00:00:06 [Matt Cromwell] Hey, everyone. 00:00:06 [Matt Cromwell] I've been chewing on this idea that I'm not sure I totally agree with or not, but, there's this thing that where almost overnight, it feels like the real threat to WordPress is no longer things like Wix and Squarespace. 00:00:18 [Matt Cromwell] We've been talking about Wix and Squarespace as the big, like, competitors to WordPress for so long. 00:00:24 [Matt Cromwell] But overnight, it's like it's not them anymore. 00:00:27 [Matt Cromwell] It's lovable, and it's Bolt. 00:00:30 [Matt Cromwell] So today, on our one hundredth episode of WP Product Talk, we're gonna talk all about how AI is going to save the future of WordPress. 00:00:43 [Matt Cromwell] This is WP Product Talk, a place where every week we bring you insights, product marketing, business management and growth, customer experience, product development, and more. 00:00:56 [Matt Cromwell] It's your go to podcast for WordPress product owners by WordPress product owners. 00:01:02 [Matt Cromwell] And now enjoy the show. 00:01:10 [Matt Cromwell] Hey, everyone. 00:01:10 [Matt Cromwell] I'm Matt Cromwell, cofounder of GiveWP and senior director of customer experience at Stellar WP. 00:01:18 [Amber Hinds] And I'm Amber Hines, CEO of Equalize Digital. 00:01:22 [Matt Cromwell] And today, we're talking all about an important topic that most WordPress product owners don't know yet about, which is the future of WordPress with AI specifically. 00:01:34 [Amber Hinds] Yep. 00:01:34 [Amber Hinds] And that is why we invited two awesome and amazing guests to join us here today, James LePage and Jason Adams. 00:01:45 [Amber Hinds] So welcome both of you. 00:01:47 [Amber Hinds] Would you want to introduce yourselves for everyone who is watching? 00:01:53 [James LePage] Sure. 00:01:53 [James LePage] Hello. 00:01:54 [James LePage] I'm James LePage. 00:01:55 [James LePage] I am the core AI co lead, and I am also the AI lead at Automattic. 00:02:02 [Matt Cromwell] Awesome, James. 00:02:02 [Matt Cromwell] Thanks for being here. 00:02:03 [Matt Cromwell] Jason, what about you? 00:02:05 [Jason Adams] I am Jason Adams. 00:02:07 [Jason Adams] I'm a director of engineering over at Stellar WP. 00:02:10 [Jason Adams] I'm also one of the folks that originally worked with Matt back in the day at GiveWP before we were acquired. 00:02:16 [Jason Adams] And, and I've recently been jumping in with the, WordPress AI team and excited about what they're doing over there and all the possibilities it brings to WordPress. 00:02:27 [Matt Cromwell] Awesome. 00:02:27 [Matt Cromwell] So glad to have you both here. 00:02:29 [Matt Cromwell] I I think it's gonna be a great conversation, and I'm super excited, Amber. 00:02:33 [Matt Cromwell] I can't even believe it is our one hundredth episode. 00:02:38 [Matt Cromwell] It's one of those things where you just start and you never expect like, I I think I even have, like, code in the in the website where it like, every all the episode numbers start with a zero. 00:02:49 [Matt Cromwell] Like, just never expect 00:02:51 [Amber Hinds] Planning ahead. 00:02:52 [Matt Cromwell] Yeah. 00:02:52 [Matt Cromwell] I was never gonna get to, like, a three digit number. 00:02:54 [Matt Cromwell] Oh my gosh. 00:02:56 [Matt Cromwell] It's ridiculous. 00:02:57 [Matt Cromwell] So, one thing I decided was, like, today, I'm just gonna have some fun and give some free stuff away. 00:03:06 [Matt Cromwell] So if you are here and you're watching us on YouTube, you should say hi and tell us where you're from and contribute to the conversation as best you can because I'm going to give away, from my own pocket, some things, a a hat, basically, our exclusive custom WP Product Talk hat. 00:03:31 [Matt Cromwell] So if you are, a fan of WP Product Talk and would love to have a hat like this, comment on on YouTube. 00:03:38 [Matt Cromwell] Tell us what you think about AI. 00:03:40 [Matt Cromwell] Tell us all the ways that you think James is steering WordPress astray, and, doing it wrong. 00:03:48 [Matt Cromwell] All the ways that give is awesome. 00:03:50 [Matt Cromwell] That would be great for Jason. 00:03:52 [Matt Cromwell] But, yeah, I'll see. 00:03:54 [Matt Cromwell] At the very end of the show, I'm gonna pick a winner or maybe, I don't know, 20 winners. 00:03:59 [Matt Cromwell] We'll see what happens, see how I feel. 00:04:02 [Matt Cromwell] But They 00:04:02 [Amber Hinds] are pretty fabulous hats. 00:04:05 [Amber Hinds] I will say I got one from you, and my partner, Chris, stole it from me. 00:04:10 [Amber Hinds] So, yeah. 00:04:13 [Amber Hinds] Probably, I need to get another one. 00:04:16 [Matt Cromwell] So I probably should probably give one to James and Jason while I'm at it. 00:04:21 [Matt Cromwell] I mean, since you're 00:04:21 [James LePage] here gonna be one of these Right. 00:04:23 [James LePage] Collectibles. 00:04:25 [James LePage] So I definitely want one. 00:04:26 [James LePage] Yes. 00:04:26 [Matt Cromwell] There you go. 00:04:27 [Matt Cromwell] There you go. 00:04:27 [Matt Cromwell] Ian asked 00:04:29 [Amber Hinds] yeah. 00:04:29 [Amber Hinds] Do you know how big is the hat, Matt? 00:04:32 [Matt Cromwell] You know, we'll work it out, Ian. 00:04:34 [Matt Cromwell] Like, one way or another, you tell me you need, like, an extra large for the big brain, then we'll make it work. 00:04:40 [Matt Cromwell] So, we'll we'll figure it out one way or another. 00:04:43 [Matt Cromwell] A little off the cuff, I have to say. 00:04:45 [Matt Cromwell] I don't have, like, a whole process involved here. 00:04:47 [Matt Cromwell] It's gonna we'll see how it goes. 00:04:49 [Matt Cromwell] But 00:04:50 [Amber Hinds] Super fun to be here and celebrating our one hundredth episode. 00:04:54 [Amber Hinds] So thank you, James and Jason, for joining us for that and everyone watching. 00:04:59 [James LePage] Thank you for having me, by the way. 00:05:00 [James LePage] A 100 is a crazy milestone, so I'm honored to be here on the 100. 00:05:05 [Jason Adams] Yeah. 00:05:06 [Jason Adams] Yeah. 00:05:06 [Jason Adams] I didn't know till yesterday it was the hundredth. 00:05:08 [Jason Adams] I'm like, oh, that's awesome. 00:05:10 [Jason Adams] Thanks for having us. 00:05:11 [Jason Adams] This is it was like an honor to be here for this milestone. 00:05:14 [Matt Cromwell] Yeah. 00:05:15 [Matt Cromwell] I mean, I did ask you both to wear tux, but, you know, whatever. 00:05:18 [Matt Cromwell] So 00:05:18 [James LePage] The rental business Hey. 00:05:19 [Amber Hinds] I brought my WP product box t shirt to the episode. 00:05:24 [Amber Hinds] So 00:05:25 [Matt Cromwell] Yeah. 00:05:26 [Matt Cromwell] Yeah. 00:05:26 [Matt Cromwell] That was perfect. 00:05:27 [Matt Cromwell] Better than me. 00:05:27 [Matt Cromwell] I didn't think about it. 00:05:28 [Matt Cromwell] I also have the hat, so I could've wore the hat. 00:05:31 [Matt Cromwell] So, alrighty. 00:05:34 [Matt Cromwell] So let's set the stage. 00:05:36 [Matt Cromwell] Right now, we're talking about AI as a future of WordPress. 00:05:40 [Matt Cromwell] I set it up. 00:05:41 [Matt Cromwell] Lovable and Bolt, they are building WordPress sites, by just typing a couple sentences. 00:05:49 [Matt Cromwell] And, we wanna talk about that kind of thing. 00:05:52 [Matt Cromwell] The rise of the core AI team has been really influential and important. 00:05:56 [Matt Cromwell] And, James, we're happy, that you're here and that that is a big effort that, automatic and WordPress core is working on right now. 00:06:05 [Matt Cromwell] Also at Stellar, Jason is here from Stellar because Stellar's paying attention, and we see it as super significant as well. 00:06:12 [Matt Cromwell] And we think that there's a big future for how plug ins can, leverage, AI in different ways, but even more so how plug ins can leverage what WordPress core is doing with AI. 00:06:27 [Matt Cromwell] So that's kind of the context. 00:06:29 [Matt Cromwell] There's several really good interviews with James has been on the circuit, asking questions and answering things and saying his perspective lots of places. 00:06:37 [Matt Cromwell] Honestly, really good context for this show is if you go to, Within WordPress by Remkus DeFries, listen to James' interview over there, that actually, really lays the groundwork really, really well for what the core a AI team is doing, what James is doing over there, at least in my perspective. 00:06:53 [Matt Cromwell] I don't know James. 00:06:54 [Matt Cromwell] Was that a good interview? 00:06:55 [Matt Cromwell] Did Remkus do okay? 00:06:56 [Matt Cromwell] Was that a good 00:06:57 [James LePage] Yes. 00:06:57 [James LePage] Remkus definitely did okay. 00:06:59 [James LePage] And and you mentioned that I'm on the circuit, and this is I'm glad you highlighted that because this is super important to me and Corey and I in that it's not just four people sitting in a Slack room making decisions. 00:07:09 [James LePage] Instead, it's kind of getting what we think we should do out and having the discourse publicly, seeing what actually makes sense for WordPress. 00:07:18 [James LePage] And it looks like we're going in a good direction, and there's a lot of feedback. 00:07:22 [James LePage] But this is why we we wanna be doing these things. 00:07:25 [James LePage] And, Remkus definitely was a lovely interviewer, and I think that's a really good presentation even even from weeks ago, which in AI land, weeks ago is, like, forty years ago. 00:07:36 [James LePage] So 00:07:36 [Jason Adams] Totally. 00:07:37 [James LePage] Still accurate. 00:07:38 [James LePage] Yeah. 00:07:39 [Amber Hinds] It's like dog years. 00:07:42 [Amber Hinds] Yeah. 00:07:42 [Amber Hinds] Well, I I I appreciate that you're sharing all that. 00:07:46 [Amber Hinds] And, of course, thanks, Matt, you know, for setting this the scene for everyone. 00:07:51 [Amber Hinds] For everyone who's watching, of course, we're not gonna spend a bunch of time rehashing, you know, where we've been. 00:07:56 [Amber Hinds] What we wanna focus on today is, where we're going from here today. 00:08:03 [Amber Hinds] And so, James, can you just give us some idea of what, you're talking about in the core AI team and what things might be coming up? 00:08:14 [James LePage] Yeah. 00:08:16 [James LePage] I think the best way to frame what core AI is doing is, first off, offering a surface for everybody to think about AI. 00:08:24 [James LePage] And this was a big thing when I was building a startup. 00:08:27 [James LePage] And the reason I'm at Automattic now is because I built a WordPress AI startup. 00:08:32 [James LePage] A lot of people used us. 00:08:33 [James LePage] A lot of people loved us, and we got bought by Automattic, which is how I ended up in my role there as the AI lead. 00:08:40 [James LePage] And when I was building this, I was kind of working with other people, and we were all like, hey. 00:08:44 [James LePage] There's no like, where do we talk about AI with the context of core? 00:08:48 [James LePage] And, like, how do we we think that there's, like, some APIs and some approaches and some core modifications that could really make our lives of building AI and bringing AI to the community and the ecosystem a bit easier, and that didn't exist. 00:09:04 [James LePage] So CoreAI First is that surface now where we can all come together as product creators and WordPress users and everybody in between and say, this is where we surface these thoughts and these ideas and kind of have the place to do the these discussions. 00:09:18 [James LePage] So that's the first bit. 00:09:20 [James LePage] The second bit is the CoreAI team is also delivering, actual features and functionality to be explored for WordPress core or WordPress core adjacent things. 00:09:30 [James LePage] And a good way to frame what we're doing is in the context of building blocks. 00:09:34 [James LePage] So we have several initiatives that all work together as these foundational building blocks that you can use individually to help create AI for WordPress and infuse AI into WordPress core and WordPress plugins and products and themes, also making WordPress more relevant and accessible in the context of all AI. 00:09:55 [James LePage] How do we connect WordPress to things like n eight n or Claude or Cursor, things like that. 00:10:01 [James LePage] So you can use these building blocks to do that. 00:10:04 [James LePage] You can also assemble all these building blocks together and create really end to end solutions, for AI plus WordPress. 00:10:12 [James LePage] So the building blocks approach is what we've decided to take. 00:10:16 [James LePage] These building blocks are squarely aimed at developers to start, to allow folks who are building the products, building the plugins, either brand new plugins or existing plugins to use these things and see what works and what doesn't and where we should steer some of these technical projects. 00:10:34 [James LePage] And, eventually, these building blocks will enable core WordPress should it make sense to build AI features into the CMS as well. 00:10:43 [James LePage] And it gets us kind of to that point, to that conversation of, oh, yeah. 00:10:47 [James LePage] Like, it would be lovely to do auto alt text for images. 00:10:51 [James LePage] But how are we going to do that if these things don't exist? 00:10:54 [James LePage] So building blocks is the approach. 00:10:56 [James LePage] Developer enablement is the first step, which flows into a lot more. 00:11:00 [James LePage] The three primary building blocks is a PHP client AI API, an abilities API, and an MCP exploration. 00:11:09 [James LePage] And I'll go and give, like, a really quick background, and then we could we could get a bit more detailed if we want. 00:11:13 [James LePage] The PHP client API allows developers to speak with LLMs, LLMs coming from OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, self hosted, in browser through a unified interface. 00:11:25 [James LePage] And this is something that you can go and use and give your customers one single place to add an a API key for any one of these and kind of, like, implement AI in a unified standard way throughout the WordPress ecosystem. 00:11:40 [James LePage] The second bit is the abilities API. 00:11:43 [James LePage] Abilities API is kind of a new name for the features API. 00:11:46 [James LePage] If you've been following AI and WordPress, you probably saw some of the explorations that we did in automatic with the features API. 00:11:52 [James LePage] This is something where you can expose WordPress functionality in a unified LLM friendly way and say, you can do this. 00:12:01 [James LePage] You can read this. 00:12:02 [James LePage] And from all that, it goes and plugs back into your first building block to connect. 00:12:07 [James LePage] And then the final bit is MCP, and MCP is how do we expose some of this functionality and data that WordPress has externally to the rest of, to the rest of the ecosystem of AI out there. 00:12:19 [James LePage] So those are the three blocks. 00:12:21 [James LePage] I think I covered why we're here, what we're doing, where we're going, and we can get more detailed on any of it. 00:12:28 [Amber Hinds] Yeah. 00:12:28 [Amber Hinds] I I actually do have a question because, you know, I think this is really interesting, the idea of let's build one way for someone to add an API key and connect to, let's say, OpenAI, and then all the plugins could use it or all the themes could use it or whatever so it's consistent. 00:12:45 [Amber Hinds] But I do see a potential challenge here in that I don't know if every plugin developer wants to allow their customers to use their own API key because a lot of the AI plug ins that I've seen out there so far are actually selling credits, and that is how they generate revenue. 00:13:06 [Amber Hinds] And so I am curious. 00:13:09 [Amber Hinds] I do wanna shift to Jason in a minute and hear, like, how Stellar is looking at this. 00:13:14 [Amber Hinds] But, James, has this been discussed internally that this might actually be something that product developers don't want? 00:13:21 [James LePage] Yes. 00:13:22 [James LePage] It has. 00:13:23 [James LePage] And, actually, Jason's been a part of some of those discussions thinking about how hosts could use this work. 00:13:28 [James LePage] So I think 00:13:29 [Matt Cromwell] a 00:13:29 [James LePage] very important point to underscore is that our entire mentality and specific to this way you interact with LLMs. 00:13:38 [James LePage] This is being led by Felix Arntz. 00:13:39 [James LePage] Felix worked on the performance team in the past. 00:13:42 [James LePage] Lovely, incredible, brilliant mind who's working on this. 00:13:46 [James LePage] And our thought with all of this, but I think it's most visible in this project, and there's a GitHub repository. 00:13:53 [James LePage] I believe it's github dot com slash wordpress slash php client AI or API. 00:14:00 [James LePage] I don't know. 00:14:01 [James LePage] But there's a repository where some of these discussions are happening. 00:14:04 [James LePage] And Okay. 00:14:05 [James LePage] The whole approach here is do the bare minimum. 00:14:08 [James LePage] Do something that's really simple and allow it to be extended into the ways that make sense for users. 00:14:14 [James LePage] So if you are a host, you can go and register your own provider that proxies through your own AI services and kind of modify this underlying system of allowing your plugins or your developers or developers, installing plugins onto WordPress to interact with AI through this unified means, but you can kinda mix and match and figure out how you want to assemble, this underlying system to do what you needed to do. 00:14:42 [James LePage] And I think that's the core mentality. 00:14:44 [James LePage] Like, WordPress core is this framework, this simple thing that can be further extended through plugins or code or themes or whatever that is. 00:14:52 [James LePage] So we don't wanna do everything. 00:14:54 [James LePage] We also want to do something that is relevant and helpful for users. 00:15:00 [James LePage] And these discussions, like you just mentioned, I believe there's actually a ticket specifically for this, are happening in GitHub. 00:15:06 [James LePage] And it goes back to to what I'm saying about actually speaking with people and talking with the community. 00:15:11 [James LePage] What do we want? 00:15:12 [James LePage] Mhmm. 00:15:12 [James LePage] What makes sense for WordPress core? 00:15:13 [James LePage] What should we ensure is able to be extended to fit some niche use cases that are important to think about? 00:15:21 [James LePage] So high level answer, not direct simply because it's being discussed right now, and we're figuring it out. 00:15:28 [Amber Hinds] Mhmm. 00:15:29 [Jason Adams] Yep. 00:15:29 [Jason Adams] In my mind, I kind of liken it to, like, take email, for example. 00:15:35 [Jason Adams] Right? 00:15:35 [Jason Adams] Like, WordPress has a built in function for delivering email, but email is actually an external dependency. 00:15:44 [Jason Adams] Something has to actually send the mail for you. 00:15:48 [Jason Adams] And so a lot of hosts have kind of a bare minimum thing where it'll work, but then they'll still recommend that you go to, like, SendGrid or get some other external service, that sort of a thing. 00:16:02 [Jason Adams] And so, technically, like, philosophically, this concept of, like, WordPress relies on something external to itself in order to fully fulfill itself is it already exists. 00:16:14 [Jason Adams] And so this would be another introduction of, like, for the AI to work, we have to have some AI somewhere. 00:16:20 [Jason Adams] And so then different hosts and different plugins and such, I think, will get creative with how do we want that. 00:16:27 [Jason Adams] Because some people are gonna want to use their own tokens because they're gonna wanna save money or do something like that. 00:16:32 [Jason Adams] Other people aren't gonna wanna think about it at all. 00:16:35 [Jason Adams] And so I think so long as we make it flexible enough for different creatives to approach this problem differently, I think that will, help alleviate that as a pain point. 00:16:51 [Amber Hinds] Mhmm. 00:16:52 [Amber Hinds] Yeah. 00:16:52 [Amber Hinds] How have you been doing it or thinking about this internally at Stellar and the direction that you can take this with your products? 00:17:03 [Jason Adams] I mean, as we all know, this is, like, months old. 00:17:05 [Jason Adams] So, yeah, discussions are 00:17:09 [Amber Hinds] And changing every week. 00:17:11 [Jason Adams] Yeah. 00:17:11 [Jason Adams] Exactly. 00:17:11 [Jason Adams] So discussions are are happening constantly. 00:17:15 [Jason Adams] You know, we we recently launched Stellar sites. 00:17:18 [Jason Adams] Like, obviously, there'd be a huge interest in having this be a part of that where somebody gets a Stellar site and it automatically has Agenca capabilities and has the AI credits built into it. 00:17:32 [Jason Adams] And so, you know, so that's one big direction would be to to for folks to think of it as something within WordPress. 00:17:41 [Jason Adams] And yeah, James and I have talked about this recently. 00:17:46 [Jason Adams] I just like I am very much of the opinion that this can't be seen as just a a feature that certain plugins or others can take advantage of inside of WordPress. 00:17:58 [Jason Adams] Like, we need the market to associate this as a feature of WordPress itself. 00:18:02 [Jason Adams] Mhmm. 00:18:06 [Jason Adams] So when when somebody thinks I want a WordPress site, they automatically have it in their mind, this agentic capabilities that it provides. 00:18:14 [Jason Adams] Yeah. 00:18:16 [Jason Adams] There's maybe 00:18:16 [Matt Cromwell] a like, if if this if AI was a 100% only plug in territory, that would be a disservice to WordPress. 00:18:25 [Jason Adams] Right. 00:18:25 [Jason Adams] Yes. 00:18:26 [Jason Adams] Exactly. 00:18:27 [Jason Adams] Yeah. 00:18:27 [Jason Adams] So it can't just be like, oh, GiveWP now has, identity capabilities. 00:18:32 [Jason Adams] Like, okay. 00:18:34 [Jason Adams] Good for GiveWP, but the the the size of the WordPress market isn't gonna care. 00:18:39 [Jason Adams] You know? 00:18:40 [Jason Adams] We need way more people to care about this and associate this as as something that's nearly capable in WordPress. 00:18:46 [Matt Cromwell] And I have 25 plugins, and I have to enter my OpenAI API key in 25 different places, and that sounds like a nightmare. 00:18:56 [Jason Adams] Yeah. 00:18:56 [Jason Adams] Yeah. 00:18:56 [Jason Adams] Exactly. 00:18:58 [Jason Adams] So so so at Stellar, we're definitely buying into that vision. 00:19:04 [Jason Adams] It's it's not just strictly how can we as Stellar take advantage of it in our hosting and products, but, like, we see this as a need in the greater WordPress market and industry. 00:19:16 [Jason Adams] And so that's, like, step one is is believing in in that vision and then bringing it down to, yes, we wanted to be a part of Stellar sites. 00:19:26 [Jason Adams] And, yes, like I've talked about, it'd be super cool if, somebody could go into their GiveWP dashboard and ask questions. 00:19:34 [Jason Adams] Like, who are my top 10 donors last year, who were also subscribers, be able to ask insightful questions of the AI in order to get those sorts of insights back from your data. 00:19:45 [Jason Adams] That otherwise can be really hard to do. 00:19:48 [Jason Adams] And, yeah, we make these big reporting tools because we're trying to give people enough information without overwhelming them in order to get the kind of insights that they're looking for. 00:19:59 [Jason Adams] And No one little be great 00:20:00 [Matt Cromwell] there, Jason. 00:20:01 [Matt Cromwell] The the the donors who are also subscribers for folks who don't know, Give doesn't have a subscriber functionality in one way or another. 00:20:09 [Matt Cromwell] So, like, if there are these top donors, who are also subscribers, they're subscribers of something else that's not GiveWP. 00:20:17 [Matt Cromwell] And the only way for the AI to know that is if it has access to all that data all at the same time. 00:20:24 [Jason Adams] So Yeah. 00:20:26 [Jason Adams] Just wanna expand that 00:20:27 [Matt Cromwell] a little bit. 00:20:29 [James LePage] Yeah. 00:20:29 [James LePage] And I 00:20:29 [Amber Hinds] also interesting though as a as a product developer, I'd say, like, a lot of our data is not actually stored in our WordPress site. 00:20:38 [Amber Hinds] I mean, some of it a lot of it, it comes through the WordPress site. 00:20:42 [Amber Hinds] Right? 00:20:42 [Amber Hinds] But then we also have our CRM, which for us happens to be ActiveCampaign, but lots of people use different ones. 00:20:47 [Amber Hinds] And then there's also things happening there. 00:20:49 [Amber Hinds] So so, like, thinking about the future of this, like, how do you get the best data for a product developer and giving AI access to it? 00:20:57 [Amber Hinds] It's almost like, I don't know. 00:20:58 [Amber Hinds] Is WordPress the right place for all of this to be stored, or does the WordPress AI also need to have some sort of capability to connect it to external platforms that might also have additional data? 00:21:12 [Amber Hinds] Right? 00:21:12 [Amber Hinds] Like, this is where I think it gets super complex on that kind of front. 00:21:16 [James LePage] I think it's it doesn't need to be as black and white as that in that if we create these these three building blocks, one of them is MCP, and MCP is a protocol that allows software to talk to AI. 00:21:28 [James LePage] Usually, software not not directly associated with that AI. 00:21:33 [James LePage] So to answer your question, about, hey. 00:21:36 [James LePage] I have data sources externally. 00:21:38 [James LePage] Maybe I wanna mix and match them and include some of WordPress's data there. 00:21:42 [James LePage] You can address that through the MCP approach. 00:21:45 [Jason Adams] Mhmm. 00:21:45 [James LePage] If you wanna build inside WordPress, you can address that through the abilities API approach. 00:21:49 [James LePage] If you want to use LLMs within WordPress, you can use the PHP client API. 00:21:54 [James LePage] Or you can choose to use one piece of it and only expose data externally or only pull data back into WordPress and build agents within WordPress. 00:22:03 [James LePage] So I think the entire approach with Core specifically is to say, hey. 00:22:07 [James LePage] We we want to immediately enable anybody to do whatever they want. 00:22:12 [James LePage] We wanna figure out what makes most sense and what is most relevant for WordPress as a project, and then we want to help steer that project into whatever that future of the web, the future of WordPress' positioning here is. 00:22:25 [James LePage] I think that a website will likely change over the next five years, and I think we want to be able to allow people to build and explore and experiment with what that change will be and make sure that core itself can enable that as it's enabled, democratizing publishing and digital expression for twenty years. 00:22:44 [James LePage] We wanna continue to allow that to happen, whatever that looks like, which will very likely not be a page with words on it as it has been for Yeah. 00:22:52 [James LePage] For twenty years. 00:22:54 [Matt Cromwell] I do want you to lean in on that a little bit because sometimes I think folks who are thinking about AI are thinking about it in terms of just, like, really basic, like, prompting type usage stuff. 00:23:07 [Matt Cromwell] But when you say that, in five years, websites might not actually be websites, that in some ways is like the the flagpole or the flag post that we're saying is like, this is why core needs to have AI built in is because things are changing very significantly and rapidly towards a different direction of, so I don't wanna take that for granted when you say websites might not be websites. 00:23:33 [Matt Cromwell] So can you can you just pull that apart just a little bit in terms of what you think and what you're saying when you say that, James? 00:23:40 [James LePage] I think that the way people interact with AI, like how we see people chat with GPT instead of, go to Google, things like that. 00:23:50 [James LePage] That will become more predominant and prevalent. 00:23:52 [James LePage] Yeah. 00:23:53 [James LePage] And I can't make any predictions on where the web will be. 00:23:55 [James LePage] And I think anybody who says in five years, it's gonna look exactly like this is lying because you can't really tell where the technology will go, how people will adopt technology. 00:24:05 [James LePage] ChatGPT was a weekend project by OpenAI, and it became what it is today. 00:24:09 [James LePage] And it Yeah. 00:24:10 [James LePage] It changed how people interact with software. 00:24:12 [James LePage] So I think the core approach is to keep very close with where everything's going, understand where we can kind of get ahead with WordPress and do so, but also create the frameworks and the APIs and the functionality to allow WordPress to do what it's always done and explore through plugins and kind of move in the way that everybody needs it to move to be relevant. 00:24:35 [James LePage] So I say that from the course perspective. 00:24:37 [James LePage] I also say from my product building perspective at automatic, we heavily expect to leverage these core things to go and build our products and kind of, throw the dart at the board and say, this is where we think the web will go, and, we can build using these things. 00:24:53 [James LePage] And even if the web doesn't go this way, we still have these these products built using these same unified systems that everybody else should hopefully be using as well. 00:25:04 [James LePage] And it gives us the ability to pivot and be agile and nimble, wherever the web brings us. 00:25:11 [James LePage] So I don't really know where it will go, but I do know what we need to build to keep pace with where it will go, if that makes sense. 00:25:20 [James LePage] And that's, I think, the best approach that anybody can have in software. 00:25:25 [Amber Hinds] Yeah. 00:25:25 [Amber Hinds] So our audience for this podcast, right, is WordPress plugin and theme developers. 00:25:31 [Amber Hinds] Most of whom already have a product out there. 00:25:33 [Amber Hinds] They're not necessarily people who are thinking about it, although we have a few of those. 00:25:38 [Amber Hinds] I think for some of them, this might seem very overwhelming or scary. 00:25:42 [Amber Hinds] Right? 00:25:42 [Amber Hinds] Like, even the thought of people don't go to websites anymore. 00:25:46 [Amber Hinds] They use chat GBT. 00:25:48 [Amber Hinds] Imagine all those food bloggers that are probably losing a bunch of ad revenue right now and freaking out. 00:25:52 [Amber Hinds] Well, who sells to those? 00:25:54 [Amber Hinds] The plug in developers, the theme developers who are relying on they make a lot of money, so they pay for my software. 00:26:01 [Amber Hinds] So now we're starting to see AI could be threatening to our businesses. 00:26:05 [Amber Hinds] So I'm curious from both of you at, like, what do we think is the solution there in a way that we can leverage AI as product companies and also not be worried that it's going to reduce numbers of people who want to buy our products? 00:26:26 [James LePage] My answer is, I think the so first off, Matt, you mentioned adding, like, these little prompting features and these little AI features, and I think that's the first step. 00:26:36 [James LePage] Like, the first step is you go from, I have a product, and I've never been able to engineer out of the complexity of reporting, for example. 00:26:44 [James LePage] And I know I can maybe solve that with AI, and I can benefit my users immediately by doing so. 00:26:49 [James LePage] So now with some of the core AI work and even before the core AI work, alleviating that problem makes your product better and makes people happier and use it. 00:26:59 [James LePage] No matter where we go churn 00:27:01 [Amber Hinds] to a degree 00:27:03 [James LePage] Yes. 00:27:03 [Amber Hinds] Is what I'm saying. 00:27:04 [Amber Hinds] Yeah. 00:27:04 [James LePage] It's just it's just a general product approach of how do I solve my my customer's problems. 00:27:09 [James LePage] And AI gives me another tool in that tool belt because no matter where AI goes, tomorrow, a website's not gonna be any different than it is today. 00:27:18 [James LePage] And your users will continue using your plugins and your users and you ideally, and you as a a developer will pivot and change with where the industry goes and where people want their digital presence to go and how they expect to build it and how they expect to use plug ins to extend it. 00:27:36 [James LePage] And I'm taking, like, a plug in first approach here. 00:27:39 [James LePage] So the first step is adding these little AI features. 00:27:42 [James LePage] And, ideally, through the core work, the addition of these little AI features is kind of, laying the foundation to add bigger things to your products, take bigger swings, and move a bit more quickly with wherever these these industries go. 00:27:58 [James LePage] I'll also note that I think that the web will be different in five years, but I'm also seeing, like, there are so many of these big proclamations that people will Yeah. 00:28:09 [James LePage] Be doing x y z, and it it's much slower than that. 00:28:13 [James LePage] Like, there's a lot of sensational discussion around a lot of these topics, and it's not something where you just ignore it and you're like, this will never happen, and the website of 2010 will be the website of 2050. 00:28:23 [James LePage] But it is something where it's like, well, maybe these people are directionally correct, and maybe I should be thinking in these ways, but my user is not one day going to decide that they don't want to accept donations on a site and accept donations through ChatGibt. 00:28:37 [James LePage] Like, that's not really possible. 00:28:38 [James LePage] So how do I improve my products now? 00:28:40 [James LePage] How do I keep track with what the WordPress core group is going and also help steer the WordPress core AI group in the right direction or or at least, like, give opinions about where you think it will go and kind of move with the flow with the river. 00:28:56 [James LePage] Because, again, nobody knows exactly where it's going. 00:28:58 [James LePage] We do know that things will change. 00:29:01 [James LePage] We're doing our best in core to allow people to change with with the industry, but it's a big question mark. 00:29:09 [James LePage] So I'll I'll end on What do 00:29:11 [Amber Hinds] you think, Jason? 00:29:13 [Jason Adams] Yeah. 00:29:15 [Jason Adams] Yeah. 00:29:15 [Jason Adams] Great thoughts and great questions. 00:29:17 [Jason Adams] And and it it's understandable why people feel a bit of apprehension towards the future. 00:29:23 [Jason Adams] When things change, they shift the you know, the fear of the unknown kicks in, and it's easy to kinda fall into that. 00:29:29 [Jason Adams] But at the same time, vinyl records are, like, selling like crazy right now. 00:29:33 [Jason Adams] Like, who saw that coming? 00:29:36 [Amber Hinds] Taylor Swift. 00:29:36 [Jason Adams] Have a way of holding on to things that they really like. 00:29:40 [Jason Adams] Like, we don't necessarily always just drop something in favor of something new. 00:29:44 [Jason Adams] People like to figure out ways to integrate the old with the new. 00:29:48 [Jason Adams] And so I don't necessarily think it's going to be an extreme of shifting one from one thing to the other and a completely different perspective thinking on, like, the audience here of developers and people building things. 00:30:04 [Jason Adams] Knowing how to develop and integrate with AI is not going to be a short term skill. 00:30:10 [Matt Cromwell] Mhmm. 00:30:11 [Jason Adams] So even if you take the time to learn how to build that into a product now, and let's just say, unfortunately, for whatever reason, that product doesn't do as well. 00:30:21 [Jason Adams] You still developed a highly valuable skill that is going to be a good skill to have for the long term right now. 00:30:28 [Jason Adams] AI isn't whether it replaces things or not, it's not going anywhere. 00:30:33 [Jason Adams] And so it's still a good opportunity to to view these as opportunities to just grow yourself as somebody who knows how to build these things and integrate with things like AI. 00:30:43 [Jason Adams] So there's really no downside to taking the time to build those integrations. 00:30:55 [Amber Hinds] No. 00:30:56 [Amber Hinds] Did we lose Matt again? 00:30:57 [Amber Hinds] We might have lost Matt again. 00:31:00 [Jason Adams] Wow. 00:31:01 [Amber Hinds] Yeah. 00:31:01 [Amber Hinds] I I I think it's interesting. 00:31:02 [Amber Hinds] We've been talking about this a lot internally for ourselves as well. 00:31:07 [Amber Hinds] You know? 00:31:07 [Amber Hinds] How how can we work with this? 00:31:09 [Amber Hinds] How can we make it work with our product? 00:31:11 [Amber Hinds] I mean, I'll say as a as a smaller team here on this podcast episode, at least, like, the biggest way that we've been leveraging AI right now is just to try and get more out of our dev work, and and that kind of stuff has been, pretty helpful. 00:31:30 [Amber Hinds] But, I'm curious what you see. 00:31:36 [Amber Hinds] Can can either of you say, like, timeline wise, what the timeline is for getting some of the stuff rolled out into core? 00:31:45 [Amber Hinds] Do you know? 00:31:47 [James LePage] Yeah. 00:31:47 [James LePage] I can give a a estimate. 00:31:51 [James LePage] So, first, the answer to this is as soon as humanly possible. 00:31:55 [James LePage] And to go a bit technical, the way we want to do this in CoreAI is to leverage composer, canonical plugins, feature plugins, to be able to create solutions that are immediately useful and also immediately official solutions that you can use to go and add AI and expose your features and use MCP even before the discussion of a core merge happens. 00:32:19 [James LePage] Because I also think AI is changing very rapidly, and some of this work should be available to developers in a central unified way. 00:32:27 [James LePage] But, for example, MCP's protocol changes every single month. 00:32:31 [James LePage] It's only existed for half a year. 00:32:33 [James LePage] So should that be something that exists in core when there are only two, three releases per year? 00:32:38 [James LePage] No. 00:32:38 [James LePage] I don't think so. 00:32:39 [James LePage] Should it be something where it's an official WordPress project until it becomes stable and is available for the usage through composer by multiple plugins, with this unified no conflict way? 00:32:51 [James LePage] Probably, yes. 00:32:52 [James LePage] So that allows us to be very quick and nimble, but also give developers the building blocks to use in their own products where they know that this is the official WordPress way of doing things and then eventually get to a point where some of this does go core. 00:33:07 [James LePage] We're looking at the abilities API as something that could go core as soon as 6.9. 00:33:12 [James LePage] I don't know. 00:33:13 [James LePage] It's gonna be an exploration. 00:33:14 [James LePage] We're looking at a lot of this stuff being official as soon as it's ready and baked. 00:33:20 [James LePage] Like, ready to go, here it is. 00:33:22 [James LePage] This is how you can use it now. 00:33:23 [James LePage] Here's where we expect it to go with a pretty detailed road map. 00:33:27 [James LePage] We want to push because we want to at least be in the position for future WordPress seven point o, 7.1, some of the future major versions to have the discussion of what do we wanna bring core, what do we want to build feature wise, do we want to keep this in plug in territory. 00:33:43 [James LePage] All questions. 00:33:44 [James LePage] But all questions we can't ask unless we move really fast. 00:33:47 [James LePage] So, I think, hopefully, that gives some clarity of how we want to approach things. 00:33:52 [James LePage] I think you'll be hearing the terms core adjacent and canonical plug ins and composer packages a lot when it comes to AI, by design. 00:34:03 [Amber Hinds] Mhmm. 00:34:04 [Amber Hinds] So we had a really interesting comment here from friendly web guy in The UK who said, could a site owner ask the built in prompt to make a mini single purpose plug in to solve a particular need, cutting out a traditional plug in dev, which is a really interesting thing that I had not thought about, which is, is it possible that building you know? 00:34:27 [Amber Hinds] Obviously, what you're talking about is putting blocks into WordPress that, make it available for for plugins to build upon. 00:34:39 [Amber Hinds] But, eventually, you could see a point where it's more than that, and, actually, there's prompts built in WordPress core or some interface, right, for adding it and generating things. 00:34:49 [Amber Hinds] Do you see anything where this could potentially cut out plugin developers and make it easier for average site users to fix things or, like, you know, what do we call them, the power users? 00:35:03 [James LePage] I think it's a horrifying concept to say I'm gonna prompt AI and it's gonna install code onto my production WordPress site 00:35:09 [Jason Adams] immediately and 00:35:10 [Matt Cromwell] and I'm 00:35:11 [James LePage] so I think that's my answer. 00:35:13 [James LePage] Like, we should 00:35:14 [Amber Hinds] While possible, not a good idea. 00:35:17 [James LePage] Yeah. 00:35:17 [James LePage] And but so then if you think about the core like, how WordPress core works, it's one of these things where you can do whatever you want. 00:35:24 [James LePage] And I guarantee you, people will build things that create code and install it on a WordPress site. 00:35:30 [James LePage] And this actually helps us talk about lovable and bolt. 00:35:33 [James LePage] These are these are kinda how these things work too where you go and get a prompt and you get code, and it may do what you want it to do, but there's no support. 00:35:41 [James LePage] There's no security. 00:35:42 [James LePage] This thing might blow everything up. 00:35:44 [James LePage] That's worrying. 00:35:45 [James LePage] If you look at WordPress core, I don't think that would ever happen. 00:35:48 [James LePage] I think WordPress core's job is to be this core framework, this core piece that other people can build these solutions onto. 00:35:56 [James LePage] So I would assume that the the AI features, if any, that end up in WordPress core, are these basic quality of life things and things that allow developers to do more. 00:36:06 [James LePage] So I would assume that there's the building blocks in WordPress core. 00:36:10 [James LePage] There's some basic features, maybe some features surfacing through, the command the command palette, maybe some features surfacing in the new site admin, but not something that's going to create an entire plug in and maintain it for you and have life support and do security audits and all of that. 00:36:28 [James LePage] And that's why plug ins exist now because you you can you can already do this, and you have been able to do this for a while. 00:36:35 [James LePage] And and my first business in WordPress plus AI was Code WP, which made the plugins and made the snippets for people. 00:36:43 [James LePage] And we saw that, like, in some situations, it would create a really lovely snippet, and it would be great, and it would solve everybody's time. 00:36:50 [James LePage] It would fix the bug that you would be annoying people at seller about. 00:36:53 [James LePage] That seller would say, hey. 00:36:54 [James LePage] That's outside of our support scope. 00:36:56 [James LePage] We can't do that. 00:36:57 [James LePage] But it wouldn't create, like, this massive form solution that would solve every problem. 00:37:01 [James LePage] And people prompt it, and people ask for it, and they realize continue updating. 00:37:04 [James LePage] Like, you can't do that. 00:37:06 [James LePage] So I think that's, like, we won't see that in core. 00:37:09 [James LePage] We definitely won't see that in core, but it's it's a question of it's a question of Yeah. 00:37:15 [James LePage] I will. 00:37:16 [James LePage] Build it and will somebody learn, like, maybe this isn't a good idea. 00:37:20 [Matt Cromwell] I I gotta say I'm 00:37:23 [Amber Hinds] said code was already a commodity. 00:37:25 [Amber Hinds] Yeah. 00:37:26 [Amber Hinds] So it's not really something that we have to worry about in that same way. 00:37:29 [Amber Hinds] Go ahead, Matt. 00:37:30 [Matt Cromwell] I I'm just, Jason's heard this from me before, but, like, I'm just I'm a support guy. 00:37:35 [Matt Cromwell] I'm like, those are all well and good intentions, but, you know, you're gonna build something, and it's gonna go away that you don't expect. 00:37:44 [Matt Cromwell] It's that's how and then my team's gonna hear about it one way or another. 00:37:48 [Matt Cromwell] So 00:37:49 [James LePage] And it's also the solutions that Lovable and Bolt and things that just spit out code create are very brittle. 00:37:56 [James LePage] They are not supported. 00:37:57 [James LePage] Nobody knows how they work because you haven't put architectural thought into this. 00:38:01 [James LePage] So you may have this brochure site, but what happens when you wanna make a a a big update? 00:38:06 [James LePage] What happens when you wanna add forms 00:38:07 [Matt Cromwell] to it? 00:38:08 [James LePage] What happens when you you want to do more than just mindlessly prompting for something? 00:38:14 [James LePage] That's where things like WordPress that's why plug ins exist and I think will be very relevant in the future. 00:38:19 [James LePage] And will the plug in of today be the plug in of tomorrow? 00:38:22 [James LePage] Likely not. 00:38:23 [James LePage] There's likely gonna have to be a pivot towards AI. 00:38:25 [James LePage] There's likely gonna have to be work within WordPress core to enable things like that. 00:38:30 [James LePage] But there's always gonna be, like, the the need for support, the need for these really thoughtful solutions. 00:38:39 [James LePage] And I'm absolutely seeing that with Lovable. 00:38:41 [James LePage] People launch the site, so, like, how do I fix it? 00:38:43 [James LePage] How do I change it? 00:38:44 [James LePage] Hey. 00:38:44 [James LePage] Why why is my API key hard coded into the the client side JavaScript? 00:38:48 [James LePage] Like Yeah. 00:38:49 [James LePage] There are all these things where this is why WordPress and our ecosystem does and can make sense into the 00:38:55 [Jason Adams] future. 00:38:57 [Jason Adams] Nice. 00:38:57 [Amber Hinds] Yeah. 00:38:59 [Amber Hinds] Jason, what are you what are you guys looking ahead to with AI at Stellar and and all of this? 00:39:05 [Amber Hinds] Is there anything you can share that's not totally top secret on this podcast episode that's only the three of us talking, really? 00:39:13 [Amber Hinds] So, you know, we won't tell anyone. 00:39:15 [Jason Adams] Alright. 00:39:20 [Jason Adams] I mean, I've I've already mentioned a couple. 00:39:23 [Jason Adams] I think, honestly, right now, my mind is really still more on WordPress as a whole. 00:39:31 [Jason Adams] Like, I I wanna narrow it in as we approach this. 00:39:36 [Jason Adams] Like, in my opinion, one of the greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses of WordPress is its diversity of the ecosystem. 00:39:45 [Jason Adams] Right? 00:39:45 [Jason Adams] Like, you can have you can. 00:39:47 [Jason Adams] It has 60 a 100 plugins doing so many things. 00:39:52 [Jason Adams] And but and that's a strength. 00:39:55 [Jason Adams] But the weakness there is WordPress is a constant tension of trying to figure out how the heck to unify that user experience. 00:40:04 [Jason Adams] You go to different pages within the admin. 00:40:06 [Jason Adams] They can look drastically different. 00:40:07 [Jason Adams] Everybody's doing notifications their own way. 00:40:09 [Jason Adams] There's all these attempts to try to unify this, and AI is a incredible way of doing exactly that of, you have a 100 plug ins. 00:40:22 [Jason Adams] If they are registering using the abilities API and stuff like that, then through a single agentic interface or some other idea, I can now, as user, get comfortable with one thing that makes a 100 things possible. 00:40:40 [Jason Adams] And that is that is an extremely exciting possibility. 00:40:45 [Jason Adams] And for me, part of how this can answer one of the greatest challenges in WordPress historically. 00:40:53 [Jason Adams] And so that's really where my mind is at right now. 00:40:58 [Jason Adams] And then I more just imagine how that would come to fruition within our specific products in in Stellar. 00:41:05 [Jason Adams] So, like, you know, Stellar sites, having that as just rolled into the hosting. 00:41:09 [Jason Adams] You get your site, you already have it. 00:41:11 [Jason Adams] Give WP, making sure that it is leveraging the abilities API and everything like that. 00:41:18 [Jason Adams] And then experimenting and asking ourselves, how can we make it go further? 00:41:22 [Jason Adams] Because there's, like, there's kind of the stage one of having, like, a chat prompt to talk to. 00:41:29 [Jason Adams] Right? 00:41:30 [Jason Adams] But then when you get truly agentic, it's where it starts to, do specific and special things in given moments. 00:41:40 [Jason Adams] So if it realizes like, a really simple example would be, like, if you ask it, hey. 00:41:44 [Jason Adams] What's the donation plugin I can use? 00:41:46 [Jason Adams] Well, then instead of just text responding to you within the the agent of saying, like, you could use give or you could use one of these, instead actually pulling from .org and being like, here are the cards for these. 00:42:01 [Jason Adams] Do you wanna just click a button and activate right now? 00:42:04 [Jason Adams] Something like that. 00:42:06 [Jason Adams] And so taking it steps beyond just a chat interface, but how can we really take it into, like, a real powerful, agentic direction? 00:42:15 [Jason Adams] So nothing really to share concrete other than a lot of interest in exploration. 00:42:22 [Matt Cromwell] Yeah. 00:42:22 [Matt Cromwell] But that I mean, that's honestly the reason why we really pushed hard for Jason to be at these meetings and to chat with James and things like that is specifically because there is a lot that's changing. 00:42:34 [Matt Cromwell] The horizons are different than they used to be just six months ago, and there is a lot of potential and a lot of upside. 00:42:41 [Matt Cromwell] And, we wanna make sure that we're paying attention and are, helping to influence the future of this in one way or another. 00:42:49 [Matt Cromwell] I I don't wanna get ahead to best advice, but, like, we're doing what I think is the best advice. 00:42:55 [Matt Cromwell] Be involved and pay attention, contribute, all those types of things. 00:43:00 [Matt Cromwell] But I do wanna I do wanna move a little bit towards, some of the the tangible I wanna ask. 00:43:06 [Matt Cromwell] Our audience real quick. 00:43:07 [Matt Cromwell] Yeah. 00:43:07 [Matt Cromwell] If Yeah. 00:43:08 [Matt Cromwell] Let me ask 00:43:08 [Jason Adams] if Yeah. 00:43:09 [Amber Hinds] Let me ask one question about that because so, you know, I said this earlier, and if people are familiar with me, then you know, like, our team is not huge. 00:43:18 [Amber Hinds] Right? 00:43:18 [Amber Hinds] And and I think we represent maybe what is a little bigger even for some. 00:43:25 [Amber Hinds] Like, some products are one developer, building the thing, doing everything. 00:43:29 [Amber Hinds] Or like us, we have okay. 00:43:31 [Amber Hinds] We've got an ops person. 00:43:32 [Amber Hinds] We have a, you know, like, a couple on the dev side marketing. 00:43:37 [Amber Hinds] Right? 00:43:37 [Amber Hinds] So we're a little bit bigger. 00:43:38 [Amber Hinds] But still, even I struggle a lot with how do we keep up with all of the things that are happening in WordPress, and on this AI front because that moves so so much faster even than WordPress that could impact our product. 00:43:53 [Amber Hinds] I'm gonna be totally honest. 00:43:54 [Amber Hinds] Before I read the notes for the show, I had never heard of Lovable. 00:43:59 [Amber Hinds] No idea. 00:44:01 [Amber Hinds] I had no idea about all the GitHub conversations. 00:44:04 [Amber Hinds] How does a small plugin team keep up with all of this when we don't have someone who can just go hang out in WordPress, make WordPress Slack, or go monitor all the repos or, like, the fire hose channels. 00:44:19 [Amber Hinds] Right? 00:44:19 [Amber Hinds] Like Yeah. 00:44:19 [Amber Hinds] How how do we do that as a small plug in team? 00:44:23 [James LePage] There was one thing that popped into my mind as you said I didn't know about Lovable, which is that you are not the minority here. 00:44:30 [James LePage] Like, many people don't know about this stuff. 00:44:32 [James LePage] We do exist in a bubble, and it kinda goes back to the point of things will move slower than we all think they'll move because everybody in AI is seeing things, but not everybody else is seeing things. 00:44:42 [James LePage] And the adoption is gonna be interesting to see how it plays out, and that is the opportunity of if you are even anywhere near looking at AI, you're a bit further along than a lot of other people in terms of product, in terms of enhancing how you you guys build your plugins. 00:44:59 [James LePage] So that's one point. 00:45:00 [James LePage] Second point is, I think the best way for the core AI stuff is everything that is super relevant and pressing. 00:45:08 [James LePage] And this has happened in the WordPress project, and I know there are a lot of people who are interested in core AI who have not really been super plugged into the project itself and how the project operates, is published to the make.wordpress.org/ai blog. 00:45:21 [James LePage] So all the important stuff, WordPress specific, if there are any discussions that should be have, if there are any major decisions, new things coming out, go on to that blog. 00:45:31 [Matt Cromwell] And it has a dedicated RSS feed. 00:45:34 [James LePage] That's yes. 00:45:35 [James LePage] So so read that, and that's How frequently gateway into everything. 00:45:40 [Jason Adams] On there. 00:45:41 [Matt Cromwell] It's the meetings are twice a week or twice a month or every other week. 00:45:45 [Matt Cromwell] Okay. 00:45:45 [Matt Cromwell] So that's that's that's when they're ready. 00:45:47 [Amber Hinds] Talking about reading, like, two articles a month maybe, and then you'd be on 00:45:52 [James LePage] top of it. 00:45:53 [James LePage] 100 articles a month. 00:45:54 [James LePage] It's gonna be it's gonna 00:45:55 [Amber Hinds] be That's what I'm asking. 00:45:57 [James LePage] Here's what we're chatting about. 00:45:58 [James LePage] Here are the big things that we're releasing and what we're expecting to do, and here are direct links to watch and contribute and discuss. 00:46:06 [James LePage] And that's the whole this is super important to the Koreyai group because if there's no discussion, we could maybe build the perfect solution, but we would very likely build a solution that wouldn't take into account everything that should be accounted for when you think about WordPress core. 00:46:21 [James LePage] Yeah. 00:46:22 [James LePage] So that's the block that's the one link that I give everybody. 00:46:24 [James LePage] And there's more out there. 00:46:25 [James LePage] There's the CoreAI Slack channel. 00:46:28 [James LePage] There are the biweekly synchronous meetings. 00:46:30 [James LePage] There are the GitHub repos. 00:46:32 [James LePage] But you'll find all of that in these posts, and then you'll be able to decide how involved you wanna be and how vocal you wanna be and where you want to point your time. 00:46:41 [James LePage] But everything is in that blog. 00:46:42 [James LePage] Look at the blog. 00:46:43 [Matt Cromwell] But I will say that, like, most of what you all are deciding to do is because of a lot of context that you already have when you come into those meetings in the first place. 00:46:53 [Matt Cromwell] So some of the things that Amber is highlighting is, like, what is the context behind the context? 00:46:59 [Matt Cromwell] Like, you all made those decisions because of the information you already have. 00:47:02 [Matt Cromwell] I will say I've seen James in the core AI channel already being like, hey. 00:47:07 [Matt Cromwell] This channel shouldn't only be populated by our meetings. 00:47:09 [Matt Cromwell] Like, everybody talk about the AI stuff that you're working on regularly. 00:47:13 [Matt Cromwell] What's the AI news going on in here? 00:47:15 [Matt Cromwell] And I've noticed that there is there's there's activity in there, outside of meetings that I find really valuable myself. 00:47:21 [Matt Cromwell] But some of it is also just simply paying attention to the space. 00:47:26 [Matt Cromwell] Amber, it's a it's a it's a really great question. 00:47:28 [Matt Cromwell] And sometimes I think normal product owners who are buried in their own work that they're like, this is how I make money. 00:47:36 [Matt Cromwell] I don't make money by reading somebody else's blog post. 00:47:40 [Matt Cromwell] But at the same time, it's kind of like it's the context of the space that we all live and exist in, and there is this this part you know, I'm at this stage, like, ten years removed from being on a a four person team. 00:47:54 [Matt Cromwell] You know what I mean? 00:47:56 [Matt Cromwell] But at that time, still, I I spent a ton of time just reading and investing and looking around at the whole space. 00:48:02 [Matt Cromwell] It's really hard to feel like that's valuable time when you know that there's, like, 200 support tickets waiting for you, behind the other side. 00:48:12 [Matt Cromwell] But I I do still, in retrospect, find that time and investment in your future overall. 00:48:18 [Matt Cromwell] It's just it's hard to it's hard to feel like it when you're doing it. 00:48:21 [Matt Cromwell] So 00:48:22 [Jason Adams] Another angle on this is, like, the the approach to AI. 00:48:27 [Jason Adams] Right? 00:48:28 [Jason Adams] So for a small team right now, with things moving so quickly and, like, MCP and stuff, it's very technical. 00:48:34 [Jason Adams] And so to build the technical expertise necessary to keep up with this is hard. 00:48:40 [Jason Adams] The you're not wrong with that, Amber. 00:48:42 [Jason Adams] And so part of the goal, a significant part of the goal of the core AI team is to lower the bar, is to make these things much more approachable so you don't have to understand it. 00:48:54 [Jason Adams] Like, something that I that kinda blows my mind when I think about it is, like, it will be easier to integrate with the abilities API than to add a block to Gutenberg. 00:49:05 [Jason Adams] Like, to say, I have this feature 00:49:09 [Amber Hinds] sure that's a credit for Gutenberg. 00:49:12 [Matt Cromwell] Is it a high bar or a low bar? 00:49:14 [Matt Cromwell] I'm not sure. 00:49:16 [Jason Adams] Well, really, all you have to say is I have this feature. 00:49:20 [Jason Adams] This I'm making a tool. 00:49:21 [Jason Adams] It does this thing, describe it in plain English, and then do some function call to do a thing that you would normally be doing inside your your plug in or theme anyway. 00:49:33 [Jason Adams] And so so part of this is to give people the ability to get a lot of value out of the AI space without having to be an expert in the AI space. 00:49:44 [Jason Adams] So you still be good at what you do, know how your plug in is amazing and all of that good stuff, learn the abilities API, which is really not a hard API to learn, and then I'll be it's still being defined. 00:49:58 [Jason Adams] But as it is now, it's not difficult to understand. 00:50:02 [Jason Adams] You learn it. 00:50:02 [Jason Adams] You integrate with it. 00:50:04 [Jason Adams] Boom. 00:50:04 [Jason Adams] You are now taking advantage of of AI. 00:50:07 [James LePage] Like, that is how everything in WordPress and MCP can use what you've exposed here. 00:50:13 [James LePage] And and I'll also mention that these APIs and we are being very mindful about this, and we we have explicitly said this. 00:50:20 [James LePage] These are the first APIs for WordPress. 00:50:22 [James LePage] And the first APIs that will be available at software that has the scale of WordPress that were designed post AI. 00:50:30 [James LePage] So we're creating these to be easy to use with AI and develop you in into your product using AI to help you in terms of how they're designed and how they're documented. 00:50:40 [James LePage] Mhmm. 00:50:40 [James LePage] So, ideally, it will be even easier than Jason just said because you can take your code base and you can say, here's the document that this team wrote specifically to allow AI to at least give me a v zero zero one of this implementation. 00:50:54 [James LePage] Go explain how how to do it. 00:50:56 [James LePage] Help me out. 00:50:57 [James LePage] And all of these APIs are designed like that with mindfully. 00:51:02 [James LePage] And I think that's a really cool opportunity because everything else I I was mentioning, before the show, Gutenberg is actually really good for AI, but it was designed before AI. 00:51:12 [James LePage] And, like, what decisions would have been made if it came about ten years later? 00:51:16 [James LePage] I don't know. 00:51:17 [James LePage] But we have those decisions, and we can make those decisions now with the AI work. 00:51:23 [James LePage] And, ideally, it can help alleviate some of the complexity, that that may come with it and may not. 00:51:29 [Matt Cromwell] Yeah. 00:51:30 [Matt Cromwell] 100%. 00:51:30 [Amber Hinds] Yeah. 00:51:31 [Amber Hinds] I do appreciate that there is thought put into that because there are a lot of really amazing plugins out there developed by people that with small teams or who are not maybe like, they're really great at PHP but not JavaScript or something like that. 00:51:47 [Amber Hinds] And that doesn't mean their plugin isn't fabulous. 00:51:49 [Amber Hinds] And so I love that you all are putting some thought into, like, how can we make this easy for people to level up into it? 00:51:57 [Matt Cromwell] Yeah. 00:51:58 [Matt Cromwell] I wanna get back to the whole premise. 00:52:01 [Matt Cromwell] So future of WordPress. 00:52:03 [Matt Cromwell] We've we've done a lot of context here. 00:52:06 [Matt Cromwell] A lot of context, a lot of, like, what we're doing today in terms of moving forward, future of WordPress terms, what is it exactly that that the work that you're groundbreaking on right now, James, is going to unlock for for WordPress as a whole, let's just say as a whole, but with an eye towards plug ins, that's gonna allow it to not just look at what's happening with like, Figma is doing interesting things, like, Webflow is doing interesting things. 00:52:42 [Matt Cromwell] Of course, there's Lovable and Bolt and Vue, all of these things. 00:52:46 [Matt Cromwell] Instead of just being like, yeah, we do that too. 00:52:50 [Matt Cromwell] What is it that we're doing today that's going to look at that and be like, no. 00:52:53 [Matt Cromwell] No. 00:52:54 [Matt Cromwell] No. 00:52:54 [Matt Cromwell] We are eons ahead. 00:52:55 [Matt Cromwell] We're not old news. 00:52:57 [Matt Cromwell] We are the news. 00:52:58 [Matt Cromwell] We are the ahead of the game. 00:53:00 [Matt Cromwell] What what what's happening there? 00:53:02 [James LePage] I think it unlocks that type of thinking. 00:53:05 [James LePage] So all of this work that we're doing, all of the future work that's coming in core in terms of site admin redesign work, in terms of the collaborative editing work, when all of these pieces exist on the same board, you have a piece of software that is infinitely extensible, which we've seen over the past twenty years with all these plug ins. 00:53:25 [James LePage] You have a piece of software that has a very defined way to create front ends, and you eventually have a piece of software with a very defined and modern way to create admin sides of things. 00:53:36 [James LePage] You have defined databases. 00:53:37 [James LePage] You have software that's been documented for twenty years that AI already knows about. 00:53:42 [James LePage] So you now have this one stop shop to go and create any digital experience you want on the web, which could be a website, but it could be a micro application. 00:53:53 [James LePage] It could be a entire application. 00:53:55 [James LePage] And there is no other ecosystem that has that out of the box. 00:53:59 [James LePage] If you go to v zero and you prompt for something, you get a front end. 00:54:04 [James LePage] But how do you go and connect it to a database? 00:54:07 [James LePage] Mhmm. 00:54:07 [James LePage] Previously, that was a big question mark, and there was no answer. 00:54:10 [James LePage] Now there is an answer, and it's like, go to Supabase and set up Supabase and figure out what Supabase is and what's Postgres. 00:54:16 [James LePage] Like, what what is any of this? 00:54:19 [James LePage] And that's the case for all of these systems, including Figma, including everything. 00:54:24 [James LePage] There's no one stop shop to go and do end to end creation. 00:54:29 [James LePage] And do it in a way where and and Jason brought this point up, and I love this point. 00:54:33 [James LePage] Do it in a way where anybody can do anything they want. 00:54:36 [James LePage] So you can have an enterprise application. 00:54:39 [James LePage] You can have a website. 00:54:40 [James LePage] You can have an ecommerce store. 00:54:42 [James LePage] You can have all of this, which we already have in WordPress. 00:54:45 [James LePage] But I think AI plus the additions of, the core AI work plus the future stuff that's already been planned and road mapped for years, that's what positions WordPress in this unique way. 00:54:58 [James LePage] And I don't think it's it's like, oh, WordPress will be the only thing in the future. 00:55:02 [James LePage] But I do think it WordPress has a very, very strong position in the future if we're able to build in this direction and also, like, create, plugins that leverage this type of stuff, create tools that allow people to build in this way. 00:55:17 [James LePage] Just think towards the future. 00:55:18 [James LePage] But I think we're moving in the right direction. 00:55:21 [James LePage] I always wanna be moving faster, but I think we are moving very fast for the pace of WordPress as well already. 00:55:27 [James LePage] And that's where we can end up where this thing is is something that, like you said, doesn't just exist and isn't like that twenty year old thing, but is now a integral cornerstone piece of the open Internet in an AI first era. 00:55:42 [James LePage] Yeah. 00:55:42 [James LePage] Which in that in that, it may be the only thing because everybody's trending towards these closed platforms, walled gardens, no open source, no data ownership. 00:55:52 [James LePage] So if we can remain relevant, we will have the most important position on the web in my opinion, which really for for twenty years. 00:55:59 [James LePage] That's another probably product talk five more episodes. 00:56:03 [Matt Cromwell] Yeah. 00:56:03 [Matt Cromwell] That's that's a bold take. 00:56:07 [Amber Hinds] Yeah. 00:56:07 [Amber Hinds] So Ian had asked a little bit ago, are there any examples, really cool examples that have already are already leveraging kinda, like, the pre beta, whatever we're calling this version of this. 00:56:21 [Amber Hinds] Do you know of any either of you? 00:56:25 [James LePage] I know of 00:56:26 [Amber Hinds] some that will go public soon. 00:56:27 [Amber Hinds] One. 00:56:28 [James LePage] I know some that will go public soon, but they're not out yet. 00:56:31 [James LePage] So I'll let them Okay. 00:56:32 [James LePage] Go out. 00:56:33 [James LePage] I know, and this is this is my fault for not having the name. 00:56:36 [James LePage] But, the PHP client API built by Felix Arntz, that is heavily inspired by another plug in that he's created called a AI services. 00:56:45 [James LePage] And AI services is on the repository, and it does something very similar to what we want this, underlying API to do. 00:56:53 [James LePage] And it does it in a different way that doesn't make sense for core, but it's been built, in the most incredibly architected way possible. 00:57:01 [James LePage] If you look at the code, it's beautiful. 00:57:02 [James LePage] And there's a service or or another plugin that uses AI services in the way that we kind of expect all of this to come together. 00:57:11 [James LePage] They're using AI services to speak with these LLMs, and they're exposing specific functionalities and features, there. 00:57:18 [James LePage] And I'm forgetting the name, and I I hate that I'm forgetting the name. 00:57:21 [James LePage] But I love that example because it's a great example of using these infrastructural pieces to go and build stuff. 00:57:27 [James LePage] The abilities API that we've been mentioning is modeled off of and and, essentially, automatically donate the features API, do heavy work to make it WordPress core ready, and it will be the abilities API. 00:57:40 [James LePage] Right now, the existing features API package has a demonstration agent in it. 00:57:45 [James LePage] So it was actually built in a very, this isn't a word, but a very unpretty way. 00:57:51 [James LePage] So the user interface is bad by design because we want you to look at the code and be like, hey. 00:57:56 [James LePage] Here's how these guys are using these features and interacting with LLMs to go and allow functionality to happen. 00:58:03 [James LePage] And I can say within automatic, all of these concepts have been concepts since I joined, and all of our products are biasing towards using these these upcoming core APIs. 00:58:14 [James LePage] And, really good example is the AI website builder on wordpress.com. 00:58:19 [James LePage] We have WooCommerce work in the future that will use the same stuff and a lot of other projects that are using this as well. 00:58:26 [James LePage] So long long answer short, no direct product just yet because it's so new. 00:58:32 [James LePage] Maybe maybe there is, and I'm I'm I'm kinda missing out. 00:58:36 [James LePage] There are a lot of explorations into AI. 00:58:37 [James LePage] There's a lot of usage of, like, the explorations of the explorations I've seen. 00:58:42 [James LePage] Also shout out Classify from ten up slash fueled, coming from Jeff Paul's group. 00:58:48 [James LePage] And I I named Jeff Paul by name because he's on the core AI team. 00:58:52 [James LePage] Mhmm. 00:58:52 [James LePage] Examples, and there's a lot of, like, here's what can happen, but nothing there just yet. 00:58:58 [James LePage] I'll close by saying we expect to build a showcase plug in as the core AI team to show you how these three things come together and serve as a reference and an experimental base to, play around with some of these features and showcase, how all of these systems work together. 00:59:14 [James LePage] Yeah. 00:59:15 [Matt Cromwell] Jason, I'd love to hear a little bit of your take on the question about just like is the work we're doing right now with CoreAI, is this really gonna give us that leapfrog effect with WordPress where we're gonna be able to really say clearly, like, we're we're doing the thing that takes us into the future? 00:59:34 [Matt Cromwell] I mean, like, I mean, one little tiny bit of additional content that needs to be elephant in the room said, there's a lot of devs in the world who think WordPress is half dead because of its code base. 00:59:48 [Matt Cromwell] It's it's an old dying platform. 00:59:52 [Matt Cromwell] That's like, you know, none of us think that. 00:59:54 [Matt Cromwell] Right? 00:59:55 [Matt Cromwell] Right? 00:59:55 [Matt Cromwell] Wink wink. 00:59:56 [Matt Cromwell] But, you know, that is a perception that folks have. 01:00:00 [Matt Cromwell] Is this something that we're doing that's gonna be able to be like, oh, no. 01:00:03 [Matt Cromwell] No. 01:00:04 [Matt Cromwell] No. 01:00:04 [Matt Cromwell] WordPress is the new sexy. 01:00:08 [Jason Adams] It's a good question. 01:00:10 [Jason Adams] And, you know, people have said that about PHP as a language too, and yet here it is still powering over 80% of the web. 01:00:16 [Jason Adams] Like, clearly, public perception of things and the reality of the market are two very, very vastly different things. 01:00:26 [Jason Adams] But, yeah, as I said before, and I'll reiterate again because I think it's, to me, one of the most profound opportunities of WordPress is overcoming that weakness that you can do so many things in WordPress, but for every feature you add via a plug in, you generally increase the complexity of the experience. 01:00:49 [Jason Adams] So it's just like you could probably chart it in a way. 01:00:53 [Jason Adams] For every plugin I add, my user experience complexity goes up. 01:00:57 [Jason Adams] My power also goes up, but these two things travel next to each other in a rather unfortunate way. 01:01:04 [Jason Adams] And having a unified way for WordPress to scale in terms of capability but remain stable in terms of user experience is a really incredible opportunity. 01:01:16 [Jason Adams] It's basically what we can do as WordPress is we can introduce something agentic like this and then scale to the to the level of plugins and capabilities we have in the ecosystem faster than anybody. 01:01:35 [Jason Adams] So you get give, WooCommerce, the events calendar, all of these folks adding support for this. 01:01:43 [Jason Adams] And not only did we just introduce AI, but we introduced AI with a level of capability that nobody can compete with. 01:01:52 [Jason Adams] Mhmm. 01:01:53 [Jason Adams] And we did it so quickly. 01:01:55 [Jason Adams] That is a unbelievable advantage if everybody is able and willing to get behind that. 01:02:03 [Matt Cromwell] That's awesome. 01:02:04 [Matt Cromwell] I appreciate that. 01:02:05 [Matt Cromwell] That's good stuff. 01:02:06 [Matt Cromwell] Mhmm. 01:02:08 [Matt Cromwell] So, are we are we really at the stage in which we're like, how close is it that we're gonna be like, alright. 01:02:18 [Matt Cromwell] I just spun up a new WordPress website. 01:02:20 [Matt Cromwell] Let's, like, ignore the, like, five minute install setup thing. 01:02:24 [Matt Cromwell] I just installed a new WordPress website. 01:02:28 [Matt Cromwell] I'm going to build an enterprise app that jumps into a new area that I need to do for my business? 01:02:36 [Matt Cromwell] How close are we to that to that vision? 01:02:41 [Jason Adams] I'm gonna be honest. 01:02:43 [Jason Adams] I'm 01:02:44 [Amber Hinds] not sure I understood that. 01:02:47 [Amber Hinds] Right? 01:02:47 [Matt Cromwell] Well, part part of leaning in on what James was saying earlier that that that that's the reality that we're moving towards is that is that this work that we're doing now is going to enable WordPress to basically be able to build any type of digital experience that we want. 01:03:05 [Matt Cromwell] Mhmm. 01:03:06 [Matt Cromwell] Right? 01:03:07 [Amber Hinds] So I'll say that's 01:03:08 [Matt Cromwell] where we're moving towards. 01:03:09 [Matt Cromwell] And if this is the work that we're doing now that's gonna enable that in the future, how how long is that future? 01:03:17 [Amber Hinds] So I wanna say something real quick. 01:03:19 [Amber Hinds] It is entirely possible to build a complex web application with WordPress right now without AI because we have done it when we were doing our enterprise builds. 01:03:29 [Amber Hinds] Like, we weren't building websites most of the time. 01:03:31 [Amber Hinds] We were building portals or web apps that were not public facing. 01:03:35 [Amber Hinds] So that is 100% possible right now. 01:03:38 [Amber Hinds] What I think is that it will get easier for people who don't have that enterprise developer level expertise 01:03:48 [Jason Adams] to Yeah. 01:03:48 [Amber Hinds] Maybe do that, I think. 01:03:50 [Jason Adams] Yeah. 01:03:50 [Jason Adams] Yeah. 01:03:51 [Amber Hinds] But it I mean, that's already possible. 01:03:53 [Amber Hinds] It's just hard and takes a lot more time. 01:03:55 [Amber Hinds] Whereas I the way I see what's happening with the future of WordPress is that kinda stuff will get easier and go a lot faster. 01:04:03 [Matt Cromwell] Yeah. 01:04:03 [Matt Cromwell] Like, I love WordPress's tagline democratizing publishing. 01:04:07 [Matt Cromwell] Are we gonna be democratizing all the things? 01:04:11 [Matt Cromwell] Like, are we gonna be democratizing all the digital applications? 01:04:15 [James LePage] Well, I like the term democratize digital because I think it's it's kind of the evolution of what everything becomes. 01:04:22 [James LePage] And, I think to answer the question, so what what Jason said in terms of you can do so much with WordPress, but the more you kind of layer on to WordPress core, the more complex it gets. 01:04:35 [Matt Cromwell] Yeah. 01:04:36 [James LePage] That's something that already is and will continue to be enhanced with AI. 01:04:41 [James LePage] Not enhanced in terms of it gets more complex, but enhanced 01:04:44 [Matt Cromwell] of 01:04:45 [James LePage] I can now bring all of these solutions together, and I I can kinda, like, pick and choose the pieces. 01:04:49 [James LePage] I know my problem. 01:04:50 [James LePage] I know maybe I'm a developer, and I know even how to solve the problem. 01:04:54 [James LePage] Maybe I'm not, and I'm an expert in what I do. 01:04:56 [James LePage] And I know I can assemble these things on WordPress. 01:04:59 [James LePage] And now this AI can help me in terms of that assembly, in terms of choosing the right bits, in terms of understanding why things may blow up when I install one thing, and that makes WordPress a lot more powerful and unlocks the power that that it already has. 01:05:15 [James LePage] Then there's also the the other side of things where you now have these AI platforms and systems like Automatics AI website builder, like Elementor's AI, like, all of these, Cadence Cadence AI. 01:05:28 [James LePage] All of these things are unlocking some of that power for a a more general consumer. 01:05:33 [James LePage] And I I could also see a lot of that kind of tying plug ins and themes in the front end and the back end altogether in in a way that wasn't even possible unless you hired, like, a massive enterprise agency and spent five years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on. 01:05:50 [James LePage] So that's kind of the the vision. 01:05:52 [James LePage] And I think, like, I know within automatic, we've been thinking about some of these things and experimenting around. 01:05:59 [James LePage] Can I generate a block and generate a back end and, like, create a web app through a lovable style interface? 01:06:04 [James LePage] And the answer is yes. 01:06:06 [James LePage] And we need more time, and we have to put more effort into this product, but this will probably be something that we we release. 01:06:12 [James LePage] And I know many other companies doing the same thing, and we're all doing it in a bit of a different way, but we're all using the same pieces of WordPress to pull it together. 01:06:22 [James LePage] And and that's even removed from AI. 01:06:24 [James LePage] We're all using, or many of us are using the block editor. 01:06:28 [James LePage] Many of us are using plugins to create admin pages that look a bit dated, but that's being fixed with future versions of WordPress. 01:06:36 [James LePage] So we're all doing the same stuff. 01:06:37 [James LePage] And then when you layer in the AI and you're like, hey. 01:06:40 [James LePage] Go and, add these abilities. 01:06:42 [James LePage] Go and connect to these LLMs in this unified way. 01:06:46 [James LePage] You have a pretty end to end system. 01:06:49 [James LePage] And now you have many different ways to get to that end to end system, all oriented at either general market or specific areas of that market, and that becomes really exciting. 01:06:58 [Matt Cromwell] Yeah. 01:06:59 [Matt Cromwell] Love it. 01:06:59 [Amber Hinds] Yeah. 01:07:00 [Amber Hinds] I think, you know, it's interesting. 01:07:02 [Amber Hinds] There's been lots of conversations over the past year about the market share of WordPress and where it's going. 01:07:07 [Amber Hinds] And I know, Matt, you raised earlier, like, how does how does this help WordPress better compete with, you know, some of the other builders that are doing more with that? 01:07:15 [Amber Hinds] And one of the things that I think that's interesting from a product developer perspective is if you look at the history of WordPress, a huge reason why WordPress was able to grow to the market share it was is because of the plug in developers. 01:07:27 [Amber Hinds] And so if we are following that same kind of trajectory, core needs to have this capability. 01:07:33 [Amber Hinds] But in order for it to really continue to make WordPress appealing is the plugin developers have to bring it into their products, and then they have to market that it's in their products because that is what's going to tell consumers that they can do this with WordPress. 01:07:51 [Amber Hinds] Because if core just has the capabilities, but none of the plugins that people use leverage it, then it's not going it doesn't matter that core has the capabilities. 01:08:00 [Amber Hinds] And so Exactly. 01:08:01 [Amber Hinds] Really, if we're thinking about how do we keep WordPress relevant for people, as product owners, we need to be figuring out how to keep our products relevant and on the edge because that's what's going to make the entire platform stay relevant. 01:08:15 [Matt Cromwell] Yep. 01:08:15 [Matt Cromwell] We have this comment here from Peter Ingersoll. 01:08:18 [Matt Cromwell] Making core more robust and available for other AI tools to code for code for feels to me a better way to go versus putting it all into WP itself. 01:08:29 [Matt Cromwell] We shall see. 01:08:29 [Matt Cromwell] And that's the balance. 01:08:30 [Matt Cromwell] This audience right here, the thing that they don't want, James, is that you all build something that's so great with AI that plugins aren't needed anymore, which in some ways, there's this this this careful balance between the fact that, like, plug ins do extend WordPress in such incredible ways, and they're so necessary. 01:08:50 [Matt Cromwell] I love Matt Mullenweg asked in, I think, it was WordCamp, like, '9, 19 or so. 01:08:56 [Matt Cromwell] He was like, how many of you have a WordPress website that has zero plugins? 01:08:59 [Matt Cromwell] And there's not a single hand in the room. 01:09:02 [Matt Cromwell] Nobody has a WordPress website with zero plugins. 01:09:05 [Matt Cromwell] Plugins are what Well, 01:09:06 [Amber Hinds] everybody has hello, Dolly. 01:09:08 [Matt Cromwell] Yeah. 01:09:08 [Matt Cromwell] At at minimum. 01:09:11 [Matt Cromwell] But at the same time, is that like, Jason to Jason's point, is that the best user experience? 01:09:18 [Matt Cromwell] That we're nickel and diming our folks into all these millions of different, plugins that they need to use to build out the site that they want. 01:09:27 [Matt Cromwell] Or even honestly, a lot of folks will lean on something like a a functionality plugin or like a snippets plugin to insert a whole bunch of tiny little snippets. 01:09:36 [Matt Cromwell] I do that on the WP product docs site, for example. 01:09:40 [Matt Cromwell] Each one of those snippets is loading something and taking time as well. 01:09:43 [Matt Cromwell] They might as well be like micro plug ins. 01:09:46 [Matt Cromwell] There's a a world in which AI is gonna empower folks to create all of those little tiny little functionalities, but then at the same time, it's just creating a whole bunch of tiny little, plugins as well to enhance the complexity of the website. 01:10:02 [Matt Cromwell] Right? 01:10:02 [Matt Cromwell] So there's just there's this careful balance between how it can empower folks to have a much better user experience to not require so many functionality plugins, let's say, like platform plugins is a term that some folks use for, like, WooCommerce or Give or the events calendar, things like that. 01:10:19 [Matt Cromwell] Functionality plugins are kind of like things that AI should be able to do today in many ways. 01:10:24 [Matt Cromwell] There it's this careful balance. 01:10:26 [Matt Cromwell] So I I don't really have a question here. 01:10:28 [Matt Cromwell] Just kind of Well, 01:10:29 [James LePage] I I have an agreement to your it's a careful balance. 01:10:31 [James LePage] I think it really is. 01:10:32 [James LePage] I also think that you need to when you think about core specifically, you need to think about how big WordPress really is. 01:10:38 [James LePage] And, like, I know everybody says 43% of the web. 01:10:42 [James LePage] I I never really got it until I started working at automatic. 01:10:45 [James LePage] This is a math project, and this is a project that powers so many it powers NASA. 01:10:50 [James LePage] It powers my personal blog. 01:10:52 [James LePage] It powers humongous d two c websites that do hundreds of millions of dollars a year. 01:10:56 [James LePage] So it's this super versatile thing. 01:10:58 [James LePage] So I don't think we could ever expect this massive AI thing to just be now it's in core, and it's added so much overhead and so much access to WordPress because that's not how WordPress works. 01:11:10 [James LePage] And you bring up the point of plugins. 01:11:13 [James LePage] Plugins are the reason why core works. 01:11:15 [James LePage] It's the reason why WordPress is still relevant after twenty years. 01:11:19 [James LePage] If it was WordPress core and no plugins, WordPress wouldn't exist. 01:11:23 [James LePage] So it's the ecosystem around WordPress. 01:11:25 [James LePage] It's how can you enable the ecosystem to do things in the same way that contribute to the overall user experience. 01:11:32 [James LePage] Yeah. 01:11:32 [James LePage] How can you kind of enable that while smoothing out maybe some of the really, really basic, really annoying things in WordPress core with AI or maybe even without AI? 01:11:41 [James LePage] I like the point about, like, using AI to enhance WordPress. 01:11:45 [James LePage] I think that's an interesting approach. 01:11:47 [James LePage] I can see a lot of basic functionality plugins being enhanced, improved, or created. 01:11:52 [James LePage] Again, like we opened, I don't really see the events calendar being prompted through three prompts and powering the website. 01:11:59 [James LePage] I don't think that's ever gonna happen. 01:12:01 [James LePage] And I think even if it did happen, you won't have the people and the support around it. 01:12:06 [James LePage] You won't have the marketing. 01:12:07 [James LePage] You won't have the learning. 01:12:07 [James LePage] You won't have the webinars, which is probably always gonna have a place in in the industry. 01:12:13 [James LePage] So I agree with you. 01:12:14 [James LePage] That's a long agreement, but I agree with you. 01:12:17 [Amber Hinds] Yeah. 01:12:18 [Amber Hinds] This has been a fabulous conversation. 01:12:20 [Amber Hinds] In fact, we've gone way longer than we normally do, which because it's so great. 01:12:25 [Amber Hinds] And I appreciate we are still getting comments and questions in the YouTube chat, which, unfortunately, I don't know if we're gonna have time to address them all. 01:12:31 [Amber Hinds] But, I do think it would be good for us to transition to what is our best advice, which for everybody watching in, this is like our little elevator pitch of, what we think product owners who want to get into AI, or start putting that in their plug in, what is our best advice for them? 01:12:51 [Matt Cromwell] And all of y'all that are in the comments right now, right after bed best advice, I'm gonna do the whole, like, giveaway thing. 01:12:57 [Matt Cromwell] So hang on tight. 01:12:58 [Matt Cromwell] Alright? 01:12:59 [Matt Cromwell] So, actually best advice I'm up first. 01:13:03 [Amber Hinds] You're up first. 01:13:03 [Matt Cromwell] Yeah. 01:13:04 [Matt Cromwell] I think I'm up first. 01:13:06 [Matt Cromwell] So best advice is stick to the end of the show. 01:13:08 [Matt Cromwell] That's my first best advice. 01:13:10 [Matt Cromwell] Second best advice is, start showing up on those biweekly meetings. 01:13:15 [Matt Cromwell] That's exactly what we asked Jason and team to do. 01:13:17 [Matt Cromwell] That's what they've been doing. 01:13:19 [Matt Cromwell] Jason's been bringing value, to those conversations and he's bringing that right back to the Stellar team automatically. 01:13:26 [Matt Cromwell] Am I stealing your best advice, Jason? 01:13:27 [Matt Cromwell] I hope I'm not. 01:13:28 [Matt Cromwell] But, like, that's that's that's what I think is best is show up to those meetings just and even just be like, you know, a wallflower. 01:13:36 [Matt Cromwell] Just listen, and and see how it goes. 01:13:39 [Matt Cromwell] Or, like, you know, volunteer if you can, if there's things to do. 01:13:43 [Matt Cromwell] So, it, it's been super valuable for me. 01:13:46 [Matt Cromwell] I've been reading all the stuff, reading the summaries later, and definitely benefiting from what Jason has been bringing back to Stellar. 01:13:53 [Matt Cromwell] It's it's been already a a big, big, big advantage for me. 01:13:57 [Matt Cromwell] So that's my best advice. 01:14:01 [Matt Cromwell] And, James, we have you up next. 01:14:04 [James LePage] You kinda stole some of my advice too. 01:14:06 [Matt Cromwell] So Your team. 01:14:07 [Matt Cromwell] This is your team. 01:14:07 [Matt Cromwell] You're like, show up for my thing, guys. 01:14:09 [Matt Cromwell] Yeah. 01:14:10 [James LePage] I I have two I have two bits. 01:14:12 [James LePage] And this is all, like, actually pretty consistent throughout if we're speaking with product developers or agencies or any of it. 01:14:18 [James LePage] The first is get involved, and get involved right now because right now is a very formative part of AI in WordPress. 01:14:26 [James LePage] Formative in terms of what we're building, what we're thinking, how we're thinking, how what we're building is architected. 01:14:33 [James LePage] And if it, like, makes sense for you as a developer of an existing plug in or if you have this crazy idea, is it possible now because of AI? 01:14:40 [James LePage] These are the questions that we wanna be getting and answering and exploring with everybody. 01:14:46 [James LePage] So Jason's been doing that. 01:14:48 [James LePage] Jason's brought up points, in terms of designing this PHP client API that weren't necessarily top of mind until he showed up. 01:14:55 [James LePage] And then it was like, hey. 01:14:56 [James LePage] Like, this is a very relevant point to Stellar, but also to many other web hosts. 01:15:01 [James LePage] We should think about this. 01:15:02 [James LePage] We should design for this. 01:15:04 [James LePage] Let's go and have this discussion in GitHub. 01:15:06 [James LePage] All of those things wouldn't happen if he wasn't involved, so we need more involvement like that. 01:15:12 [James LePage] The second bit is to design the future that you want with AI because it's very scary. 01:15:17 [James LePage] It is. 01:15:18 [James LePage] And things are changing a lot. 01:15:20 [James LePage] And the best thing to do is be proactive and say, I want this. 01:15:25 [James LePage] Like, I want WordPress to be in this spot in the future. 01:15:27 [James LePage] I want, in general, it to be this end to end means of building applications, or I want my plug in to have x y z features. 01:15:36 [James LePage] You have to just move in that direction. 01:15:39 [James LePage] You have to get involved in these conversations. 01:15:41 [James LePage] You have to see what's being shaped by core to understand, hey. 01:15:46 [James LePage] Is this going to be able to be this new product feature of mine? 01:15:50 [James LePage] You need to get involved in core in general to say, I think WordPress should be here in the future. 01:15:55 [James LePage] Like, what are we doing to bring it here? 01:15:57 [James LePage] And if the answer is we're not, like, why are we not? 01:16:00 [James LePage] Should we not be? 01:16:01 [James LePage] Should we be? 01:16:02 [James LePage] Those types of discussions help design the future of where everything goes. 01:16:05 [James LePage] And that's the beauty of open source. 01:16:07 [James LePage] It's what people want, and it wouldn't exist if people didn't want it. 01:16:10 [James LePage] So design the future you want, whatever that means to you. 01:16:14 [James LePage] And to me, I think, like, the the main way to design the future you want is to get involved in the core AI stuff. 01:16:21 [James LePage] Shout out again, meg.wordpress.org/ai and the core AI channel in Slack. 01:16:27 [Matt Cromwell] Excellent. 01:16:27 [Matt Cromwell] Love it. 01:16:28 [Matt Cromwell] Amber. 01:16:29 [Amber Hinds] Alright. 01:16:30 [Amber Hinds] So I'm not gonna repeat. 01:16:32 [Amber Hinds] Go read the blog post, but, of course, I suppose you should. 01:16:35 [Amber Hinds] But what I would say is particularly no. 01:16:38 [Amber Hinds] Actually, it doesn't matter what size your team is. 01:16:40 [Amber Hinds] There is always more things that you could build than there is time in a week or a month or a year. 01:16:48 [Amber Hinds] And so what I would say to be a little bit cautious about with the AI stuff is shiny object syndrome. 01:16:55 [Matt Cromwell] Mhmm. 01:16:56 [Amber Hinds] So pay attention to what your customers actually will benefit from. 01:17:01 [Amber Hinds] Think really long and hard on that, what they will be willing to pay for, because what they want is not always the same as what they'd be willing to pay for, and then also how you will support it. 01:17:13 [Amber Hinds] Because we can definitely get into areas with, AI being able to speed up our ability to code certain things or whatever where potentially we could build out a feature, and then it would have taken a bunch of our time and attention. 01:17:27 [Amber Hinds] But in the long run, it doesn't benefit the product business. 01:17:30 [Amber Hinds] So I would really spend time thinking kind of consciously about that and mapping out and making sure if you don't have one that you have some sort of clear road map and how AI can fit into that in support of other things that maybe you already have the research to show are necessary for your product. 01:17:49 [Matt Cromwell] Love it. 01:17:50 [Matt Cromwell] Jason? 01:17:51 [Amber Hinds] What about you, Jason? 01:17:54 [Jason Adams] I yeah. 01:17:55 [Jason Adams] I'll I'll let go to get involved. 01:17:57 [Jason Adams] Right? 01:17:58 [Jason Adams] It's definitely a good time to do it. 01:17:59 [Jason Adams] And I will say that the you know, I showed up completely out of nowhere last Thursday. 01:18:06 [Jason Adams] And just started asking questions, jumping into conversations, and everybody was extremely friendly, inviting. 01:18:14 [Jason Adams] Nobody has told me that, you know, get get back over there, nerd. 01:18:19 [Jason Adams] You know, they've been really friendly about it. 01:18:21 [Jason Adams] So it probably feels scary to approach a team like that, but they're great people. 01:18:27 [Jason Adams] Like, they definitely wanna hear your thoughts and input, and nobody's gonna look down on you if you don't know AI deeply and all that good stuff. 01:18:34 [Jason Adams] So just go for it. 01:18:37 [Jason Adams] Then for, yeah, product owners and the like, don't get overly distracted by possibilities. 01:18:42 [Jason Adams] Just start somewhere. 01:18:43 [Jason Adams] Like, at this point, we are developing a skill of thinking in these ways of what AI can do and how to integrate it into products or what products to build around it. 01:18:55 [Jason Adams] Like, it's better to just start doing something than to get stuck in analysis paralysis with all of this stuff. 01:19:02 [Jason Adams] So just do something. 01:19:04 [Jason Adams] Mhmm. 01:19:06 [Jason Adams] And then, then second is, think beyond the agent. 01:19:11 [Jason Adams] Apple has taken a really interesting approach to AI where they've said that their goal is not to come out with another agent. 01:19:21 [Jason Adams] A lot of us when we think of AM or AI, we think of LLMs. 01:19:26 [Jason Adams] We think of ChatGPT and Gemini. 01:19:28 [Jason Adams] We think of these chat interfaces that we work with. 01:19:32 [Jason Adams] But there's a heck of a lot more that you can do with AI that has nothing to do with the chat interface. 01:19:37 [Jason Adams] So don't limit yourself to just thinking about how can I make it, you know, my product work inside of a chat interface? 01:19:44 [Jason Adams] Yep. 01:19:45 [Jason Adams] You know, there are so many other creative ways to approach AI where the user doesn't even realize that they're using AI. 01:19:52 [Jason Adams] Mhmm. 01:19:52 [Jason Adams] Your product just feels like magic because it just did something incredible, and you know that an agent or that a LLM or whatever somewhere did that for you. 01:20:03 [Jason Adams] But, but yeah. 01:20:04 [Jason Adams] So be creative with all of this stuff. 01:20:07 [Matt Cromwell] Yep. 01:20:08 [Matt Cromwell] Excellent. 01:20:08 [Matt Cromwell] Love it. 01:20:10 [Matt Cromwell] Alright. 01:20:10 [Matt Cromwell] We're gonna get to the giveaway. 01:20:12 [Matt Cromwell] I just wanna highlight super fast mode. 01:20:14 [Jason Adams] A 01:20:14 [Matt Cromwell] couple really great comments in this. 01:20:17 [Matt Cromwell] We, we did that one. 01:20:18 [Matt Cromwell] Marshall, real quick. 01:20:19 [Matt Cromwell] How do you see AI as future security assistant for WP sites integrated with core or somehow we're not gonna get to it? 01:20:26 [Matt Cromwell] I think it's really great, though. 01:20:27 [Matt Cromwell] Security 01:20:28 [James LePage] Patchback, though. 01:20:29 [James LePage] Shout out to Patchback. 01:20:30 [James LePage] They did a lovely AI thing. 01:20:31 [James LePage] Look at their look at their work. 01:20:33 [James LePage] It's awesome. 01:20:34 [Matt Cromwell] I appreciate that, James. 01:20:35 [Matt Cromwell] That's a good one. 01:20:36 [Matt Cromwell] Yeah. 01:20:36 [Matt Cromwell] Patchstack's AI implementation is really, really excellent. 01:20:39 [Matt Cromwell] They're a great one. 01:20:40 [Matt Cromwell] It's not core, but it's really great. 01:20:43 [Matt Cromwell] I love this one. 01:20:44 [Matt Cromwell] Rising tides from Ian Meisner. 01:20:46 [Matt Cromwell] He says, rising tides, I'm okay if a site needs 12 plugins instead of 35, subtext because of AI. 01:20:52 [James LePage] I 01:20:52 [Matt Cromwell] think I agree with that. 01:20:53 [Matt Cromwell] Depends on the plugins you're getting rid of, I have to say. 01:20:57 [Matt Cromwell] Peter Ingersoll says, it's become faster for me to use AI to create a snippet that I bring into WP to do the exact thing I want versus finding a plug in that might do the part. 01:21:06 [Matt Cromwell] It's exactly what I do. 01:21:07 [Matt Cromwell] If you wanna see WP or AI in action, look at the wpproduct. 01:21:11 [Matt Cromwell] Website. 01:21:12 [Amber Hinds] So Yeah. 01:21:13 [Amber Hinds] There's actually a bunch of videos on the Equalize Digital YouTube channel where I show the back end of that website and how it's all built because I've been modifying. 01:21:24 [Amber Hinds] So the caveat I will say is AI code snippets are not always accessible. 01:21:29 [Matt Cromwell] Yeah. 01:21:29 [Matt Cromwell] Yeah. 01:21:29 [Matt Cromwell] Yeah. 01:21:30 [Matt Cromwell] And they all 01:21:31 [Amber Hinds] I I have gone through and fixed a lot of those code snippets. 01:21:35 [Matt Cromwell] I just always say, now make it secure and accessible, AI, please, and it works. 01:21:41 [Matt Cromwell] And I hope AI can improve this is Peter Ingersoll again. 01:21:44 [Matt Cromwell] I hope AI can improve the overall WP experience beyond code. 01:21:48 [Matt Cromwell] For example, cleaning and enhancing the WP repositories, presenting 59,000 plugins and 13,000 themes is not really helpful. 01:21:56 [Matt Cromwell] Might agree to disagree on that one a little bit, but there's definitely still always room for pruning, when it comes to things that are outdated or insecure. 01:22:07 [Matt Cromwell] I Like better search. 01:22:08 [Matt Cromwell] Yeah. 01:22:09 [Matt Cromwell] Or better. 01:22:09 [Matt Cromwell] Yeah. 01:22:09 [Matt Cromwell] I miss the Well, I like 01:22:10 [James LePage] the term enhancing. 01:22:11 [James LePage] I like the term enhancing. 01:22:12 [James LePage] I like that a lot. 01:22:13 [James LePage] And Matt Mullenweg explicitly was speaking about that at WordCamp Europe. 01:22:17 [James LePage] So if you want to see change there, there is a team that you can get involved with as well, and I'm sure they would love your help. 01:22:25 [Matt Cromwell] Last one, we're definitely not gonna get into. 01:22:27 [Matt Cromwell] Ian Meiser says, how involved is the WOO team? 01:22:29 [Matt Cromwell] I'd love to see a lot more AI activity from the WOO team myself. 01:22:32 [Matt Cromwell] I think that's a good idea. 01:22:35 [Amber Hinds] I'm sure it's coming. 01:22:36 [Matt Cromwell] We'll hope to hear from them. 01:22:37 [Amber Hinds] That's what I have to say. 01:22:38 [Matt Cromwell] Yeah. 01:22:39 [Matt Cromwell] Yeah. 01:22:40 [Amber Hinds] I I mean, no insider information. 01:22:41 [Amber Hinds] I'm just sure it's coming. 01:22:43 [Matt Cromwell] Yeah. 01:22:43 [Matt Cromwell] For sure. 01:22:45 [Matt Cromwell] So cool cool. 01:22:46 [Matt Cromwell] Everybody, here is the thing. 01:22:47 [Matt Cromwell] If you are looking for some free swag, and James and Jason, I will set you up myself, But, this is where you go. 01:22:57 [Matt Cromwell] Go to wpproduct.com and go to the contact page because right now, for a limited time, you will see can you see the drop down on this? 01:23:07 [Matt Cromwell] Does it show up on the screen? 01:23:10 [Amber Hinds] Yep. 01:23:11 [Matt Cromwell] I want a WPPT hat. 01:23:13 [Matt Cromwell] When you go to the contact form, choose the option, I want a WPPT hat, and then tell me your size and your mailing address, and I'm going to send it to you. 01:23:23 [Matt Cromwell] So open for, like, twenty four hours from now, and, thank you all so much for being our listeners and for, being the reason why we do this at all. 01:23:34 [Matt Cromwell] And I cannot believe that we've done a 100 episodes, And I hope I'm alive by the time we do 200. 01:23:42 [Amber Hinds] Yes. 01:23:43 [Amber Hinds] Me too. 01:23:47 [Amber Hinds] James, Jason, do you wanna share where people can find you online? 01:23:53 [James LePage] Yeah. 01:23:53 [James LePage] James w LePage on x, formerly known as Twitter. 01:23:57 [James LePage] That is where I talk a lot about AI and WordPress. 01:24:02 [Jason Adams] Yeah. 01:24:03 [Jason Adams] Jason v, Adams on x. 01:24:06 [Jason Adams] You could also find me on the post status Slack and then also in the the WordPress Slack as well. 01:24:14 [Jason Adams] So feel free to grab me in any of those spaces. 01:24:17 [Matt Cromwell] Alright. 01:24:18 [Amber Hinds] Wonderful. 01:24:19 [Amber Hinds] Well, thank you so much, both of you, for being here. 01:24:23 [Amber Hinds] Thank you to everyone who watched. 01:24:25 [Amber Hinds] I think we're up to, like, a 138 viewers. 01:24:28 [Amber Hinds] Yeah. 01:24:28 [Amber Hinds] So thanks so much for watching live. 01:24:31 [Amber Hinds] If you are watching this next week, our cohost, Zach Katz and Katie Keith, will be back with guest Steve Jones, one of my partners from Equalize Digital, to discuss translation and expanding your product's reach to an international audience. 01:24:46 [Matt Cromwell] Special thanks like always to Post Status for being our green room. 01:24:49 [Matt Cromwell] And if you're enjoying these shows, do us a favor. 01:24:51 [Matt Cromwell] Hit the like button. 01:24:52 [Matt Cromwell] Hit the subscribe button wherever you are listening to us at. 01:24:55 [Matt Cromwell] Share it with your friends. 01:24:56 [Matt Cromwell] Reference this show in your newsletters. 01:24:58 [Matt Cromwell] We got our reference in a newsletter just today, actually. 01:25:01 [Matt Cromwell] And most of all, we hope to see you for a brand new, episode of WP Product next week. 01:25:07 [Matt Cromwell] Thanks, everybody. 01:25:09 [Jason Adams] Thank you. 01:25:09 [Jason Adams] Bye. 01:25:10 [Jason Adams] Bye.