay relevant in an agentic world.This episode is for designers, product leaders, and technologists grappling with a fundamental shift: when AI becomes a collaborator instead of a tool, experience design becomes one of the most strategic disciplines in the company.