WCAsia 2026 Opening Keynote

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Hello WordCamp.

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How are y’all?

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Thank you so much for having me.

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I really appreciate it and I’m excited to jump.

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been to this presentation on AI and WordPress.

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I’m also super bummed.

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I can’t be there in person.

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I was planning on it.

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I have some family stuff.

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So I’m giving you this presentation live and direct from Charlotte, North Carolina.

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United States.

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I’m drinking coffee.

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It’s the middle of the night.

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It’s early for y’all.

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Everybody’s drinking coffee.

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My goal today is to talk about AI and WordPress.

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and speak towards the things that have happened in the project and what we’re building and what we’re doing, what’s coming in the near future, but also zoom out a little bit and think about the position and place that WordPress plays

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in this internet in this AI era.

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So it’s an interesting presentation.

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It’s one where it’s kind of taken a life of its own as I’ve put it together.

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So I’m really excited to

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present to y’all.

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Hopefully there will be time for questions at the end.

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I think one of my favorite things about WordCamps and something that I’m definitely already feeling the FOMO, looking at the video feeds.

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is that in-person question answer time, the ideas shared, the code looked at.

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So while I won’t have that opportunity in person myself,

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There are many folks from the core AI focuses and functions here.

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And I really invite you to use the in-person time to the best of your advantage.

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So the obligatory slide, who I am.

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My name is James LePage.

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I actually had a way better introduction from

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uh our opening presenters than I even think I can give myself.

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So thank you for that.

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That’s awesome.

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But my name is James LePage.

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I’m the core AI co-lead for the WordPress project.

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I’m also the head of AI at Automatic

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To quickly restate my background, I got my start in WordPress building websites as a freelancer, eventually grew into running an agency.

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Sold the agency, ran a startup in FinTech for a little bit, and then founded a company called WPAI.

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And WPAI, as the name suggests, did AI for WordPress

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Some of y’all may remember the Code WP and the Agent WP products.

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I really love those near and dear to my heart.

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We were acquired into automatic and this is where I find myself.

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You can find me online at j.

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cv.

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That’s my personal blog.

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I have a lot of writing on this blog that cover a lot of the topics that we’ll speak about today.

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You can also find me on X or Twitter and LinkedIn at James W.

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LePage.

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So that’s who I am.

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And before we really get into the WordPress stuff, before we get into the AI stuff, I I want to take a step back and take a look at

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what WordPress actually works within, what it occupies, which is the web.

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And to me, the web isn’t just a collection of pages, but instead it’s a living graph of entities.

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And it’s really beautiful.

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This collection of entities, these individual websites represent people and businesses and places and concepts and ideas.

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And each of these

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is connected through links.

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They have citations.

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They have content that’s similar to other websites.

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They have trust signals.

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So we have this beautiful internet of interconnected pieces of the web.

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These individual sites typically contain content that’s been shaped and crafted by people and humans behind it.

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And it forms a genuinely beautiful collection of human knowledge, of human ideas, ingenuity.

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This is a visual representation of that actual graph of the web.

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And if you look it up, I I actually forget what the study is, but you you can get to these images.

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And you can see the evolution of the web over time and the growth and the scaling of these really, really incredibly connected nodes.

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Each little dot in the

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representation being a website, websites connected through the links, through the semantic similarity, each color in this graph representing a

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specific category of site.

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This is what the internet is.

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And again, to me, it’s a beautiful representation of people and humanity all pushing their hearts and their souls and their ideas into a digital space.

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And this structure of the web, this interconnected collection of entities, has been very stable for 30 plus years.

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And what’s changing right now because of this AI stuff isn’t that structure, but instead it’s everything else.

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It’s everything around that structure.

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And one of the big changes that I’m seeing today is the shifting consumption model.

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Now we have AI consuming content.

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AI didn’t exist in the way that it does even three, four years ago.

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Users are reading less.

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Publishers are changing the way they’re capturing value.

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And when I say consumption model, it maybe sounds like a big scary concept, but it’s really just the discovery and the reading and the understanding and the traversing of the web and the content within.

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And that consumption model is changing because of AI.

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So yesterday, and I say this in absolute terms, but it’s not absolute.

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This is still happening.

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I still do this all the time today.

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Yesterday, a human would visit a site.

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They’d go and read the content, they’d click the links, they’d go through the rabbit holes, they’d get distracted by an Amazon product and then buy it as a

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I did today.

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And we go and synthesize the answer, or we go and take the action, or we go and achieve the goal on our own accord.

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And this has been really the way the web has worked for a long time.

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We search on Google, we end up on the site.

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We see the URL on the billboard, we end up on the site.

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We click through, we come to our own conclusions.

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And today now we see AI beginning to sit between the human and the web.

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And we see this with many of these AI tools.

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We see this also with the traditional ways we’ve interacted with the internet.

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Google introducing AI overviews.

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something that synthesizes answers from dozens or hundreds of sources to give you a quick tidbit of information that may answer your question, may help you achieve your goal a bit quicker.

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a chat GBT pulling web searches down to cite sources to give you answers or research reports or recommendations.

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But right now, the user is still deciding.

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They’re still acting.

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They’re the ones being given this synthesis of that web

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Tomorrow, things change even more.

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The user begins to delegate goals to an agent.

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And that agent, instead of the person, begins traversing this open web, walking through those connected lines on the entities.

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comparing and acting, creating a recommendation, fulfilling an action.

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And the user chooses to be a part of the outcome, but maybe they don’t need to be.

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And I think it’s also worth defining what an actual agent is.

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An agent to me is something that is an AI-based system that uses LLMs that has agency.

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Agency meaning they can go and do things themselves.

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They get the goal, they have a collection of tools, they walk through the internet to go and achieve that outcome.

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And this all represents that shifting, changing consumption model.

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Now instead of taking half a day to do research on one specific thing, I can go spin up multiple agents.

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I can use OpenClaw.

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I can use

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Claude code, I can use ChatGPT to go and do things for me, which means I’m much more enabled, much more efficient, and I can do a lot more at once.

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It’s a very interesting shift.

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And that shift points to a term that has probably been mentioned at WordCamps time and time again.

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Content is king.

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And content in this AI era that we find ourselves hurtling towards still is king.

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Content is king again.

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And the reason is

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AI needs content to run well.

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The models are already trained.

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They already exist.

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But what they need is information about the world, deep expertise on specific topics.

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Creation and novel outcomes that these models can’t do.

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So right now, humans are still reporting the news.

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We don’t have flying robots from OpenAI going and interviewing us as to how great WordCamp Asia really is.

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this year.

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The humans are saying it’s great this year.

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The people are writing the posts.

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We’re creating the things that are making AI useful.

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Which means that to me, AI, generative AI, LLMs, agents, they’re not going to replace the open web if we have anything to say about it.

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But instead, it makes this open web

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this beautiful graph that I showed you on slide four, way more valuable.

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The people on the platforms that are creating and creating and publishing, this is going to matter a lot more in this AI mediated internet.

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Internet, not less.

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And to me, the act of writing and publishing on a personal level is more important now than it’s been in years.

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As soon as I saw how the internet was evolving, these

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answers, these retrieval systems, these chatbots that would draw on sources.

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I began blogging a lot more about me, myself, my businesses.

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Because I knew that I wanted to control my representation, control the way I was positioned and placed on the internet.

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This has always been something, but it’s much more important in this AI-enabled era.

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But the way the publisher captures value is shifting.

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That content model is shifting and it’s impacting the economic model.

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that publishers, big and small, me on my blog, huge media conglomerates, enterprises, e-commerce stores, bomber stores.

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It’s changing the way we capture value.

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Now AI is synthesizing the content without always sending visitors to the source.

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And we’re seeing responses already on the open internet like RSL, really simple licensing.

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a standard to monetize and protect content.

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We’re seeing Cloudflare block AI crawlers by default.

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That model is changing.

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And it poses an interesting question to me.

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Who shapes how the content is accessed and how it’s synthesized and how it’s represented in this era that we find ourselves rapidly

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pointing towards.

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And if we want to go higher level, a big question becomes, what does this future look like?

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Is this future open?

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Or is the future closed?

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And I’m sure this is another question that we’ve also asked at WordCamps time and time again.

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To me, open versus closed when it comes to the

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this AI-enabled internet, this AI era is an interesting question.

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The closed approach means that we have proprietary layers.

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They all work together.

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Content becomes material for interfacing.

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It’s a walled garden.

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It’s a garden, it’s very pretty, but you’re within it.

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You don’t have an understanding as to how it works and the agents that operate within these systems.

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These closed systems don’t publish their protocols, they don’t publish the way they work.

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We don’t really understand how to best interact with them.

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And that closed walled garden is something I would like to avoid in this AI internet.

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But I think it’s also something that we’ve always wanted to at least have an answer to.

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which is a big reason why I love WordPress in general.

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And that open future, that open approach, brings the source code to light.

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It has open protocols.

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It has open data.

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Your site can expose what it is and what it does through these standards like MCP, and I’ll talk a lot more about that momentarily.

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You can choose your AI models, you can have your infrastructure.

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And the web, that beautiful graph representation of the web, remains this decentralized network where you’re maintaining

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the control on how you’re represented, you’re owning your content, you’re being able to move it around.

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You have the benefit that WordPress offers.

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And this isn’t something that’s theoretical.

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This is something that’s happening right now.

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And I absolutely see it as an individual working on my own personal blog, walking through the internet.

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But I definitely see this in automatic and in the statistics on our users and in the way the internet itself is shaping up in the steering groups and the committees and all of the

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Different things going on online today.

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This stuff is happening now.

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And the outcome of this closed versus open, how this internet actually looks in five years.

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It really to me depends on what gets built and who’s actually building it.

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And that’s when we get to our favorite number.

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And I know this number shifts and changes a little bit.

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This is actually my favorite number.

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So 43% of the web running on WordPress.

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That means that WordPress plays a very important role in what this future internet looks like.

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The largest open source publishing platform on the planet.

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And I’ll actually put a cross-through, a strike-through.

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and to just say the largest publishing platform on the planet.

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And this is the largest publishing platform that has two interesting things, especially in this AI era.

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Distribution and content.

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And this is really important for WordPress, but this is important really for any product, any piece of software, now that these generative AI LLM-based things are walking around.

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Distribution is really hard to do.

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Having placement across the entirety of the internet is very difficult.

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New things pop up consistently.

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But they don’t have the positioning that WordPress has.

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And they also don’t have the content.

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WordPress is by definition a content management system.

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It’s something that manages the stuff that a language model

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must interact with to be powerful.

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So these are two assets that we have as the WordPress project.

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And the third is that we have always been the open web’s foundation.

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And now this role is more and more important.

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And so this was something that I think the WordPress project itself began to understand as we began to understand what LLMs were and how they would work.

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and how they would interface with the software and what the limitations were and what we would expect things to happen, how we would expect things to shape up in the future

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And the project was deeply tracking LLMs basically since they came out.

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And we watched and we waited for the maturity of an LLM, the maturity of the AI industry itself, and then began building.

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We started building for this interesting change in the consumption models, this interesting change in the way we interact with software.

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And the first thing we started doing on the AI side of things, something that gets delivered in its entirety with WordPress 7.

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0, we call AI building blocks for WordPress.

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And you’ll see a couple QR codes in the lower corner of the screen.

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These are things you can scan to get a lot more information about it.

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I wanted to do this presentation in a way where we spoke about these four foundational pieces.

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but also spoke about the impact that they have now that they really do exist in WordPress.

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If you’ve seen State of the Word, if you’ve seen some of the previous WordCamp US presentations.

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We go into a lot more detail about these building blocks, but if you scan that QR code, it will give you a really good overview of these blocks.

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You can also keep up to date with all of the AI stuff at make.

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wordpress.

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org slash AI.

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And so these are the building blocks that we need to create to bring AI to WordPress

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And now, today, with the WordPress 7.

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0 beta, with the upcoming release, and in WordPress 6.

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9, WordPress can do three things that it couldn’t do before.

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The first thing, the first building block for AI, we call the abilities API.

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And this is in WordPress right now as of 6.

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9.

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The Abilities API allows you to tell any AI what your website is capable of.

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Your site can publish a machine-readable list of everything it can do.

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And that machine readable list says, if you give me this in, I’ll go do this out.

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And by the way, here are my permissions, and here’s exactly how I work.

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So an ability could look like updating content, managing users.

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Interlinking pages.

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And when presented as a total list of what the website can do to AI, that AI can use it to interact with software.

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You can think of this as a tool set.

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And your website itself being a toolbox.

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Abilities are really fun to me because you can also add additional abilities with the installation of WordPress plugins.

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Maybe I have a great learning management plugin and it has a lot of capabilities that I want AI to be able to interact with.

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If that learning management plugin bundles abilities and I have an agent that uses these abilities or these individual tools.

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You could almost imagine the installation of this plugin on my WordPress website dumping seven new tools into that toolbox.

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that now AI can use.

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And I have to mention also, Abilities is a very cool API.

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Even if AI didn’t exist, it would be really fun.

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But to me, I’m a bit biased and a bit focused on AI.

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So Abilities API for AI is extremely powerful.

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And it’s that kind of cornerstone thing that you need.

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to bring AI to WordPress.

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The second thing is coming core as of WordPress 7.

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0.

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Something that exists, something that’s being tested and has been tested for some time.

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But the WP AI client now allows WordPress to interact with any AI provider.

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A provider is a company like OpenAI or Google, and they give access to state-of-the-art AI models.

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These models you can prompt to go do things.

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These models you can give access to tools, tools being abilities in the context of WordPress.

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And this is something that is swappable and pluggable.

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It’s a universal way to interact with AI.

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It doesn’t lock you into a provider.

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And you can choose, hey, I want to use a model from my desktop locally hosted.

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Completely private.

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Or you can say, I want to use the best and greatest model from Google.

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You can choose anything you want, which I think is the biggest point of this WP AI client.

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And what’s interesting, when you take these two things together, the abilities API and the WP AI client, you end up with a toolkit to build native first class end-to-end agents and AI features into WordPress as a developer.

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And now that things like Claude Code exist and now that these projects are extremely well documented, you can kind of try your hand even if you don’t consider yourself a developer.

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And that’s really exciting and interesting to me.

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The third building block is almost more important than the first two, but it’s actually dependent on the first two, so I put it third.

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This third building block is the MCP adapter

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And first I’ll mention the concept of adapter.

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So we have a list of abilities of what can happen on a WordPress site.

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These abilities can be used by AI and people alike, but AI to go do something on WordPress.

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But this is within WordPress.

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Outside of WordPress, we have a bunch of clients, things like ChatGBT, Claude Code.

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These clients need to interface with the tools that software has to offer.

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And the way they interface

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in a primary function is MCP.

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MCP is model context protocol.

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It’s an open protocol.

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It’s now under the Linux Foundation

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which is really exciting.

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And it allows third-party clients to talk to software.

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So it allows us to say we have agents that can be built within WordPress, but we can also make WordPress

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extremely accessible to agents outside of it.

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We can meet users where they want to use AI.

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And this third building block

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Gives that holistic coverage of AI within WordPress, AI on the front end, AI on the back end, AI everywhere

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These blocks make WordPress enabled for an agentic era.

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Without them, we couldn’t build for AI.

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With them, we can.

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And all of them ship with WordPress 7.

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0.

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All of them are open source.

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All of them are readily available.

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They’re also not forced.

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You can opt in, you can opt out, but they’re available regardless of your host, regardless of your provider or your budget.

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And this to me is extremely exciting because now with WordPress 7.

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0, we have a CMS that is ready for what the future of the internet is

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20:49
And if you if you skin scanned the first QR code and are reading this building blocks article, you’ll be like, James, hey, where’s the fourth?

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20:57
This is the fourth.

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20:58
The fourth building block is the AI plugin for WordPress

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21:01
This is something that ties all three of the other blocks together and says, here’s what they can actually do.

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21:08
Here are the capabilities that we can offer you as a user of WordPress, as somebody who wants to generate images

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21:15
Get editor assistance, generate content, all built on these cornerstone building blocks.

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21:21
So it’s a great reference to

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21:22
to the code and how everything works, but it’s also just like awesome to install on your WordPress website and get AI features.

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21:30
So this is a plugin that is a core canonical plugin, an official plugin of the project.

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21:35
And it’s available for everybody.

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21:37
And it’s an awesome project.

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21:38
It’s consistently like every week releasing new versions.

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21:42
I think I went on my email maybe like 10 minutes before this and I saw that there’s a 0.

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21:47
7.

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21:48
0 release

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21:48
out or coming out.

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21:50
So consistently improving every day.

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21:53
And for the developers, now that these things exist

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21:56
Within WordPress 7.

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21:58
0, you can use these APIs directly.

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22:00
You can register abilities in your plugins or for your clients.

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22:04
You can query AI through the WPAI client.

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22:07
You can expose all of this to third-party agents through MCP.

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22:11
And you begin building your WordPress websites, the existing stuff that you maintain yourself or you maintain for your clients or your people.

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22:19
Towards this agentic era.

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22:21
You begin truly enabling your people or yourself to be a player in this

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22:27
this world.

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22:29
And across the ecosystem, we’re seeing the adoption of these building blocks really, really rapidly.

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22:35
So I put this slide together and I wanted to find some logos.

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22:38
So I started doing research

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22:40
And I already know of ACF.

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22:42
I think that was a really fun announcement where they announced that they support abilities and Elementor doing really fun stuff with AI and WS Forum using all

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22:49
three of the blocks.

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22:51
But I also started finding community contributed provider plugins that work with that WPAI client and allow me to query things from MISTR

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23:00
a very popular open, open-ish AI provider in Europe, open router, OLAMA.

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23:08
And the list kept growing and growing and growing and growing.

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23:11
So it’s not just core, it’s everywhere in WordPress that’s now using these blocks because they’re mature and available

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23:17
And as I put this slide together, I decided to write a blog post.

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23:21
So my blog j.

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23:22
cv slash blog has a post that says the AI ecosystem.

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23:27
or the ecosystem around AI and WordPress or something like this.

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23:30
And that post got so long and so overwhelming and had hundreds of links.

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23:34
It just got me so excited to see the actual use.

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23:38
of these building blocks in the real world, something where people are really deriving value and building really impressive things.

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23:46
This stuff is shipping now and it’s consistently covered in TechCrunch and NGadget and CMS wire.

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23:52
We have real products, both within the WordPress project itself, but almost more exciting within the community.

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23:59
We have real users using these things.

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24:01
and legitimate capabilities being built into WordPress as we speak.

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24:05
Even in the contributor day yesterday, I saw some really fun stuff shaping up in core AI.

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24:12
And this starts us down the path, the path to the future.

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24:16
We start moving from a CMS to an agentic platform.

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24:20
And this is something that’s more personal to me as opposed to

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24:23
Core AI is decreeing that this is becoming agentic platform, but it’s something where when we manage content and we place AI around it or near it, we’re able to build towards a future-facing agentic platform

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24:37
So WordPress isn’t becoming this AI-powered CMS.

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24:40
It’s not becoming something that is sparkle buttons everywhere and AI everywhere and 14 little clippies trying to joust for your attention.

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24:49
But it is becoming a platform that agents can operate on directly.

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24:53
They can access it through MCP, they can access it through the REST API, through the WPCLI by directly using abilities both server side and client side.

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25:03
And this platform is the same old WordPress that we know and love.

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25:08
It has the same permissions baked in, the capabilities, the user role.

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25:12
It has the same governance as the project.

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25:14
It’s open.

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25:15
We can see all of the code.

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25:16
There’s no back doors.

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25:18
The automation and the agents respect the same rules holistically as people have for 20 years with WordPress.

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25:25
And this becomes the only agentic platform that has that deep distribution, that 43% of the internet, that’s already that cornerstone

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25:34
Which means it opens a door to a really exciting future for WordPress and AI.

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25:41
And I want to take a step back.

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25:42
before I talk about that feature, because there’s a lot more in WordPress and WordPress 7.

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25:47
0 than AI.

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25:49
And obviously I will talk about AI, but I do want to shout out one of the other flagship cornerstone features of this impending release.

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25:57
collaborative editing.

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25:58
This is something that’s really exciting to me.

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26:00
I’m sure there’s going to be a lot of demonstrations and chatter and discussion around it during the WordCamp Asia in-person sessions.

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26:08
But collaborative editing to me is really interesting because it was designed kind of before we saw all of this AI stuff shape up.

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26:17
It was designed for humans to work together in a document.

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26:20
And it’s really fun.

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26:20
It’s really awesome.

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26:22
to play with and explore with people that you work with, but also yourself.

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26:25
I had like 18 different windows open and I was bouncing between all of them.

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26:30
It was awesome.

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26:31
You have your blocks that sync, you have your paragraphs that sync.

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26:35
It’s really impressive.

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26:37
But now with AI, some of those collaborators aren’t going to be human.

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26:41
And what’s interesting to me

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26:42
Is that we can use the same infrastructure that we’ve built for people for agents.

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26:48
We have the same permissions.

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26:49
The agents can now work alongside you in the editor.

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26:52
We have content guidelines that can steer them.

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26:54
We have abilities that can be changed.

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26:56
together into workflows.

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26:57
And all of this to say we’re building these building blocks for WordPress.

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27:01
They’re shipping into WordPress 7.

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27:03
0.

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27:04
There are additional features in WordPress 7.

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27:06
0.

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27:07
There’s more work to do in AI with the AI plugin, but there’s also more work to do in general as the WordPress platform moves in

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27:15
this agentic era, we have options to go and explore and build and continue to push the future of what this platform truly can be and truly can do.

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27:25
So to me one of those options

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27:26
is collaborative editing, collaborative editing with both people and agents.

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27:30
But that’s just one example of many exciting future states of WordPress.

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27:36
And that future state starts pointing towards the future state of the web, which I am calling the agentic web.

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27:43
And you’ll see the agentic web mentioned in many marketing documents all over the place.

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27:48
I keep seeing it pop up.

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27:49
But to me, the agentic web is simply the internet that exists, that beautiful graph with a new player on the board.

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27:56
Instead of only people, now we have agents

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27:58
those agents being these LLM derived systems that have agency that can do things for you.

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28:04
We start moving from questions to goals.

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28:07
And we start moving from synthesis to action, that changing consumption model that I spoke about.

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28:12
But the agents that are changing this consumption model

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28:15
are already using the same infrastructure that the web has, that the web shifts with, that the web has had for 30 years.

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28:22
We’re not re-architecting the internet in service of these agents.

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28:26
These things operate browsers.

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28:28
And a great example of these things operating browsers is Claude and Chrome, the ChatGBT computer use, the perplexity computer.

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28:38
They click, they use the area labels, they use the internet that already exists.

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28:43
On the other hand, other agents are accessing websites or these

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28:47
Entities on that beautiful graph programmatically.

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28:50
And they’re accessing this through MCP, which we talked about as a core building block, but they’re also accessing this through traditional means of software interaction.

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28:59
And we’re seeing a resurgence of CLI commands for local agents to use and the WP CLI being perfectly positioned for agents to interact with.

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29:08
We’re seeing the REST API and application passwords get used more and more and more.

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29:14
I’m also seeing a new generation of browsers, specifically one coming from Google, but I see a few of these, where they actually consume content from the site and they create on-demand interfaces.

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29:24
But it’s all using the same stuff.

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29:26
It’s all using the same web that’s always existed.

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29:29
But that also means representation begins to shift.

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29:33
Representation

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29:34
the reason why I even started blogging, the reason the reason why I started increasing my outcome, output of blogging.

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29:41
When a human visits your site

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29:44
You control the experience.

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29:45
If you go to my blog, you’ll see an about me that I’ve crafted very specifically to explain what I do and who I am.

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29:52
You’ll see my personal experience, my professional experience, the albums that I like listening to.

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29:57
You’ll get a sense for who I am because I’ve designed my site.

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30:01
I have set the layout, the flow, the messaging, the way the pages link together.

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30:07
So I control that experience and everybody controls their own experience on the web today.

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30:12
I think we’re back.

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30:13
I think this presentation was so good that my agent sabotaged me because I was going to share all of its secrets.

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30:20
So we’ll jump right back into where we left off.

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30:24
Actually, we’ll go back one more slide.

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30:27
So to me, when an agent visits your site, the experience that you’ve crafted yourself

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30:33
You’ve put together this beautiful flow of information.

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30:36
You’ve created images.

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30:38
That experience begins to change.

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30:41
The agent interacts with your content differently.

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30:44
And that introduces an interesting concept to me, which is maybe with all these agents interacting with my site, I want an agent on my site to represent me to them.

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30:57
And this is a concept that I’ve been calling the site delegate.

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31:00
This is something that I’ve blogged about a lot, which is a site delegate, a delegate being something that represents you.

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31:08
Something that understands your content and your capabilities and who you are and what your personality is.

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31:13
This is something that can start interacting with these visiting agents on your behalf

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31:18
And instead of these visiting agents simply getting the content and leaving the site, they begin to interact, to ask questions, to go deeper.

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31:27
And your delegate begins to answer these things, to negotiate on your behalf.

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31:32
So the web begins to evolve from a collection of documents to a network of interacting agents.

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31:38
That visiting agent represents the user and the site agent represents the entity and they communicate, they exchange

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31:45
change information, they come to outcomes.

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31:47
And you have more control over how you’re represented in this agentic internet.

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31:52
And because it’s all WordPress and because these four building blocks that I

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31:56
Tuned back into and heard y’all winning on that quiz, all of those building blocks result in this being a possibility, this being open

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32:08
Content that you own, protocols that we all know and love, like MCP, existing under the Linux Foundation, agent to agent as an open standard.

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32:19
Nobody’s locked into the ecosystem.

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32:21
Everybody’s able to control their representation.

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32:24
And we still maintain that beautiful decentralized web of information.

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32:29
And to me, I call this democratizing representation.

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32:33
I see this as almost the fourth step of WordPress, what needs to happen in the future

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32:39
20 years ago, WordPress made it possible for anybody to publish on the web.

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32:43
You didn’t need a developer, you needed five minutes to install the thing, and you started publishing.

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32:48
Uh you had something to say and you said it.

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32:51
And if you look at my first blog about amateur radios, I was saying stuff about amateur radios.

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32:57
And it was something that I wanted to do.

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32:59
I was enabled by WordPress to do that.

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33:02
The publishing was democratic.

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33:05
But now the same thing needs to happen for the digital representation.

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33:09
And I think that this has always been the case on the web.

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33:11
What’s the best way to represent yourself in a pre-AI era?

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33:15
It has been creating beautiful pages

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33:18
working through the content flows, ensuring that you understand how a user walks through your site.

Speaker 1:
33:24
But now with agents entering the chessboard

Speaker 1:
33:28
Being a new player on the map, we need to do the same for digital representation.

Speaker 1:
33:34
And without accessible tooling, the benefits of this agentic web, which is happening,

Speaker 1:
33:39
They’ll concentrate to those who have the resources to build for it.

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33:42
They’ll end up in those very pretty looking but messy closed walled gardens.

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33:49
But WordPress is the solution to this.

Speaker 1:
33:51
WordPress can change that.

Speaker 1:
33:53
We have the building blocks.

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33:55
We’re building towards this interesting future where agents interact on the web, where our websites have

Speaker 1:
34:01
MCP servers, where we have agent-to-agent, where we’re able to interact locally through the WPCLI.

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34:08
It’s all there for WordPress to use.

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34:11
So our local plumbers, our journalists, our tiny to huge WooCommerce stores, the portfolio websites, the j.

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34:18
cvs slash blogs, everybody gets access to

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34:22
to the same stuff, the same protocols, the same interoperability, the ability to look at the actual source code itself.

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34:30
They have the ability to shape their representation.

Speaker 1:
34:34
So what you can do today is very, very related to those building blocks.

Speaker 1:
34:38
You can register abilities in your plugins if you’re a developer.

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34:41
You can do the same.

Speaker 1:
34:42
if you’re an agency.

Speaker 1:
34:43
You can expose the functionality of your site through MCP.

Speaker 1:
34:47
You can use MCP plus Claude or ChatGBT or Copilot to go and maintain, manage, extend, learn more about your WordPress sites.

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34:56
Clients sites, your sites become these programmable interfaces.

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35:00
And this is the next era of WordPress.

Speaker 1:
35:02
This is where everything is headed.

Speaker 1:
35:04
And you can participate right now because it’s in WordPress 6.

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35:07
9 and it’s coming to WordPress.

Speaker 1:
35:09
7.

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35:10
0.

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35:11
For the creators and the publishers, things are shifting, things are changing.

Speaker 1:
35:15
But I think the best course of action is to keep creating, to keep presenting who you are and why you do it

Speaker 1:
35:23
You being the entity, you being the person, but you being the business or the e-commerce stop.

Speaker 1:
35:29
Structure your content intentionally.

Speaker 1:
35:32
Make sure that you’re putting your best foot out there.

Speaker 1:
35:35
The quality of the representation right now and into the future as we move towards this agent-to-agent model that may exist really depends on the quality of the content.

Speaker 1:
35:46
Content is again it would kind of come back to the SEO world of write good stuff, link that stuff, make it well structured, you’ll do just fine.

Speaker 1:
35:55
And for the freelancers and the site builders, go and play with 7.

Speaker 1:
35:59
0.

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35:59
Go and update to, well, I wouldn’t recommend this on a production site, but go and update to WordPress 7.

Speaker 1:
36:05
0 when it comes out.

Speaker 1:
36:06
Go and experiment with the data using WP Playground.

Speaker 1:
36:09
You’ll see that the AI just works.

Speaker 1:
36:11
There’s API keys that get set up in the central connectors plugin.

Speaker 1:
36:16
If a host sets it up for you, it’s just there.

Speaker 1:
36:19
There’s no plugin hunting.

Speaker 1:
36:21
And now a website is enabled by AI.

Speaker 1:
36:25
And for the hosts, go and take a look at this WP AI client.

Speaker 1:
36:29
You have the ability to bundle AI credits into your plans because of this unified approach.

Speaker 1:
36:34
And what that means is

Speaker 1:
36:35
If every host offered a small amount of free AI credits to their users, which is extremely possible with this WP AI client.

Speaker 1:
36:45
Everybody whoever uses WordPress gets access to AI out of the box.

Speaker 1:
36:51
And imagine how powerful that could be for those creating, for those using AI in novel ways through their plugins.

Speaker 1:
36:57
That would be an incredible world that we live and operate in.

Speaker 1:
37:01
So right now today, you can update to 7.

Speaker 1:
37:04
0 the beta.

Speaker 1:
37:05
You can play around with it in WP Playground.

Speaker 1:
37:08
You can go to makewordpress.

Speaker 1:
37:09
org slash AI to understand more about what we’re actually doing day to day in that core AI group.

Speaker 1:
37:15
You can go to the core AI Slack.

Speaker 1:
37:17
and marvel at the really fun stuff that happened yesterday at the Contributors Day.

Speaker 1:
37:22
You can install the AI plugin.

Speaker 1:
37:24
You can also tear it down and take a look at the code because it’s a really great representation of how these things work together.

Speaker 1:
37:30
You can point Claude at your site and say, tell me about myself.

Speaker 1:
37:33
Help me interlink things.

Speaker 1:
37:35
Am I missing images?

Speaker 1:
37:36
Should I put alt text here?

Speaker 1:
37:38
I’ve been using Claude and the MCP stuff.

Speaker 1:
37:41
It’s incredible.

Speaker 1:
37:42
And just see what happens.

Speaker 1:
37:44
Explore.

Speaker 1:
37:44
Be in the conversation.

Speaker 1:
37:46
Be in the arena.

Speaker 1:
37:47
Understand what this agentic web truly could look like because you’re actually a participant.

Speaker 1:
37:52
in the early stages of it.

Speaker 1:
37:54
To me, it’s always been empowerment over replacement.

Speaker 1:
37:58
I want people to be empowered to create their best work.

Speaker 1:
38:03
instead of replaced with AI.

Speaker 1:
38:05
So we’re not adding the Sparkle buttons all over WordPress.

Speaker 1:
38:07
If you want it, there are many plugins that we’ll add it.

Speaker 1:
38:10
But we’re building the tools that make everybody more effective at creating.

Speaker 1:
38:13
And we’re building the foundations that enable just that

Speaker 1:
38:16
The website concept, that’s not changing.

Speaker 1:
38:19
The the reason for being digital, the reason for being online isn’t changing.

Speaker 1:
38:25
But the people on that board are, the things on that board are.

Speaker 1:
38:28
We now have both humans and agents.

Speaker 1:
38:31
However, the people that build on and for and within WordPress, they are more important than ever.

Speaker 1:
38:37
That open web is worth building for.

Speaker 1:
38:39
That beautiful graph that I come back to is truly beautiful to me.

Speaker 1:
38:43
And WordPress is how we’ve always built for this web.

Speaker 1:
38:46
It’s our goal and Core AI absolutely, but within WordPress in general, for this to be the way that we do it far into the future as well.

Speaker 1:
38:54
So let’s build that open and genetic web.

Speaker 1:
38:57
Let’s do it together.

Speaker 1:
38:58
Thank you very much for dealing with my interruptions, and I really appreciate y’all taking the time to go and watch this presentation

Speaker 1:
39:07
And even though I was digital, I just want to mention that my favorite parts of WordCamps are the hallway tracks.

Speaker 1:
39:13
They’re the things where when I walk off this stage, I get stopped by people and have these crazy unique conversations and these ideas and

Speaker 1:
39:21
And as I mentioned in the opener, I am bummed out that I can’t be doing that here.

Speaker 1:
39:25
But I do invite you to have these conversations.

Speaker 1:
39:28
Think about what the future of the web looks like.

Speaker 1:
39:30
Think about how WordPress plays a part in it

Speaker 1:
39:32
explore the building blocks, but explore the future of the CMS as you walk around in person today and tomorrow and really enjoy what looks to be a great WordCamp Asia.

Speaker 1:
39:43
So thank you very much.

Speaker 1:
39:44
You can find me and you can ask me these questions at James W.

Speaker 1:
39:48
LePage, specifically on X.

Speaker 1:
39:50
Feel free to DM me.

Speaker 1:
39:51
You can read more about a lot of this thinking on J.

Speaker 1:
39:54
C.

Speaker 1:
39:55
And I don’t know if we have time for questions, but if we do, I’m happy to answer them.