Site Troubleshooting with AI for WordPress

[00:00:00] Matt Cromwell: Hey, everybody. Welcome, welcome to another episode of WP Product Talk. Today, we want to talk about the magic that we've all been promised. Um, AI is supposed to solve things for us, right? Not just be like another tool that we tinker with and lose endless hours just being like, "Oh, how cool that it can respond to me."

[00:00:24] Uh, we want it to actually, like, fix websites. Can it do that? We want it to actually, like, fix customer problems. Can it do that? Uh, we keep saying that it most likely can. Um, we know that it fixes things for us individually. Can it do that at scale? Can it do that at GoDaddy? Uh, we have a guest today who's going to talk with us all about that.

[00:00:46] So stay tuned.

[00:00:50] This is WP Product

[00:00:52] Talk,

[00:00:53] the place where every week, we bring you insights on product marketing, business management and growth, customer experience, product development, and more. It's your go-to podcast for WordPress product

[00:01:06] owners by WordPress product owners. And now, enjoy the show

[00:01:17] Hey, everybody. I am Matt Cromwell, founder of Roots and Fruit.

[00:01:22] Ian Misner: And I'm Ian Misner with Kestrel.

[00:01:24] Matt Cromwell: And before we get started, we're on a road to hit as many subscribers as we possibly can. We actually, uh, have been doing this for a little while, and y'all have been great and helpful and amazing. Uh, but the truth is, uh, the easiest way for you to help WP Product Talk to continue to bring this great, excellent content for you is to hit subscribe or follow or subscribe or like or reshare or any of those social things on any of the platforms that we exist on today.

[00:01:53] It's free for you, and it helps us out a ton.

[00:01:56] Ian Misner: Yeah, actually go to the LinkedIn page and like that real quick, actually, specifically. Don't ask questions.

[00:02:02] Matt Cromwell: That would

[00:02:02] Ian Misner: be a good one. Huge thanks to... Yeah. Huge thanks to Freemius, though, for being our growth partner on this. Um, you know, Freemius helps software makers grow, monetize, and succeed.

[00:02:12] Uh, merchant of record platform, so they handle everything, right? So checkout, payment, subscriptions, licensing, updates, global tax compliance. They let you build your product instead of building the way to sell your product.

[00:02:24] Matt Cromwell: Cool, cool. All right. Well, let's jump into the subject of AI support, uh, troubleshooting.

[00:02:30] For this, we invited Drew Wilde from GoDaddy. And Drew, hey. Welcome, welcome. How are you doing?

[00:02:38] Drew Wilde: Doing very well. Thank you, Matt. Thank you, Ian, for having me.

[00:02:41] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. Yeah, appreciate it. Can you, uh, introduce yourself to everybody for us?

[00:02:45] Drew Wilde: Absolutely. My name is Drew Wilde. I am the product manager of record on managed hosting for WordPress at GoDaddy.

[00:02:52] Historically, I've also been at Bluehost doing similar things with shared hosting on the cPanel platform there. And yeah, and been involved in the community now for WordPress, uh, for some time, and I think probably coming up on 15 years, which is a long time for me. But certainly others have been been around longer, but I've been happy to be a part of the community.

[00:03:15] I'm repping, I'm repping WordCamp US 2025.

[00:03:19] Matt Cromwell: Nice.

[00:03:19] Drew Wilde: Yeah, probably the last time I saw anybody in person. Happy to be on here on the, on the podcast today.

[00:03:26] Matt Cromwell: Awesome.

[00:03:27] Ian Misner: Yeah. Awesome. And, uh, thanks again for coming on. And for anyone who's watching live right now, YouTube, Twitter, wherever, uh, leave comments, questions, feedback in the comment section here for Drew.

[00:03:36] We'll highlight them and, you know, add them as we discuss live on the show.

[00:03:41] Matt Cromwell: Awesome. Well, let's talk about it. Um, I am a support person and, um, have been chasing the dream of, uh, being able to see teams solve things with AI. Ian is a support person, um, who loves, uh, giving his team a hard time and running after them and seeing them do more.

[00:04:00] Uh, Drew, tell us a little bit about your background, um, at GoDaddy and how you got yourself involved with this whole, uh, AI and support thing.

[00:04:10] Drew Wilde: Absolutely. So when I first started out at Bluehost, I was on the phones, and when you're on the phones and you're talking to customers, and, you know, at the time it was like, you know, you got a one-click WordPress install.

[00:04:22] People are calling because they've got issues with their WordPress sites. And so that's always been something that anybody that's helped customers with their WordPress site, you kind of have your troubleshooting patterns. You kind of like, you kind of figure out what do you need in order to help triage the issues.

[00:04:38] You kind of learn what things are more common than not. As I came over to GoDaddy as a, you know, product manager on the managed hosting for WordPress product, now you have that problem at scale. You just say, okay, great, yeah, we have this many hundred thousand sites. How many are down at any given point in time?

[00:04:55] And that's like a pain point. As somebody who cares about the customer experience and cares about customers getting the value out of their product, you know, any downtime feels like it's... it's just, it just gets to me.

[00:05:09] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:05:10] Drew Wilde: And I know Ian feels the same way. We shared we had some overlap time at GoDaddy and, you know, those, you know, just accepting any kind of fault in, in, in performances, it just, ugh, it's something that we just want to- Yeah

[00:05:24] kind of get rid of as, as much as possible.

[00:05:26] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:05:27] Drew Wilde: And we felt like AI was certainly the way to try to get to it more at scale.

[00:05:32] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:05:33] Ian Misner: Yeah. It's the, the managed part, right? It's the- Yes ... you know, really- Managed part ... the, the commitment of what that is intended to mean and what I think that your team at GoDaddy, uh, has really been striving to make sure that that-

[00:05:45] Drew Wilde: Exactly.

[00:05:45] Ian Misner: Exactly ... means what people assume it means.

[00:05:47] Drew Wilde: Upping the game. Right? Upping the standard.

[00:05:49] Matt Cromwell: Nice. Yeah, I mean, I have always been excited about AI as a, almost like a team member on the support team, um, with the, the hope and the dream that, like, we won't have to be having people staffing the inbox through the wee hours of midnight to 6:00 AM, uh, all the time, uh, because AI can help on those fronts.

[00:06:13] Um, was, was that a little bit of the motivation, too?

[00:06:15] Drew Wilde: Certainly. Certainly. And, you know, c- and, and what, w- the reality is, and as we work with our support partners, and, like, a lot of this comes through kind of our tier two or some of our kind of, like, upper level support partners that are really, like, just really great WordPress minds, WordPress troubleshooting minds, it's not like we're trying to eliminate the, the job function at all.

[00:06:38] It's... But it- there's so many menial tasks, so many tiny things that take up time-

[00:06:44] Matt Cromwell: Yeah ...

[00:06:44] Drew Wilde: in that support process that we wanted to kinda get to. And it's like we did some research, you know, as we're kinda building the business case for AI Site Troubleshooter for WordPress, and, and kinda we were, you know, looking at it, and it's like you're kinda l- if you get a WordPress site in the door and you don't know why it's down and you don't have any information, that's about a 45-minute at a minimum- Yeah

[00:07:06] time commitment to get to a point where you can say, "Oh, now I know I can get that site back up and live." And so that 45 minutes is either a really long and painful phone call perhaps, um, or it's, you know, if, if nobody notices even, that could be, you know, that, that downtime could stretch into, you know, a lot longer for a customer.

[00:07:25] Matt Cromwell: Yeah, absolutely. Um, the, I think there is sensitivity, though, around the concept for a lot of customers, especially those that are, you know, brick-and-mortar business owners who aren't living their day-to-day in Claude. Um, and AI more and more just sounds like this, like, Big Brother situation. Um-

[00:07:48] Drew Wilde: Yeah. Kind of the Big Bad Wolf sometimes.

[00:07:50] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. That's right. I, I'd love to hear a little bit about, like, what did you all do to navigate expectations or- Yeah ... anxieties or fears that your customer base might have had around saying, "Hey, we're gonna have AI check out your sites all the time"? Like- ... how, how did that go?

[00:08:09] Drew Wilde: Yeah, and I, I'll, I'll kinda dig into a little bit of that, that kinda life cycle there because, yeah, we originally were at, w- this was our, really our first agent build at GoDaddy.

[00:08:21] This was years ago that we started, you know, building this, and we had just kinda come out of generative content and everybody was getting- great blog posts written with AI. And then there was kind of this- Yeah ... point where it was like, well, okay, we're kinda reaching the end of this rope, but then this, you know, the agent mentality came on.

[00:08:39] Okay, yeah, we can actually have AI do things on behalf of a customer. And so we jumped into it technology first, really excited about what this technology could do. And, you know, kinda had like a really kinda cool opportunity, you know, being at GoDaddy, still being the first ones to kinda jump into this as an agent for the WordPress team.

[00:08:59] So we're like, okay, great. This is really cool. Got a lot of WordPress sites. Big opportunity size for us here. WordPress sites can break in, I don't know how many ways, you know? We're still, we still learn about the new ways that, uh, Word- Like, can break- An

[00:09:12] Matt Cromwell: infinite number of ways, true.

[00:09:16] Drew Wilde: Exactly. And so we're like, well, maybe we can start to may- uh, create an agent that can kinda decompose that a little bit.

[00:09:22] Um-

[00:09:22] Ian Misner: It's an interesting opportunity for GoDaddy in particular, is like the weird thing, like the uncommon things happen at scale, right? Like, you guys have so many sites that even the things that a lot of the audience here might dismiss as, like, normal, not that big deal, you know, you guys see it hundreds of times versus- Exactly

[00:09:40] one for most people, so.

[00:09:42] Drew Wilde: Yeah, one in a- I mean- Yeah, like in your, yeah, in a lifetime. But yeah, we're seeing a lot of things across our, all of our WordPress sites. Big, big impact zone for us. So we, we wanted to kinda get into that. And as we were kinda like, okay, yeah, we're kinda like demoing this. We're testing this.

[00:09:58] Okay, now I'm starting to reach out to pros. I'm starting to reach out to people about, you know, what, what this is offering. You know, kind- I wanted to understand how pros are currently, you know, what is all the workflows of a pro in order to troubleshoot a site? Okay, how can we train, you know, some, some agent skills in order to do the same thing?

[00:10:17] So we're kinda digging into that. And then obviously that kinda comes up about, like, well, you know, what is, what's the market opportunity for this?

[00:10:24] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:10:25] Drew Wilde: You know, like, how are we gonna like, I'm not, you know, it's like, okay, great. Yeah, it's like we AI troubleshooting, right, right on your site, or you know, we say, "Hey, yeah, like, GoDaddy's always watching."

[00:10:34] Yeah. You're like, wait a second. That's not-

[00:10:36] Ian Misner: Yeah ...

[00:10:37] Drew Wilde: that's not perhaps the thing that's gonna resonate.

[00:10:40] Ian Misner: I mean, that does sound a little off, but I mean, sometimes the GoDaddy customer may not always be the typical WordPress customer also, right? Yeah. Like, you get a lot of like main street businesses and like-

[00:10:49] Drew Wilde: We get a ton of just SMBs.

[00:10:51] Yeah ...

[00:10:51] Ian Misner: side of the community in that where, I mean, the value of just, like, it like, I mean, tell me if I'm wrong, but like a lot of those customers, they don't necessarily care that it's WordPress. They just want their thing to just keep working and do- Yeah ... you know, so- Right ... you know, if, if you make it easier to keep that happening, uh, again it's, there's like an efficiency thing here, but also from like a managed hosting product- Like, your uptime's a measure that you're paying attention to, right?

[00:11:17] And-

[00:11:17] Drew Wilde: And that's really kind of the, the crux of it. It was like, well, if we're providing this value of something's broken on my site, I'm not, not getting the site as I normally would expect, there's some kind of downtime event occurring. And so to frame it as a, essentially an insurance policy for your site.

[00:11:38] "Hey," like, "this AI site troubleshooter or this feature," we called it Site Uptime Premium, you know, in certain contexts. Which it means that not only are we watching your site uptime, but then when we detect an event, like a downtime event, we can say, "Hey, we have the steps for you to fix it, or we have a fix ready for you.

[00:11:57] You just gotta click a button, we'll fix it. And maybe even if you want to and you trust us enough, because we've done it for you a couple times by now maybe, we'll fix it and we'll just send you the email, 'Hey, we detected a downtime event.'" And then you get that second email just minutes later, everything's back up and running.

[00:12:13] Ian Misner: And so you have this sort of like default, like it's a warning system, but there is an opt-in then for like just the service?

[00:12:19] Drew Wilde: Absolutely. Yeah, so and, and that's, that's the case. And so we work with a lot of obviously Main Street businesses and a lot of pros, like a lot of like web pros managing sites for their clients.

[00:12:31] And one of the great use cases we feel like was for this is like, I'm a pro. I wrote this whole like this whole story for the business case, which was like, I'm a business... I'm a, I'm a web pro, I'm a, I'm a WordPress pro and I'm, and I'm, I'm, I'm on a customer call trying to get a new site built. It's a big, big, you know, monetization opportunity for me and my agency.

[00:12:53] I get a text message from a different client that the site's down.

[00:12:57] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm.

[00:12:58] Drew Wilde: What do I do?

[00:13:00] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm.

[00:13:00] Drew Wilde: Do I leave the opportunity to grow the business in order to fix the current site? What can I do? And so it's like this pain point of a pro that I kind of tried to illustrate talking with other people. I was like, "This, this resonates with, with folks."

[00:13:14] And so then the, the fix is, you know, with, with Site Uptime Premium or the AI site troubleshooter, I'm on the phone call getting new business. Everything's going great. I get a text message, not from my client that the site's down, but from GoDaddy saying, "We detected a downtime event and we fixed it." And it's like, okay, great.

[00:13:33] I read that message. I put it away. Maybe I just got on my watch. Okay, great, yeah. I detected the downtime event. I fixed it. Maybe I'll go look at the remediation steps that it took, and I figure out why it was like that in the future, but I can stay locked in on my new business opportunity as a web pro in order to keep my business growing, knowing that my current customers are being taken care of by monitors and agents that know what to do in certain cases with appropriate guardrails to drive the customer outcomes that they want, which are increased site uptime.

[00:14:05] Matt Cromwell: There's a

[00:14:05] Ian Misner: couple

[00:14:05] Matt Cromwell: things there I really love that I wanna highlight super quick. The way that you framed that, um, is something I think a lot of our folks really need to pick up on more and more. I've been talking about a lot lately. You framed that as what is the customer job to be done right then. Um, and so many times we think of our products as tools or features, um, and we're like, "Don't you want this feature?

[00:14:30] Don't you want this thing that we do?" Yeah. Um, yeah. Yeah. And, um, instead of just, like, putting ourselves in the customer's shoe and being like, what in the world are they actually just trying to accomplish, you know? It doesn't have anything to do with your product or your plugin. You know, they're on a call with another client.

[00:14:47] They're not even thinking about you. But then all of a sudden, you know, the website becomes a problem in one way or another. Um, I love that, um, thinking about it in the, in that way in particular. The other one I love is a thing that I've talked a, with a lot of folks about is folks who are trying to adopt AI as, as a benefit in one way or another.

[00:15:08] Uh, they keep saying, like, "Well, what can AI do? How do I think about it?" You're, you're thinking specifically about a workflow that your team has been, um, doing all the time. Like, they constantly have been dealing with site uptime things and were previously doing them in very manual ways. Um, you just thought about, like, don't we think that AI can help us do that a lot faster and a lot better and actually make the load of the team, um, actually easier and lighter, um, actually get to resolution a lot quicker, potentially, um, ideally, hopefully.

[00:15:48] Ian Misner: Um- Well, that, that kinda does lead me to a bit of a question there, though, which is, like, I mean, a lot of the, you know, again, at the scale of GoDaddy, you have a top five, like, support drivers list, and you always knew what those were, and, you know, you could just use code to solve them back before, right?

[00:16:02] Now, like, what's the AI doing- Like at the scale of your company, like for you as a product manager, what's the AI doing that you couldn't have done before? Like, do you have any examples of like specific types of things-

[00:16:16] Drew Wilde: Yes ...

[00:16:16] Ian Misner: that it fixes?

[00:16:17] Drew Wilde: And I, I think that we, you know, there where this idea of like a, the, you know, like a script could go out there and fix all the sites that have this plugin that broke in this way, or we could, yeah, like, and, and those kinds of things like, you know, we certainly, you know, can do, but now we kind of have one tool that we can kind of set along things and we can kind of train it to do additional things.

[00:16:39] Like it's not one thing forever, but the, the skills that we've built into the AI site troubleshooter, kind of we start with like, we start with the logs, we start with the data on the site. Okay, great. We're your host, we're your managed host. You trust us enough to do that. We understand that we get a lot of data in on every kind of site interaction.

[00:17:01] We start with that. We get all of the logs in, and we feed that to the agent in order to create a remediation plan. And the remediation plan then is able to cycle through a few different kind of common use cases that we understand could be a problem with the site. And it kind of like has its kind of recursive logic in order to create a remediation plan that it has a high confidence in would restore site uptime.

[00:17:25] And after the site You know, has the remediation plan. The option to kind of run an auto fix or not kind of i- is available. And kinda like to kinda answer the question about like, well, why don't we just kinda like we could fix it with code, we could do, you know, X, Y, or Z there. You know, the idea that we don't know why it might break in the future kind of helps us to say, "Hey, yeah, this is a sustainable platform for us to kind of build off of in the future."

[00:17:52] And it can actually help maybe inform us, not reactively but proactively, hey, we're actually seeing more sites broken in this way, or we're seeing these errors and our remediation plans are not fixing it in the way that we think it should. And then we can kinda go in there and invest in, okay, what is a new agent skill?

[00:18:09] Or maybe we gotta adjust a guardrail here or there, or add additional functionality for the agent in order to kinda fix it. And so the way that we then apply the, you know, the fixes to the site is, you know, we use, again, we're your hosting we're your hosting provider, so we have SSH access and WP CLI access to the site, and we can run the appropriate remediation steps necessary in order to, you know, to fix it.

[00:18:34] You know, I've got a demo queued up that we can kinda take a look at where I-

[00:18:37] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:18:38] Drew Wilde: Yeah.

[00:18:38] Ian Misner: I, I definitely would love to see a demo. I mean, I got like five or six follow-up questions. Okay. I'm gonna lead with Marcus's here though actually, because- Marcus ... it's very in line with where I'm thinking too. Uh, so a site being back up may not mean that the store checkout's working again, I guess as an example, right?

[00:18:54] Yeah. How do you confirm the agent actually fixed all the things instead of just doing the

[00:18:58] Drew Wilde: same thing? And, and to be quite honest, it doesn't have all of that power yet. We don't give it access to fix everything on the site. We're actually looking at a few different tools. And so this particular site uptime, the AI site troubleshooter that we have, is primarily focused on restoring site uptime.

[00:19:14] So we focus on downtime events and restoring site uptime. Again, Marcus, to your point, excellent point. Yeah, like that's not gonna fix your, you know, checkout or maybe I'm still getting like issues on, you know, visual aspects of the site. We might have to lean in on that. We don't have the agent fully built out to, to do all that.

[00:19:33] But totally agree that that's like another- Yeah ... use case for us to dig into.

[00:19:37] Matt Cromwell: But ideally, you know, the fact that the agent is doing this work probably when the support team is occupied somewhere else, you know? Um, and then i- is able to bring up and say like, "Oh, this, this, uh, uh, mo- this, uh, uptime issue happened.

[00:19:53] I responded. The customer said, 'Bring it back up for me.' I did it. Um, here's the results." The support team maybe by that time might be able to, like, just at least quickly audit what's going on. Um, and it expedites their, uh, their time essentially, um, ideally, and they'd be able to actually check the checkout in a, in a more human manual way, which might be more effective- Yeah

[00:20:16] actually.

[00:20:17] Ian Misner: And I mean, it's, it's sort of like a fancy logging layer of the remediation steps, right? And I think like... A- actually, before diving into too many more questions, I would love to see that demo actually. Yeah. I wanna demo. I think that might help contextualize- Sure ... some of this a little bit.

[00:20:30] Drew Wilde: I'm gonna show the manual remediation aspect because to be quite honest, when it's like I- we've struggled demoing this in the past in a couple different ways 'cause it's like we're gonna create downtime on a site.

[00:20:44] Create downtime. It's now fixed. Did you see it?

[00:20:48] Ian Misner: Yeah. I mean, trying to do a demo of a memberships plugin, trust me, it's, it hides stuff instead of- Yeah ... displaying anything, right? So yeah.

[00:20:57] Matt Cromwell: Look, you can't see it. That's exactly what you're supposed to not see, right?

[00:21:01] Drew Wilde: I think you're looking at it. You're gonna see a little bit of like the GoDaddy backend.

[00:21:04] Like, obviously, that's not gonna be like the customer experience, but I'm gonna highlight a little bit about what it does and kinda show you, you know, okay, yeah, this part can be automated. Okay. I got to get to my tab here. Are we seeing my screen?

[00:21:20] Matt Cromwell: Bringing it up right now. Here we go. Maybe zoom in a lot.

[00:21:26] Drew Wilde: Okay.

[00:21:27] Matt Cromwell: If you can.

[00:21:28] Drew Wilde: Uh-huh. Okay, great. You've seen my WP admin?

[00:21:33] Matt Cromwell: Yep.

[00:21:34] Drew Wilde: Okay. This is my WP admin for my Drew's Horse Petting website that I made with Arrow for WordPress, another word- or Arrow, uh, agent, uh, AI product that we have. One plugin that I wrote for this site is a fatal error test plugin.

[00:21:51] Matt Cromwell: I've done that.

[00:21:52] And we'll- I've done that before.

[00:21:53] Drew Wilde: Yeah, exactly. So I'm going to activate my fatal error test plugin, and okay. Wow, okay, now I've got some kinda downtime event. Now, n- this is the backend now. Like, this is, like, as if I'm a, a GoDaddy agent, right? I'm gonna share it to a different tab here, and you're gonna see that this is kind of like what we call your managed WordPress, like, oh, your site is live.

[00:22:16] Let me, like, refresh this. It's gonna start to detect that maybe not everything's not okay with my site. This might take a second or two, but the idea is, like, okay, a customer calls in, they've got some kind of downtime, they've got their fatal error, and then they've probably got some now idea that they should go in and talk to their site.

[00:22:37] Okay, great. AI Site Trouble says, "Hey, this site appears to be down." Okay, great. The, the, our agent has already, at this point in time, created a troubleshooting plan or the re- site rem- you know, remediation plan. So okay, great. Let's go ahead and click into it. Okay, yep, okay. Now it's gonna go through the evidence.

[00:22:55] It's going through the logs, what happened on the site, what's going on here.

[00:22:59] Matt Cromwell: I hope it says something like, "Don't activate a plugin that says fatal error generator." Yeah. Like, "You

[00:23:05] Drew Wilde: dummy." Yeah, yeah.

[00:23:06] Matt Cromwell: That's what I would like it to say.

[00:23:08] Drew Wilde: Yeah, and you'll see it's like- Yeah ... once it kind of goes through and it learns why the site is broken, it'll be like, "We think it's this fatal site error plugin."

[00:23:17] Ian Misner: I mean, I would love to see how you guys do frame up problem plugins here. I mean, both- Yeah ... on an individual. I mean, as a team that sells plugins, I would love to know what one of the biggest hosts in the world are showing people about problems, you know?

[00:23:31] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:23:31] Drew Wilde: Yeah, so it's like we identify a problem with the plugin, and then, okay, great.

[00:23:35] So it says, "Hey, here's Arrow's plan fix for your site. We got high confidence in this particular plan." Yeah. "Here's the remediation plan caused by the fatal error plugin, and it ha- it's calling an undefined function." So it's like, that's what I wrote the plugin to do. It, it, it deletes it. So it's not even available on the WordPress.org, so it's like trying to, like, reason with this.

[00:23:57] So you can't update it, 'cause a lot of times we'll just say, "Hey, what if we update it, will that fix it?" That's part of a remediation plan.

[00:24:02] Matt Cromwell: Mm-hmm.

[00:24:03] Drew Wilde: And then it's like, okay, great. Cannot be reinstalled. Okay, the only thing that we really have is if you deactivate this plugin. And so- Yeah ... the remediation plan, fairly simple at this point.

[00:24:12] Great. Okay, great, and then it's like, do you want us to do it? Now, this then goes out and, and does the remediation plan. I will say that the guardrails are on the remediation plan. There's not like... We take a backup of the site, we run our remediation plan, we confirm 200 response code or some kind of, like, you know, okay great, are we getting the, the site response back that we did before?

[00:24:35] If we don't get that, we revert back to the known broken. We don't leave new broken in place, so we wanna make sure that we're kinda doing our, our part here. So I'll go ahead and auto-fix at this point, and then- We'll kind of run that. Great. It's queuing it up, running the remediation plan. And again, this is the part that could be automated.

[00:24:57] You know, we have, in the customer experience for the managed hosting for WordPress packages that, you know, have this particular premium site uptime, auto site reme- the, the s- site troubleshooter, you can either say, "Yes, I just wanna see the remediation plans," or you can say, "Yeah," and you can auto-fix it. If you wanna click the button every time, we'll let you click the c- the button every time, but certainly something that, you know, that we wanna make sure people have access to.

[00:25:23] So auto-fix in progress, deactivating my plugin

[00:25:30] Matt Cromwell: And most likely it's doing that through WP-CLI?

[00:25:34] Drew Wilde: Yeah, so obviously when we were, like, working on this site or on this product, it's like, well, okay, great. Like, we wanna fix WordPress sites, but the WordPress site is broken when we wanna fix it. And so yeah, we use SSH and the WP-CLI kinda in order to insert the right fixes- Yeah

[00:25:54] at any given point in time. So that's why it's, like, really great, "Hey, autofix completed successfully. Your issues have been resolved." Well, I say prove it Hey, the site is back. And that's the AI site troubleshooter.

[00:26:09] Matt Cromwell: We're not, we're, we're still seeing the... We're not seeing your WordPress site yet. There it is.

[00:26:13] Drew Wilde: And it's back. Nice. The, the error is gone. I refreshed.

[00:26:17] Matt Cromwell: Nice.

[00:26:19] Drew Wilde: That's the quick demo.

[00:26:21] Matt Cromwell: I like it. We got some, uh, props here. "Drew is a fantastic developer, very exclusive plugin." Thanks. I think that's one of those, like- Yeah ... you know, it does what it says on the tin, um- Yeah ... kind of reviews, right? Uh, "It creates a fatal error just as intended."

[00:26:35] Drew Wilde: Probably, probably not gonna get it through the plugin review, you know what I

[00:26:38] Matt Cromwell: mean? Like- Hey, I don't know why not. Uh, like it says, it does exactly what it's supposed to do.

[00:26:43] Ian Misner: I did a quick search, and I don't see any on there actually, so.

[00:26:46] Drew Wilde: Oh, maybe I could... Maybe, yeah, maybe I'll- ... talk to a few friends. Get it through.

[00:26:52] Matt Cromwell: No, that's great. And, like, even the way that the AI, uh, presented the case, um, I love that, all those caveats. It's like, you know, we'd love you to be able to just do an update to the plugin, but that's not possible. Exactly. All that kind of thing. So, um-

[00:27:07] Ian Misner: Yeah. How, how on the rails is that? Like, are, how much are you trusting the LLM, and how much...

[00:27:13] Like, do we have just, like, a checklist running behind the scenes, or is it sending it off to, like, Claude, ChatGPT, something to, you know, be creative about a solution?

[00:27:23] Drew Wilde: There's some creativity in it. There's, it's not, it's not like a you can do plugin deactivations, and this, and this, and this, and that. It's, like, but you could do a combo of those things, and that's where a little bit of the agent kind of logic comes in, 'cause yes, we can't, we don't give it, like, root access.

[00:27:40] It's like, but, and there's some things that it can't fix. Like, um, it can't fix your DNS for you. We're not gonna make any kind of changes on that for your site. This is WordPress code specific.

[00:27:51] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:27:51] Drew Wilde: And so it obviously has some power, like, okay, yeah, there's some of those kind of, like, PHP. Like, we'll, we'll let it change your PHP version.

[00:28:00] But yeah, like, it's not gonna be able to change any kind of records on, on your site.

[00:28:05] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:28:05] Drew Wilde: Well, and, and the guardrails are there to certainly, you know, help it, but we, we let, we let it create a remediation plan that does have some elements of creativity or, like, combo-ing some of these things in order to restore site functionality.

[00:28:19] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Interesting. A couple more comments here. Um, not that one, sorry. Um, Nick McLaughlin is in the comments. Uh, he says, "Plugin Check might be able to flag some issues there." That's an interesting one. I honestly have, the way that that plugin has been evolving recently, and the more and more significant and important it's become to WordPress.org as a whole- Mm-hmm

[00:28:40] I've been curious whether or not hosts might leverage that. Um, it also has really good CLI support as well. Um, but, uh, do you have any, has that been discussed internally at all?

[00:28:51] Drew Wilde: Yeah, 'cause plugins tend to be kind of what we- Plugins and PHP issues end up being kind of like a majority of what we see that, that we can remediate- Yeah

[00:29:00] automatically fairly quickly for customers. So I'm, I will absolutely take that back to our, our AI site troubleshooter team.

[00:29:07] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:29:08] Drew Wilde: Help.

[00:29:08] Ian Misner: Yeah.

[00:29:09] Drew Wilde: Help drive- Help drive that, that feature functionality a little bit.

[00:29:12] Ian Misner: I mean, it doesn't surprise me plugins are one of the primary issues. That was one of my follow-up questions I mentioned earlier, right?

[00:29:17] Like, anyone can add any code to any site. You got Main Street businesses, they have a problem, they Google it, they find whatever plugin, they install it. You know, you've got, what, billions across your managed platform of just random code running everywhere.

[00:29:32] Drew Wilde: That's a lot.

[00:29:33] Ian Misner: So, I mean, it doesn't surprise me at all.

[00:29:35] Are you guys, um, tracking in any way, like, you know, what plugins are-

[00:29:40] Drew Wilde: Yeah ...

[00:29:40] Ian Misner: the mo- Yeah, like you have sort of like the data on-

[00:29:42] Drew Wilde: We, we, yes, and that's, and that's what's really... I mean, I find it to be really cool and fascinating at that, at this scale, we can learn from the data in that way. And like, and, and LLMs actually make that data pretty accessible in a, in a lot of ways.

[00:29:56] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:29:57] Drew Wilde: And so to say- Yeah ... "Hey, we can learn. We're seeing issues from this kind of plugin." Now, one of the pushbacks that we've gotten from this product, you know, and this is from a lot of like internal stakeholders, "Hey, why are we investing in this? Why don't we just not allow customers to break their sites?"

[00:30:14] And I say, "That's a great idea. That's a great idea." And it's like we wanna create an environment where customers can't break their site. Like obviously- Yeah ... we wanna do as much as possible there But-

[00:30:23] Ian Misner: Yeah ...

[00:30:23] Drew Wilde: as a WordPress host, we don't want to just block plugins in order to fix our problems. Yeah. Because then we're limiting the extensibility and the reason why a lot of people come to WordPress in the first place, which is either, one, they- there's a lot of plugins and they're free and they're great, or maybe there's some kind of altruistic thing.

[00:30:42] They're like, "Hey, I actually want it to be open source, and this is-" Right ... "like the space that I feel like I can be online in a, in the democratic way." And so, you know, for us to say yeah, and like if you're on managed hosting for GoDaddy, like your plugin, it'll get blocked and it'll never get off that list.

[00:30:57] Like no, we don't want that. We, we work with plugin developers in order to make sure it's like if we ever see any issues, great, yeah, let's, let's, let's jam on 'em, let's fix 'em.

[00:31:06] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:31:07] Drew Wilde: In order to kinda like get out of that. Very few times do we have to kind of resort to our, our, our block list in order to resolve those kinds of things.

[00:31:15] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Another good, uh, question from Marcus in the comments here, how granular are the auto fix options? Like, can I say go ahead and update plugins automatically, but ask me to deactivate or delete anything? Uh, for example, like instead of just a button, can you reply to the AI email and say, "Go ahead, but do X, Y, and Z," or something like that?

[00:31:38] Drew Wilde: That's a future roadmap item for us. 'Cause yes, that, that's absolutely something like that where like, okay, yeah, the granularity on some of those things. Make a lot of sense, especially for that, that pro use case.

[00:31:50] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:31:50] Drew Wilde: Right now it's just kind of like all or nothing on the auto fixes.

[00:31:54] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:31:55] Drew Wilde: Certainly the direction that we would like to go to.

[00:31:57] Matt Cromwell: Um- Feels like it would have to be something like you reply to the email and then the AI replies back to the same email saying, "Okay, well here's the revised plan. Do you want that?" Yeah, exactly. But yeah. That, I mean, that- Mm ... starts to be very, very agentic at that stage. Um, uh, which is- I

[00:32:14] Drew Wilde: don't... It's like I want it in my head, it's always been this idea of like- This is your, kinda like your first line of defense as a web pro to- Right

[00:32:24] issues that are coming up for your, your customers' sites. And I don't want it to just be, like, site downtime in the future. But yeah, like, hey, like, my... I'm working with a customer and the, the spinner loads on their bookings page, and it's like it doesn't go away. Like, okay, great, like, I would love for this agent to be able to say, "Hey, like, give us an opinion on why that is."

[00:32:44] You know, it's like, oh, probably these caching related issues. It could provide some really quality opinions on that. I just have always wanted it to kinda be that first line of defense. And instead of email even, just be like it pops open on your phone as like, hey, a conversation that you're, that you're texting or chatting with about, okay, yeah, I got...

[00:33:02] We detected an issue. Okay, great. What's your i- what's your plan or what's your idea of that? Hey, can you go ahead and do that? Okay, great. Next time that comes up, just do that automatically.

[00:33:11] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:33:11] Ian Misner: Mm-hmm. You already got my phone number somewhere in the account center, right? Kinda like- Right ... you know? Right.

[00:33:17] Yeah. I mean, I, I do think this is very interesting, and I actually really liked what you said about, you know, not resorting to the block list, right? Because, I mean, the framing that I often use to pitch WordPress to people, especially in the e-commerce thing, is like, you know, it's, it's not about what you can do today, it's about the fact that when you imagine the next thing, the answer is you can definitely do it.

[00:33:37] Mm-hmm. You don't have to have that question. Um, so I, I think that's an interesting framing. Now, as far as your, you know, you, you brought up, like, the web pros a few times though, right? So are you building this primarily with, like, that pro client use case in mind?

[00:33:52] Drew Wilde: Th- certainly, m- you know, at the time that we started building it, that was, like, our- our modus operandi to, like, try to get features to this audience.

[00:34:04] And so we really saw, you know, and I wrote the use case in that, in that voice of the, you know, the Web Pro and, you know, we wanted to demo it to, you know, different GoDaddy stakeholders in that way. You know, as, as time has kinda gone on and has, we've kinda, like, you know, and as agentic builds have kinda, like, changed and, you know, kinda emerging trends with how people are kinda coming to managed hosting for WordPress or looking for different solutions to solve the same problem, m- you know, my, my job to be done has certainly kind of narrowed back in on, well, how is this gonna help somebody that just wants their site to work all of the time and they don't know how to, you know, troubleshoot a WordPress site?

[00:34:46] How can I make troubleshooting a WordPress site available to them without really kinda getting any kind of technical knowledge in, you know, into their, into their workflow? So what, where it started with the Web Pro primarily at the beginning, I've certainly shifted focus back onto that Main Street business.

[00:35:06] Ian Misner: Yeah. As you guys also recently launched, like, Arrow for WordPress, right? So, like, you know, the site builder, you know, you're, you're starting on the... You, you buy a WordPress site, you're in an AI builder, you end up with a website. Feels like a user that starts there, like, they probably wouldn't, you know, be concerned with you having this, like, AI- Exactly.

[00:35:26] Yeah ... agent paying attention, right?

[00:35:27] Drew Wilde: Yeah.

[00:35:28] Ian Misner: So, yeah.

[00:35:29] Drew Wilde: And, and, and more and more we're seeing more people kinda come in and wanna u- like they're, I guess that there's, there's certainly still a, a level of- I'm not gonna say distrust, but just like that, like, I don't know if this is gonna do what I want it to, but there are, there are...

[00:35:45] we're getting more and more people to be interested in trying AI tools in related to building their site.

[00:35:51] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. I really feel like the, the big value here, like if I'm pitching to my customer base, you know, I'm GoDaddy, I've got tens of thousands of managed WordPress customers, but, like, let's say I've got 1,000 customers, uh, on hosting, um, and, and they're all putting in tickets every day more or less.

[00:36:14] If I can come to them and say, "Hey, if you opt into this service, you'll get uptime responses, um, uptime restoration responses in seconds basically or, or a minute, uh, compared to 30 minutes," you know? Mm-hmm. Um, you know, a, a support team is trying to act as fast as it can possibly act, but especially in like, you know, the managed WordPress space, not the VPN space or VPS space, you know what I mean?

[00:36:43] Not like the, the top-tier space. The- these folks are paying 30, 40 bucks a month, not hundreds a month, you know? Um, you're gonna respond in like 10 minutes, 15, 30 minutes, an hour, um, to an uptime issue compared to the AI that can respond in minutes, you know? Um, to me it's, it's, it's about, like, if you really want this type of service, then you're gonna need the bots, honestly, um, to get that, that, that, that quickness.

[00:37:12] I don't know. Is that kinda the way you all think about it as well, or how you pitch it to them?

[00:37:17] Drew Wilde: Certainly. I mean, that's, that's, that's part of the, the, the pitch for sure is like, "Hey, yeah, like we can get to it before you notice it." For us, we don't want clients to notice downtime, like our, our customers to notice downtime and have to call support and say, "Hey, what's going on with my site?"

[00:37:33] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:37:33] Drew Wilde: That like, now I'm, that problem has now just become a bigger problem, and it's like, you know, now it kind of enters our cost center.

[00:37:40] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:37:40] Drew Wilde: And as a pro, okay great, I don't want my clients letting me know that they have downtime. I would like to be the one to notice the downtime-

[00:37:47] Matt Cromwell: Yeah ...

[00:37:47] Drew Wilde: and then say, "Oh," ideally, like maybe I don't even have to like contact them if it was a fix, or just you're driving that, you know, that opportunity to say, "Hey," like, "Oh yeah, actually something broke on your site, but we fixed it."

[00:37:56] And that's, that's the notification, not-

[00:37:59] Matt Cromwell: Yeah ...

[00:37:59] Drew Wilde: hey- What

[00:38:00] Matt Cromwell: happens- ...

[00:38:00] Drew Wilde: client calling because the site was down.

[00:38:02] Matt Cromwell: What happens when the uptime issue is actually specifically hosting-related? What happens under those circumstances?

[00:38:10] Drew Wilde: Yeah. When those are, that's when it's like our system saying, "Hey," like, "Great," like the AI site troubleshooter's like letting us know like, "Well, actually we have some kinda cell issue."

[00:38:18] Like that's not, there's nothing on the, the WordPress site that's down, but we have downtime, and that's when we're having our SRE team lean in immediately. Like that's like those are the, you know, and GoDaddy has a really strong site reliability- Mm-hmm ... muscle that fixes those issues very timely. Yeah.

[00:38:35] But yeah, obviously it's like if we see that at scale, like we're, we're monitoring site uptime across our whole, you know- Yeah ... farm of sites- When, when those hosting things specific come up, yeah, we, we-

[00:38:47] Matt Cromwell: But what does that AI agent do under those circumstances? Is it like, is it like triggered to be like, "Well, don't respond under those circumstances," 'cause we have a different system that does all of that?

[00:38:59] Drew Wilde: We, the, the site uptime will still notify saying, "Hey, like we're, we're working on fixing your site." It's not gonna send the, "Hey, we fixed your site for you-

[00:39:07] Matt Cromwell: Yeah ...

[00:39:07] Drew Wilde: notification that, you know, the, in the ideal use case we get to send. But we certainly let the customer know, "Hey, we're, we're working on the issue.

[00:39:15] We've identified it, and, you know, we'll let you know when it is fixed." And we obviously, you know, fix those in a, in a time of manner. We don't see a lot of those, you know, those, those kind of- Yeah ... bigger

[00:39:24] Ian Misner: hosting- Yeah ... issues. And I don't know why I'm like pitching for GoDaddy at this point, but I will say in my time when I was there, like the managed hosting team, like their internal commitment uptime were much, much stricter than what's actually publicized.

[00:39:39] Yes. And like it's taken pretty seriously also. Yes. Like-

[00:39:43] Drew Wilde: Yes. We have yeah, and, and I, I will second obviously I, I'm, I'm I'm an inside ... yes, like that is, I've been very impressed with the level of care that our platform and our site reliability team take on our, on our platform, which is why this was such like a companion opportunity 'cause they can't fix those WordPress issues, you know, in the way that they want.

[00:40:05] Right. They're like, "Hey, we have this downtime on this," you know, like, ugh, it drives them nuts.

[00:40:08] Ian Misner: Well, that, that's why a plugin block list already exists basically. Sure. Right? It's because that is like the, that's the dumb tool that this replaces basically. Mm-hmm. Right? Mm-hmm. It's like a, a way to have a little bit of nuance automated into the machine, be part of the product.

[00:40:22] And it sounds a lot like you're really kind of blending, you know, like the support part of the managed stack with the product piece and, you know, extending further to what people used to have to handle, which is exactly what AI is supposed to be doing, right? Mm-hmm. Like it's actually... I'm, I'm vaguely excited by what you're doing here, mostly because it is, I mean, even in my own team, much smaller obviously, you know, we got a, a much, much, much smaller support volume, but like we have AI run through literally every conversation.

[00:40:53] We have notes before we get to them. You know, like we-

[00:40:56] Drew Wilde: Exactly ...

[00:40:57] Ian Misner: usually it diagnosed the problem before a person even looked at it. And you know, I have this thing where it's like I'm not comfortable having it respond as a person for whatever reason, but I mean, it could, and it would be just, just fine. I don't even know, really.

[00:41:15] Vaguely.

[00:41:19] I mean, I, it's, it's sorta like, you know, the more the, the more you run through it, it's a- the I can imagine how much more you could do with it even. Oh, yeah. And I guess maybe that's a question of, like, how easy is it? Is it just the product team that updates it? Like, how do you get knowledge into this? And, like, is your support team able to respond quickly to, like- Yeah

[00:41:38] new issues or, or whatever with it, you know?

[00:41:41] Drew Wilde: I think we have some room to improve on the feedback loops, for sure. You know, and it kinda sits, you know, still in what it does for a time before we kinda lean back in and kinda make, make some more improvements to it.

[00:41:52] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:41:53] Drew Wilde: If we had some recursive agent build that, like, fed itself, I think that you'd be talking about, you know, something pretty special.

[00:42:00] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:42:01] Drew Wilde: You often encounter technical difficulties when you're-

[00:42:05] Matt Cromwell: Yeah ...

[00:42:06] Drew Wilde: trying to build that kind of sophistication.

[00:42:07] Matt Cromwell: That's what I wanted to get into a little bit before we get into our best advice section is, is, like, we all, like I said at the beginning, we all have this hope and this dream that AI is going to solve problems for us.

[00:42:19] Um, and people are solving a lot of things in general, but can you go a little bit, Drew, into, um, like, it's not as if you just turned this thing on.

[00:42:30] Drew Wilde: No.

[00:42:30] Matt Cromwell: Like, this is infrastructure that you built. Um, and even, like, yes, of course we have SSH, we have WP-CLI available, but this isn't, like, OpenClaw for GoDaddy.

[00:42:42] You know, you don't just, like, connect something to all these different endpoints and now all of a sudden all these folks have this ability. Like, this must have taken a lot of time and effort and engineering, um, and, and this is a, a, an infrastructure tool that you built over months, I'm assuming.

[00:43:00] Drew Wilde: Yes, absolutely, and that, and that, and that's really, yeah, and it gets more complicated the more that you try to, like, really kinda hammer into it.

[00:43:07] Um, so I, I will say that, you know, we were pretty early on trying to build this agent, and, you know, we were s- you know, we had to go through security review. You know, we're a publicly traded company. Like, we have responsibilities in order to make sure that the data that we're operating with is, is safe and used responsibly.

[00:43:25] And so to kinda go through all of this different certification on an agent in order to act on behalf of a customer on their live site, like, hey, like, this is something that we wanted to make sure that we got right. And it certainly has quite a bit of structure to it, and even on the data on the backend side of it to say, "Okay, great, now what are we learning?

[00:43:47] How are we surfacing that?" So there's a whole kind of, like, data instrumentation piece to our troubleshooter as well that we, that we lean into. But the fact of the matter, at the end of the day, when we turned this site on, we, we originally kinda, like, you know, we turned it on for 10,000 sites for the, you know, the, the package that, that, that we have for it.

[00:44:05] Those 10,000 sites over the course of time exi- you know, experience downtime events 10% less of the time, which for me, at scale, massive number, massive wage. Huge. Huge. Yeah. So it's like, w- then we can say, okay, yeah, what does that downtime cost of our customer? You know, we can make a, you know, a different kind of business case from that.

[00:44:26] But we saw what we needed to in order to make sure that we understood that this was a valuable tool for customers that we can get it to. It's not free, certainly not free. Yeah. Because it's like every remediation plan, token a- you know, token usage. Yeah. Every site automation fix, token usage. So it's like, yeah, like, we have a cost associated with this, but the value to the customers that either don't e- experience the downtime that they would have, certainly that value to them is, is worth that cost.

[00:44:56] Ian Misner: Yeah. But also, like, I mean, the, the value of, like, your very frontline support agents being able to solve probably most issues with the click of a button, I don't, I don't even know how you would measure that. Uh, do you measure that actually? But I mean, that's a huge number, whatever that translates to though, I'm sure.

[00:45:14] Yeah. Right?

[00:45:15] Matt Cromwell: Yes. Let's, uh, let's do that super quick, though, also. Um, we, we've talked about AI and support a couple times on this show, and the subject that very often comes up is the sentiment around the support team themselves and whether or not they feel empowered by this tool or threatened by this tool.

[00:45:33] Um, how are y'all navigating that reality? It's a reality. Um, support agents legitimately feel threatened by AI for real reasons. Um, and there's a lot of folks who are also just, like, leveraging AI in really great ways to make their team feel more empowered. Um, it's a double-edged sword or, or maybe it's just two different weapons.

[00:45:55] I'm not sure.

[00:45:57] Ian Misner: I, I wanna add, too, before jumping in too much is, like, at the scale of GoDaddy, it stresses me out even because, like, ultimately an individual can do two, three, four times as much work in support now than they could a, like, a year ago even, right? Like, that's just objectively true. I mean, I'm happy to hear arguments if anyone thinks I'm wrong, but I mean, it's, it's not even...

[00:46:21] I, I mean, just the, the scale you're dealing with, there's sort of a, a... How do you feel about that, you know?

[00:46:28] Drew Wilde: It's certainly nuanced, to be quite frank. Um, and GoDaddy has, you know, different, you know, as, as things ebb and flow, different ideas around how to provide the best WordPress support in the industry.

[00:46:43] It's like, obviously we'd love to say we, we do the best WordPress support, but however, at times, when we're in different cycles of our ebbs and flows- Upsell opportunities are incredibly important to the sale- Right ... to, to the support reps that- Yeah ... help have, you know, these, these opportunities. And so The, the nuance that I will say is we had troubles getting our care agents to click this remediation, you know, get a remediation plan, click to auto fix.

[00:47:15] 'Cause once they have a workflow that they do, and we had easier buttons in that, in that interface, you know, I showed you quickly that. It- there's, like, a few things like clear cache. There's a few things like reset WP config. And sometimes those will do it, sometimes they won't. Uh, but those are easier buttons to click that were already in their workflow that, hey, no, we're actually trying to do a different kind of thing with WordPress.

[00:47:39] Like, this is more WordPress specific remediation, and they're like, "Eh, maybe not my job. Uh, maybe not my job." When in reality it's like, hey, like, you could actually build a little bit of customer trust, you know, as, as a part of your customer workflow, and then kinda go into additional opportunities to help them grow their business.

[00:47:57] But yes. You know- Yeah ... certainly had some trouble getting them to, to take it. I'd never heard specifically, "Hey, this is at risk of taking my job," but it's at risk of taking the time away from a conversation that could help make me more money as a rep on the phone.

[00:48:15] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. Right.

[00:48:16] Drew Wilde: And that was kind of what we combated more than, you know, like, than, than the other things.

[00:48:21] Matt Cromwell: Yeah.

[00:48:21] Drew Wilde: Which, you know, like, that's the unfortunate truth sometimes. Like, we're, uh, you know, and we have leaders right now that we're like, we j- if you come in on a WordPress call, that is not a sale call. That is a WordPress support call. We fix their issues, and then if we create that opportunity to have a sale environment, great.

[00:48:39] But we really wanna hammer WordPress support first. Yeah. It's kind of, that's where we're kind of at in our process.

[00:48:46] Matt Cromwell: Great comment here also from Nick, who's also at GoDaddy, um, in the comments here. Our team, who's separate from Drew's, is measuring first response resolution percent as a way to understand how our tooling is supporting our team.

[00:49:00] So essentially, if, uh, AI is proving to be an effective and valuable tool to the support team, then they should be able to measure that by seeing the first response resolution rate go up. Yeah. Um, which in a hosting environment, I think that makes a lot of sense. In a support environment, I think it makes less sense.

[00:49:20] I am highly skeptical of anybody who can resolve a s- a plugin ticket on the first response.

[00:49:27] Ian Misner: Yeah.

[00:49:28] Matt Cromwell: But, but- Um, because there's just too much context that we don't have access to, um, to be able to res- to resolve things, uh, reasonably in the first response. But...

[00:49:37] Ian Misner: I would normally agree. It's, with the tool that Drew's demoing, though, you do have access to 90% of what you need- Yeah

[00:49:43] in that case actually. You do, yeah. And it's, it's like I- Exactly ... I normally would fully agree. Um, and I will say, it sort- it sounds like, you know, the framing that you kind of led, led with on that question, it's like it's not even just the first response resolution rate. Like, you're probably resolving more also because, you know, they're- If you get them to use the button, you know, they're doing that and actually providing the service before attempting to move on to the next thing, basically.

[00:50:11] Yeah. Right. So, yeah. So

[00:50:13] Matt Cromwell: just- I wanna jump into, um, best advice as we wrap things up. But before I do that, I wanna give a shout-out to the folks in the comments. Honestly, the comment section to me is one of the things from the beginning of the show that I always like. I was, I always thought, like, I wanna make sure that we have live comments on the show, and the truth is, we don't always have people who chime in.

[00:50:33] But today, all of y'all who chimed in, thank you so much. You added to the conversation in meaningful ways, and I appreciate it. So shout out to- Yeah ... to everybody out there. Um, we end every show, Drew, with our best advice, and I'm not sure how to position this one, honestly. Because it's like, what's your best advice for people who want to build a giant agentic infrastructure-

[00:50:57] for their plugin teams? It's like that's not a thing.

[00:50:59] Ian Misner: Yeah,

[00:51:00] Matt Cromwell: yeah. Um, I think in some ways it's like, what's our best advice for, um, solving customer problems with AI? That might be the best way to say it today. Um, so, uh, Ian, how about you first? What, what do you think? What's your- Yeah ... best advice for folks who wanna use AI to solve customer problems?

[00:51:17] Ian Misner: I mean, I still feel like I'm learning myself how to use it best, so I'm just gonna share maybe l- less framed as advice, more just what I'm up to. Which is we have a big, uh, we have a couple of skills in our team which, you know, running in Claude and Terminal, when you do troubleshooting with the help of AI, it actually, at the end of a session, it assesses what you corrected it and how you corrected it.

[00:51:40] It pulls those out of the transcript, and it actually creates updates to your various skills and, you know, your troubleshooting procedures for each thing. And it's like a, uh, internal documentation that we've always had, except now it's this like living document that Claude's updating 30, 40, 50 times a day.

[00:51:58] And like our, like translation to positive reviews out of support has never been better, and we're probably spending less time than we ever have doing the work. And I, I'm a little uncomfortable with it, to be honest. But it's just like the, the proof and the values are just there. So yeah, it's just, you know, whatever.

[00:52:20] Experiment broadly and be willing to trust the, the, the, the machine a little bit more than you're comfortable with- Yeah ... is my advice.

[00:52:29] Matt Cromwell: I'll go next so that, uh, we save Drew the best for last. Um, honestly, if you're a product team, um, and you've got, like, five support agents, um, my advice is don't follow Drew's, uh, path right now.

[00:52:45] You don't need to over-engineer a giant agentic system when you're a team of five, uh, because you just don't have the volume. That's not... Like, don't concern yourself with that. But I would spend real time doing what Ian was just talking about in terms of leveraging AI to empower your support team to do things faster.

[00:53:04] Uh, I also have been talking a lot with, with Katie, another co-host, about her support team. She's trying to leverage AI tools to empower her support team to do more, um, not only in the queue, but outside the queue as well. Uh, your support team suddenly becomes like team members and assets that you can use throughout the whole business because honestly, they should be freed up from the queue more than they typically have been in the past.

[00:53:29] Um, um, but that doesn't mean that you start laying people off. That means you get to actually beef up the value and the output of your whole team and do more than you ever have done, uh, before. Um, and I think that that's a meaningful impact on, on the business overall. So thinking of AI as a new, like, power tool that lets you do more with, with the same amount of resources that you have today, um, that's the way I think about it personally.

[00:53:56] So Drew, what's your best advice for our audience who wants to use AI?

[00:54:04] Drew Wilde: I think my best advice is to know what you wanna accomplish. What's the outcome that you wanna get out of the tool? So Ian, you mentioned like, "Hey, our, our responses, our, you know, our, the, the review scores on our support, like, that's better than ever."

[00:54:20] You knew when you were gonna be successful using AI to maybe drive an improvement in a process or something. And for us, in this particular product, we knew that we wanted to... You know, at the beginning it just started off with the technology. It's like, okay, right, we can do this, we can do this. And it's like, okay, no, but what is the real customer outcome that we're gonna get out of this?

[00:54:37] It's we wanted our sites to be up more. We wanted our sites that we host to have more site uptime. And so we knew what we wanted to get out of it, and then we could drive towards that. And with the data that we got out of it, the learning from the use cases, great, was all in order to make sure that customers would experience less downtime for WordPress related issues.

[00:54:59] And we knew we had an opportunity there because we had the data to support that. So for me, that, that's big. You can really drive a lot of impact. If you don't know where you're going or the outcome that you want, you might just end up doing some cool stuff with AI.

[00:55:15] Matt Cromwell: Yep. Totally. Yeah,

[00:55:16] Ian Misner: and I'm just gonna throw up Nick's comment quick too, 'cause I think it sort of...

[00:55:20] That wasn't what I fully thought I was saying, but I really like how you brought that home, Drew, which is the whole, a lot of the signals I used to use to show poor quality, like I don't... A lot of my assumptions have to change, and I think having that core, this is like the primary metric, the primary and secondary metric, the measure of success that we care about, and just trust the tool to drive you towards it, I think that is probably...

[00:55:44] Yeah. It's what you said, not what I said, but I, I'm gonna go back and change mine to yours. I like that.

[00:55:51] Matt Cromwell: Nice. Cool, cool, folks. Well, that is a wrap. Drew, thank you so much for being here and joining us today. Where can people find you online?

[00:56:01] Drew Wilde: Uh, you can find me on Twitter, Drew BWildee, @drewbWildee. That's a, that's the, that's a great one.

[00:56:07] Obviously, I, I also have LinkedIn. My name is actually James Andrew Wildee, and so people sometimes have a hard time finding me. But my parents always called me Drew, so I go by Drew. Um, but yeah, Twitter and LinkedIn would be the best places.

[00:56:21] Matt Cromwell: LinkedIn being so formal. Geez.

[00:56:24] Drew Wilde: I know. Yeah. It's like, "Ugh." But hey, Ian plugged LinkedIn at the beginning, so I said, "

[00:56:28] Ian Misner: Well-" Well, while you're following Drew on LinkedIn, make sure to hit up the WordPress Product Talk.

[00:56:33] Drew Wilde: Exactly.

[00:56:33] Ian Misner: The WP Product Talk page, like that too, for reasons that do not bother t- with them at all. Just do it. Uh, and then if you're YouTube, wherever, hit subscribe there as well. It supports us here. And thanks again to Freemius for supporting WP Product Talk as well.

[00:56:49] Matt Cromwell: Absolutely. Next week, we are on a WordCamp Europe hiatus.

[00:56:54] Next week is WordCamp Europe, and we're taking two weeks off. Um, and we are, in the meantime, looking for new guests. So Drew, who would you recommend? Who should we have on the show for sure?

[00:57:06] Drew Wilde: That's a great question. I did not com- come prepared with an answer for that. Um, man, uh, that, you know, caught me off guard.

[00:57:14] I, I certainly have very good friends like Mike Hanson- Ooh.

[00:57:19] Matt Cromwell: Yeah ...

[00:57:19] Drew Wilde: at, you know, New Fold Bluehost-

[00:57:21] Matt Cromwell: Yeah ...

[00:57:21] Drew Wilde: that is very involved in the, in the future of WordPress, uh, you know, on that side, that I, I think would be a great-

[00:57:30] Matt Cromwell: That's a good one. Mike's great. We have not had Mike on the show yet, so.

[00:57:34] Drew Wilde: Yeah. Oh, yeah, he's...

[00:57:35] And he's done it all. He's done it all.

[00:57:37] Matt Cromwell: Yeah. That's true, true. Good one. Uh, and even, you know, a frenemy in the space for you. That's awesome.

[00:57:42] Drew Wilde: Exactly. Yeah. Group chats that we have still.

[00:57:47] Matt Cromwell: All right, folks, well, have a good one. I hope to see you at WordCamp Europe, and, uh, we'll see you in two weeks. Have a good one.

[00:57:53] Thanks.