Host: And we are back. What an amazing session by Khushbu on leveraging AI for digital businesses. I think it was extremely insightful, so please show some love to Khushbu in the chat and let her know how the session was. And don’t forget to show appreciation for Brent as well, one of our star hosts for this event.

I’m going to be taking you guys forward with a panel discussion. But before that, a few announcements. This is a reminder for the Easter egg activity that we’ve been doing throughout this event. We have hidden some Easter eggs strategically in different areas of the event, you might see some on the stage, some on the expo, some in the lobby. So make sure to go around the event platform and look for those Easter eggs, and refer to the talk in the comment section, which is pinned, so that you can submit your findings by the end of this event. The winners will be announced by the end of day two, which is tomorrow.

Now moving on to the session. This session is on AI and WordPress, and today we have an amazing panel for you to enjoy. I’m going to be pulling up our panelists one by one and giving an introduction. First up is James LePage. James is the Director of Engineering, AI at Automattic, leading innovations at the intersection of WordPress and artificial intelligence. Thank you so much, James, for being here. Next up is Jeffrey Paul, Director of Open Source at 10up and longtime WordPress core contributor. Jeffrey, it’s an honor to have you on the stage. Next up, Felix Arntz, Senior Software Engineer at Google and WordPress core committer, focused on improving performance and user experience across the open web. And last but not least, Pascal Birchler, Senior Developer Relations Engineer at Google and co-lead of the WordPress AI team.

So this is a powerhouse panel, guys. If you are a WordPress fan, if you have been using WordPress for any period of time, this session is for you, because WordPress is doing a lot in terms of AI. This session is about what WordPress is doing in the AI space, how it’s beneficial to agencies and small businesses, and how anyone can benefit from the AI capabilities of our favorite CMS. So it’s an honor to have the entire WordPress AI team on the panel.

Before I move on to the questions, just wanted to make another announcement, that when we started this event there was an issue with the chat. What I want all the viewers to do is just refresh your page so that the issue can be resolved. It’s resolved on the back end, but if you can just refresh, for the safe side, you won’t be seeing this issue from now on.

So let’s move on to the questions. My first question is around AI and WordPress, and this goes to James LePage. What are your individual lenses into the intersection of AI and WordPress, and what do you expect to bring to the AI team?

James LePage: Sure, we’ll do the round table. My fascination with WordPress started 10-ish years ago. I was a freelancer, then formed an agency and worked through that agency, and in university I studied AI. As AI became more powerful, what we all think about as AI today with these generative models and LLMs, I began to fixate on how we can lift WordPress up with this technology. WordPress is this super massive open-source project that powers so much of the internet, and my livelihood and so many others’ livelihoods are based on this platform. I saw a pretty big opportunity personally with AI and WordPress: in building these sites, in helping maintain and manage them, and in extending and creating new experiences on the open web for the folks who visit the sites that we build.

So that was my immediate focus. I then formed a startup, very creatively named WPAI, to go and build with that. And that experience in WordPress and AI, and also my day job here at Automattic building AI products through this company with a really talented group of folks, is that aspect of what I bring to this team: deeply understanding AI, deeply understanding WordPress, and figuring out how we build the building blocks for other developers, and also the features for individuals, to really allow WordPress to thrive in this AI era. I’ll pass it off to Jeff.

Jeffrey Paul: So I come at this WordPress AI team from the agency side of things, Fueled and 10up. We’ve historically built not just sites or apps for clients like Google, Microsoft, Warby Parker, and some large government entities, but through the open source practice that I help run, we maintain two dozen different plugins in the WordPress space, contribute to WordPress core, and partner with folks that want to build open-source projects. We’ve been working on ClassifAI, an AI plugin in the space, since 2018, so we’ve got some very historical understanding of what the space was like back then and how it’s advanced to now.

So coming to the WordPress AI team with that lens in mind, the agency and enterprise use cases, and the concerns you need to worry about when you’re building a plugin used by folks both at the agency side and down to the general consumer side. That’s going to be a different experience than Pascal, James, and Felix, but I think extremely valuable to the team. I’ve been active since call it August of 2016, 2017, working on major releases, so very familiar with how things work within WordPress core, and excited to pair with the folks here to elevate what the project can do from an AI perspective, not in a fragmented way with different people going in different directions, but with a concerted, centralized approach, building those things from core outwards that others can leverage. I will tag Pascal to go next.

Pascal Birchler: Thanks. My background is more from the WordPress contributor, core committer side of things. I’ve been doing WordPress for almost 20 years, almost as long as WordPress exists. I did a lot of work on the performance team, which is also relatively new, and I think for the AI team you want to pursue a similar approach with feature projects and feature plugins that we did with the performance lab. I also have a background with WP-CLI, the official command line tool for WordPress, which I’m a maintainer of, and there especially I did some explorations with MCP support in WordPress, WordPress as an MCP server but also client. I’m also a huge advocate of web AI, anything that can run on-device in your browser without any third parties, and those are the things that I want to push a little bit. Felix?

Felix Arntz: I’ve got a little similar background to Pascal. I’ve also been contributing to WordPress core for many years, actually my 10-year contributor anniversary is coming up in five days, so I’m very excited for that. One of my favorite things is building APIs, so I’ve been involved maintaining the REST API component of WordPress for a long time. And in more recent years, I’m one of the co-founders of the performance team, and as Pascal said, we would like to bring some of the successful approaches of the performance team to that new AI team. For AI specifically, my intersection with WordPress is that I started this plugin called AI Services last year, which is supposed to close the gap between developers wanting to build AI features in their plugins and having to do all the plumbing themselves to even connect to an AI provider. That leads to a bunch of different problems the way it’s currently going. Most developers, when they build a plugin, they want to build AI-facing features, they don’t want to build the plumbing. But I love building APIs, so I’m really happy to take that load for other developers. That’s how I got to AI.

Host: That’s awesome, guys. That brings me to my next question. You each reflected on what your focuses are based on your own experiences, but what are the current focuses of this WordPress AI team? What is it currently working on right now as we speak?

James LePage: I’ll jump in, and folks can fill in the gaps if I forget anything. First off, I’m going to put a link in the chat to make.wordpress.org/ai. That is where you can understand everything that we’re doing. This team, like mentioned by Pascal and Felix, is modeled off of the performance team, which does a lot of things really well, including communication: here’s what we’re doing, here’s why, here’s how. We’re trying to do the same with AI.

To answer the explicit question of what we’re focusing on, the first focus is enabling developers within WordPress to build in a unified way, as Felix alluded to with his AI Services work. We have noticed over the past couple of years, as AI has become more prevalent in software, a lot of people doing their own things, and when you do your own things there’s a lot of duplication of work. So somebody may choose to interact with OpenAI or Anthropic in their own special way, and then another plugin re-implements the same exact thing. That can be the same case for how we’re exposing this functionality to these LLMs, and for how we interact with WordPress and AI externally. So the focus of this group is to say, now within the WordPress project there is this core group, and this is the surface that all of the AI work can go through, and all of the people building AI in WordPress can look at this group and say, here’s what I’m doing and here’s what I’m thinking. And it’s up to us to say, okay, from all of this mind share, we’re going to create and maintain these shared building blocks, these shared packages, for you the developer to use and infuse AI into your own plugins. These building blocks will also be used to extend WordPress core should that become something we want to do in the future.

There are three primary building blocks, mentioned in the make.wordpress.org/ai blog. The first is a provider-agnostic LLM client abstraction, that is what Felix just mentioned, how can we make it so regardless of what plugin or implementation you are developing, it’s all interacting with AI providers in this one unified, easy way. That’s helpful for the developer because it’s a single implementation, and helpful for the end user because there’s, for example, one place that you put these API keys, not five different places. Another focus is tool and resource definition and registration. So if we can talk to AI models, we also need to be able to provide these models, in a unified way, almost a list of what WordPress has to offer and what these things can do. It could be as simple as, hey, I want you to just stream text into this input field, but it can be more complex where a plugin registers a lot of these tools and capabilities. The final thing is an integration bridge, primarily focused on MCP. As Pascal mentioned, he has a lot of background experimenting with that. MCP is the most predominant protocol to allow software to talk to third-party AI, and that plugs into our general strategy: if we can register the features and abilities of WordPress core and individual plugins in a unified way, then we can expose them out to clients like Claude and OpenAI.

So those are the three building blocks, and there’s more detail in the blog at make.wordpress.org/ai. All of these are intended to enable other developers to build in a unified way, and allow us to experiment and explore whether AI features should be brought closer to WordPress core. All of these packages and tools are built in this canonical plugin style that was proven to work very well with the performance team, and it allows us to iterate pretty quickly, get these things out to folks in a formal official way, and explore whether they should be merged into core. So that’s what we are currently focused on as the AI team. Am I forgetting anything?

Host: Awesome, James, that was my next question. So is there anything else that anyone wants to add, Pascal, Felix, or Jeffrey, that James may have missed?

Jeffrey Paul: I’ll jump on and note that a lot of what James talked through are developer experience tooling sorts of things, and I just want to amplify that. All of us have seen individually, as we built things in the AI space, the table-stakes things that you have to build to get to actually having the benefit of AI doing a thing for you. This team is hoping to help alleviate a lot of that, to then power what people want to build on top of those toolings. There is a demo showcase plugin that we’re intending as well, that will show how some of that can work within the WordPress admin and authoring experience. But it’s also not just going to be the four of us. James, Felix, and Pascal are extremely brilliant, I’m along for the ride, but it’s really the community that is going to help contribute to these developer experience tooling sorts of things, and also have the really brilliant ideas, the clients they’re working for, the sites they’re building. While we’re trying to shepherd this process, we do need people to come to the AI team, to our Make blog, and to the Slack channel to help contribute and bring these ideas in. So while we do have a foundational road map in mind, from there we’re just trying to fuel the ideas from the community. It’s not just us, there’s only so much we could do realistically anyway.

Pascal Birchler: To add to what Jeff said, the big focus right now is on developer experience, which I would agree with, but I just want to call out that this is eventually going to benefit user experience, because that’s why we’re doing this. We’re not just building something nice for developers, we build it because without this there are certain problems that developers are facing that then translate to user problems. One of the examples, the provider-agnostic connection side: today as a developer you have to implement this by yourself, and because it’s a lot of work, you probably only do it for one provider, because you’re not going to do the same thing 10 times for 10 providers. That leads to a user-facing problem. Let’s think this further. We don’t only use one plugin on our WordPress site. So let’s say at some point in the future you use 10 AI-based plugins in WordPress, and you would need to get subscriptions with, let’s say, five different model providers, that would get unnecessarily expensive for you. Many users have their preferred models and preferred provider, and it would be great if they could use that without being forced into using another one just because they want to use that plugin. That’s one of the user-facing problems that some of our tooling hopefully will solve, via going through developer experience, but at the end the goal is to improve user experience.

Host: That’s an interesting point, because initially the focus felt like it was too much towards developers and improving their workflows, but Felix, you mentioned it very correctly, that the goal is to improve user experience at the end of the day. Which brings me to my next question. Is there a road map or aspirations for these focuses? Have you started working on things, anything substantial that’s already in the works that you can tell people about? Anyone can take this, Jeffrey or Pascal.

Pascal Birchler: In short, we are working on it. It’s not there yet. We discussed some of the major focus areas that James mentioned in the bi-weekly Slack meetings that we have in the WordPress Slack, and we’re planning on publishing a more thorough road map hopefully very soon.

James LePage: And also related to that, with the shared building blocks approach, each of these building blocks is essential to create AI experiences in WordPress, and each of these has already been experimented with by folks on this team. For example, Felix worked on AI Services, which will directly inform how this shared thing exists. So if agency owners or individual developers are interested in the thoughts there, you can look at that prior reference. Same with the unified way to register tools and resources, Automattic built a Features API for that specific reason, and that’s something that will be shaped into a project that goes closer to core. Same with the MCP work: Pascal worked on AI Command, Automattic worked on WordPress MCP, and even ClassifAI is a great example of how you can tie a lot of these things together into user-facing features. So there will be more messaging in the future as to how these packages shape into these building blocks, but there’s also reference that already exists. And right now is the time to be a part of these conversations, looking at these packages and saying, hey, my agency or my plugin or my client could absolutely use these specific things, and I’m seeing it missing from these building blocks, is there a way to include that into the design of these APIs? That’s really important for us, because as Jeff said, it’s four people in this room. We’re the ones helping define and steward this work, but this work isn’t going to happen without community involvement.

Host: Now let’s move from this specific team to a more generic point of view, and I want to put the spotlight first on Jeffrey. How is AI currently being used in WordPress site-building tools, for example Elementor or Bricks or others I missed?

Jeffrey Paul: I know that Miriam and the Elementor team, and probably other large plugin shops, page builder companies, and hosts in the space, have various AI tooling. So folks that are leveraging those tools, be it Elementor, Bricks, or existing on a particular host, those all have AI functionalities. A lot of the AI functionalities can be similar in a way: generating text, generating images, perhaps generating entire sites or pages of content. But the problem at the project level is that that is all being individually done with those hosts and plugin companies, not having a centralized approach to a similar developer experience and user experience. So that’s what this team is trying to put in place. For folks using Elementor and some of these other tools, hopefully they’re familiar with what those teams have built, and hopefully what the WordPress AI team does will help those teams focus more on their specific user base and needs, there might be some things shared with the needs coming from the WordPress core team and the AI team, but then also things unique to their audiences. So I don’t know if there was specific AI functionality you were curious about, I can certainly talk about functionality that we built into ClassifAI.

Host: That was great, because right now we’re seeing on a daily basis that AI site builders are popping up every now and then, and tools already working on site builders are adapting AI to further ease the process. Even some hosting companies have started to roll out AI site builders. So I just wanted your thoughts on how AI specifically is being used by WordPress companies and brands. Anyone else want to add to what Jeffrey said, James, Felix?

James LePage: I want to shout out the Automattic AI website builder through WordPress.com, that’s a WordPress.com product but it creates sites in native Gutenberg. And I’ll also shout out, in a competitor-friendly way, the Stellar Sites team, they have a really interesting product as well that does a similar type of onboarding experience in WordPress. And recently at WCEU there were several smaller companies showcasing some of their AI features. For example the PlugANs team, for an AI plugin search and a related AI agent for WordPress. And I know the developer behind Command UI is working on an AI feature as well. We’re seeing this blossoming of AI because people in WordPress need it. But as Jeff said, all of these things are being built in fragmented ways, and it could be more efficient if we’re all sharing the same packaging. When you think about the end state, when every plugin and solution in WordPress has AI, it will be helpful to be using these shared packages to be able to hand off and not have conflicts or clashes between Elementor flowing into maybe a support agent within the WordPress admin. So there’s a blossoming, and it’s nice to see, but it’s also something that I would love to, number one, enable more people to do easier, and number two, make it easier for those already building AI to accelerate and share the common things that everybody’s building.

Host: My next question would be very interesting for the developers and designers in our audience. How do you think the role of a web developer or designer evolves in the next two to five years with the advent of AI? Where do you think these roles are going, and how can developers and designers adapt? I want Pascal to shed light on this, because he regularly speaks with developers. Pascal, you’re on.

Pascal Birchler: Thanks. Many developers at the moment might think, oh, AI is going to replace me and take my job because it can do all the coding for me. But I think AI is more an enabler for developers, it will enhance your skills and make you a better developer. It can take some of the boring tasks away from you and help you get off the ground quickly and enhance your skills, not replace them. So that’s where I’m seeing developers heading in the next few years, or even months, because it’s such a fast-paced thing.

Felix Arntz: I would agree with that. AI as a developer can give you a big productivity boost, especially on tedious tasks. Sometimes as a developer you need to do something that you have to do but it’s super boring, and often those tasks are perfect use cases for AI, because a very structured task is what AI is really good at. So they can take a lot of work away that would otherwise be tedious. But it’s not going to take your job away, because critical thinking, architecture of a software project, AI is not going to be able to solve that, at least not anytime soon. I mean, never say never, but it’s going to take a long time until it can realistically compete with us humans in that. One thing I want to call out is that maybe in the long run, as a developer you need to focus more on, think about today there are team leads that lead teams of developers who, rather than doing all the coding themselves, oversee the coding and make sure everything is aligned. I think that’s where, with AI, that skill set becomes more important with time, because you may not direct another team of people, but you may direct a set of AI agents to do some coding tasks for you. So you don’t have to be a big people person, I’m not personally a big people person, but I think it’s important to step up your communication. Of course communication works differently between people and AI, but some of the skill set is adjacent between leading an effective engineering team of people and leading an effective team of AI agents.

Jeffrey Paul: I’ll also chime in from my agency experience. Back in 2018 we actually used ClassifAI because they had, and still do have, an alt text feature for images. That was one of those examples of something we didn’t really want to do, but alt text is very important for accessibility, it’s something you should do for your clients. For us it was like, I would much rather devote my time and my developers’ time toward solving the problems that the client has come to us with, because that’s why we’re hired. So let’s think about the design and the flow of the site, the look and feel, whether we’re going to build custom plugins or glue together existing solutions, the stuff that we get hired for. That was something we used a long time ago, before even the generative boom. And now within Automattic we’re building these products to help alleviate some of that tedious work. I don’t think it’s going to replace the need for agencies, and it might in fact make the skill set of agencies and developers even more valuable. Even now, folks could build a site through Gutenberg or Elementor or Bricks if they really wanted to, but they choose not to because they run their businesses and have their own priorities, and they hire an expert. So I can see the role of how we do these things changing in the future, and maybe the tooling and process changing, but in terms of why folks get hired and the jobs we do, I don’t really think that will change. Just as we transitioned from pure HTML to custom themes to using page builders, it’ll just be an evolution in how we interact with our clients.

James LePage: I don’t want to be left out of the squared answer, so I’ll jump in too. I shared this the other day, and I probably should have double-checked the source, but I know Phil Crumm, who heads technology at Fueled, summarized it as, it’s not AI that’s going to come and steal your job, it’s somebody that’s expertly leveraging AI that you need to be worried about. So developers, designers, project managers, if they’re not exploring how AI can be used, if they’re not actively leveraging it, like Felix mentioned, to offload some of the redundant things that aren’t interesting and leverage their creative time to be creative, let the human brain do that, that’s where you’re going to fall down. You’re going to lose out to agencies that are smartly, creatively using AI. That’s going to be the difficult bit, not that AI is purely going to come and take all of our jobs itself.

Host: Really good insights, guys. Let’s move on to the Q&A from the chat. I saw a very interesting question from Jill, a follow-up of a previous question. What I think she’s trying to ask is, are you basically building your own AI platform, is it like a new product? Pascal, can you briefly answer this, and I want all of you to chime in as well.

Pascal Birchler: I’ve tried to answer that one in the chat, and I hope we answered it a little bit in the discussion before. We are not building our own AI platform. That wouldn’t make sense, I don’t think WordPress can compete with the big corporations in trying to build its own AI platform. What we do want to do is put together these building blocks and the foundational implementations so that you can use any existing AI platform with WordPress easily, without any vendor lock-in, so that you’re not tied to a specific provider. But no custom AI platform.

James LePage: I also think it depends on what the definition of AI platform is, because with this building blocks approach there’s definitely the ability to say, I’m going to use this model and chain together these various features or abilities, and take these building blocks and automate things and create AI features. The entire point of our work is to enable that type of stuff. So I wouldn’t expect WordPress in one year, you fast-forward and look at version 7.0 or 7.5, and it’s this AI builder platform. But I would expect to see, and hope to see, plugins surfacing using these new core features and core-adjacent features to offer the functionality that the market and users want, which is how WordPress has always operated. You use what WordPress has to offer and you extend it. From that we got learning management systems and page builders, not created by core but enabled by core. I could definitely see things like that happening with the work that we do here.

Host: Awesome. I think we have time for one more question. I do see that we’ve answered more or less every question in the chat. Someone like Jill says that it’s someone who actually knows how to use AI who will steal your job, like Jeffrey said, it’s not AI that’s going to steal it, but someone who knows how to use it better. So I think this is it from the session for now. We’re right on time to conclude. I want to thank all four panelists for being here and taking time out of their busy schedule to educate us on what the AI team of WordPress is doing. So thank you so much, Pascal, Jeffrey, Felix, and James, for being here and making this event even more insightful. As for you folks, there is a leaderboard for this event, the winner of which will be announced by the end of day two, so engage in the event, ask questions, leave comments, interact with the other members, and the more you do that, the more you move up. After this we have the AI word hunt activity, and the winner will get a prize by the end of day two as well. We’ll be back in about 10 minutes with the AI word hunt activity. Until then, stick around and don’t forget to engage. Thank you so much for being here.