I’ll be publishing a personal year end roundup in a week or so, but we’ve done a lot at Automattic AI in 2025 that’s worth celebrating publicly:
- I moved into the engineering director role for AI, following WPAI’s acquisition, leading AI across Automattic a few months into 2025.
- We formalized to the AI group at Automattic, which didn’t exist in the past!
- We grew the group from 9 to 50+ engineers, supported by dozens of designers and product wizards.
- Processed more than a billion tokens every single day (average over the year).
- We architected, built, and went production with boutique Eval Suites and PHP first AI frameworks.
- We formed several new teams focused on different products, leveraging the same, shared work.
- Met up with our people in Mexico City, Basel, Germany, Philippines, Portland, and here in NYC.
- Shipped dozens of AI-powered features and products across 3+ major surfaces. Hundreds of millions of users. Big Sky, MCP on WordPress, Parsely Sage and Telex were some of the big ones. And a lot more on the way.
- Worked to completely transform the way our 100% remote company operates through AI Enablement Initiatives. Talked a bit about this on The New Default.
- Built some real agents. A challenge as we’re plugging into existing and new products all at once, trying to cover several surfaces and dozens of use cases.
- We became the first company and collection of production products to adopt Core WordPress AI improvements, like Abilities API. We also heavily contributed to them as well.
- Met some really impressive leaders from our close partners; OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
- Hosted the first dev/ai/nyc event, with over 500 RSVPs, in our Noho Office.
- Got to work with some of the most absurdly talented people. Mad scientists and masters of craft.
I think my favorite moment was the first day of our AI offsite in November of this year. Almost 70 folks from the company completely focused on AI for the Open Web.
That was one of those moments where you look around and it hits you – the scale of what you’re actually building.
I’ve founded startups, and somehow this feels the same. The same energy, the same intensity, just bigger. Here’s to Automattic AI in 2025 and everyone who made it what it was. Excited for what’s next.