WordPress interviewed a member of the newly formed WordPress AI Team who shared how AI can be integrated into WordPress, outlining a future in which the platform supports AI agents and content consumption while enabling new kinds of functionality. To achieve this, the team is focusing on developer tools that allow third-party developers and services to connect AI systems to WordPress without embedding generative features directly into core.
The interview was with James LaPage, the AI engineering lead at Automattic and one of the leaders of the newly announced WordPress AI Team.
Timing Of AI Team Announcement
Many competitors, from private closed systems like Wix, Duda, and Shopify to open-source platforms like Drupal CMS, have various AI integrations built in. Third-party WordPress plugins such as Yoast, Rank Math, and Elementor also feature AI integration. WordPress hosts including Bluehost, 10Web, and Automattic’s commercial WordPress.com platform offer AI-powered site builder functionality. A case could be made that WordPress is late to the AI party.
James LaPage of the WordPress AI Team argues that a cautious approach was necessary due to the fast rate of changes within AI. This makes sense given that Agentic AI (AI agents that research the web on behalf of humans), is just beginning to gain adoption.
LaPage explains these realities early in the interview:
” I’ve wanted an AI team for a long time. I think right now actually was the perfect time to launch it because the …generative AI boom and the technology running and powering that boom is actually like pretty recent, and it’s changing so rapidly and only recently have we seen a lot of centralization around, for example, how these models work, how they consume information, how you interact with them, how you connect them to software.
So we’ve come to a point right now where a project like WordPress, which is massive and humongous and incredibly important on the web, is able to begin actually exploring this type of stuff because it isn’t changing from under our feet in the way that it was a year ago or two years ago.
And a good way to point that out is there was a Make WordPress post about AI two years ago that Ann published, and a lot of us had commented on it and it was really like, Yeah, this is awesome.
And as you read through those comments, you can kind of see everybody being excited but not really knowing where to push that excitement and point and say do this or do this or do this and we finally get to the point now where this team can say this is what we want to be doing and there can be real understanding of why we’re doing that and prior art in terms of how things actually work.”
WordPress As A Fully AI-Accessible System
LaPage was asked what an AI-friendly WordPress might look like in three years. He share a vision of WordPress as a foundational framework for AI agents, like a platform where tools, content, and interactivity are natively exposed to be dynamically interacted with and consumed.
He explained:
“I think if WordPress is able to become something that we can use AI to consume information from and build functionality for, that is a lovely spot and position it can be in. And it’s already almost in that spot. And if we can make it more accessible to AI, then I think that we are able to maintain its position on the open web as this place that you express yourself digitally.
…What I would love to see is WordPress be this platform where people continue to digitally express themselves. And I think that expression becomes more important in this era where more and more stuff will be consumed by chatbots and you’ll be speaking with AI and you’ll be doing all these different things.
Having the ability to express yourself and also be able to express yourself in ways where you couldn’t before because you couldn’t develop this crazy idea that you have in your head, or you have a crazy idea in your head, you don’t even know how to do it… Like, that type of stuff I would love to enable through the work that we do on this AI team.
So maintaining the position of yes, it’s really important to have this digital presence on the Internet. It’s very important not to subscribe only to these walled gardens, like the social media platforms and the AI chatbots, but instead have this lovely blossoming of expression on the web as WordPress enabled in its beginnings as well.
Like, this was something that it was very difficult to publish your thoughts and then it wasn’t. Let’s do it again. But let’s do it with AI.”
Technical Description Of Future Of AI Innovation With WordPress
James LaPage went into a description of what MCP Model Context Protocol is and the role it plays with how AI can interact with and transform WordPress into like a framework for being able to accomplish a wider range of things on the web.
“So MCP is model context protocol. This is an open protocol and standard. So it’s important to focus on that. It’s a standard. It’s not a technology package that’s built in Python that you go and install. You can build things around this standard and what the standard does is define how software can expose functionality to AI, in the simplest definition.
So you have the ability to define tools which are ways that you expose, hey, you can do this or you can read this on my piece of software. You can look at the piece of software as WordPress and then you also have the method of providing those tools to the client, which is something like Claude or Cursor or another AI agent for example, that can then read those tools and use them however they want, and it’s up to the folks building the actual systems to implement the protocol properly and to build the actual agents and the tools and everything that comes with it through MCP.
So when you look at how we enable AI within WordPress and outside of WordPress, we’ve had similar needs at Automatic …and other folks in the industry have had needs to define how AI speaks to specifically in WordPress different plugins and different functionality within the core software and the Feature API is the answer to exposed features of WordPress and features of plugins in a WordPress specific way to AI.
And this is intended to almost be something that goes into WordPress core, allows plug-in developers to expose this functionality to AI within WordPress in this unified way, similar to how I explained MCP. But do it in the WordPress way allows you to plug into the capabilities and the permission callbacks and the REST API aliases and all of these different WordPress-focused things, which means you’re not reinventing the wheel on WordPress, you’re simply exposing functionality in this unified way, which then it’s up to a developer to say well, now I have this list of functionality, list of things I can do with WordPress resources, I can read with WordPress, let’s build an agent or let’s build a media generation playground or let’s build a single shot, single click button that generates a whole bunch of stuff and use that features API to do so.
And when you think about how WordPress can speak with software outside of itself and almost become that framework for the functionality that plugins bring in, the data that the database stores and custom post types and posts, then you kind of start infusing the ideas behind Feature API and MCP.”
You Can Become Involved
Something that many WordPress users might not be aware of is that every user and interested party can contribute to WordPress to help shape it to be what they need it to be. Even a user who doesn’t know how to program can still influence WordPress by expressing their opinions to WordPress.
LaPage invited the wider WordPress community to get involved with providing feedback to the AI Team.
He said:
“Immediately, the way to get involved is through the make.wordpress.org/AI blog. There are several posts popping out. The most recent one as we’re recording being the hallway hangout. This probably best way to be plugged in is through the Core AI Slack, in the Make WordPress Slack. Both of those things are linked throughout the make.wordpress.org/AI site and the news announcements and everything else, so that’s how you can get involved right now in terms of contributing into the future.
A big focus of the group is to get to a very solid road map with explicit instructions and directions on how you can contribute that are likely going to be several projects that work together that we build and maintain. There’s likely going to be many other focuses around AI that we want to address, and we’re going to try to make it as clear as possible as to how you can get involved and how you can actually go and help make WordPress what it needs to be in in this AI era.
So right now, join the the core AI Slack, check out the blog posts and join the hallway hang out on Monday to really get in on the ground floor.”
Watch the WordPress interview with James LaPage here:
Featured image/Screenshot by author
