I’m excited to share that I’ve joined the newly formed WordPress AI Team, representing our 10up WordPress practice alongside Felix Arntz and Pascal Birchler from Google, and James LePage from Automattic. Together, as the launch team, we aim to shape how artificial intelligence is integrated into the WordPress ecosystem—not just abstractly, but through practical tools and features that help WordPress evolve and remain competitive.
My participation follows more than 6 years of investment into open source AI integrations for WordPress at Fueled (starting at 10up and continuing on through our merger and recent brand refresh), in addition to a decade of varied contributions to WordPress. As the Director of our Open Source Practice, I’ve collaborated with engineering to advance our open source Artificial Intelligence plugin for WordPress, ClassifAI, and project managed client engagements using it as the foundation for custom AI integrations. I’m honored to bring that experience into this next chapter for WordPress.
Advancing WordPress with a New AI Team
The AI Team’s early focus is clear and pragmatic: define a shared roadmap for supporting AI-powered capabilities through official, community-backed plugins, packages, and frameworks. Rather than beginning by embedding AI directly into WordPress core, we’ll follow a proven model by building canonical feature plugins, much like the approach taken with the Gutenberg block editor and the Performance Team.
I expect that our initial focus will encapsulate the Feature API, AI Services, an MCP adapter, and a demonstration plugin illustrating how those can be used to implement common, table stakes applications of features like title or image generation.
A Critical Step Toward WordPress’s Future
AI is no longer a “nice to have” feature. It’s essential infrastructure for any digital platform that wants to remain relevant in the near future.
This initiative signals that WordPress isn’t sitting on the sidelines. Instead, it’s taking a proactive approach to integrating AI, rooted in the platform’s core values: openness, user ownership, and community collaboration.
Carrying Forward From ClassifAI
When we began building ClassifAI, we saw a dearth of quality, enterprise-caliber solutions for integrating AI tools directly into WordPress. In fact, our work goes back to 2018, when early AI was more commonly referred to as Machine Learning. Since then, as generative AI platforms blossomed, ClassifAI has evolved into a flexible, provider-agnostic toolkit offering features like content and image tagging, content summarization, image generation, and more.
That flexibility to pick from a variety of cloud and self hosted models, including OpenAI, Gemini, Azure, Ollama, and others, is key.
Equally important is usability. We’ve put significant effort into making AI capabilities feel like intuitive and seamless extensions of native WordPress. Those lessons in UI/UX and extensibility will directly inform and influence our contributions to the WordPress AI initiative.
Some of ClassifAI’s baseline features, like category suggestions, AI writing assistance, or interoperability layers, may one day become part of an official WordPress plugin. In fact, we may even directly contribute some of our code base or UI paradigms to this new project. We welcome this.
If official WordPress plugins can take on foundational “table stakes” AI capabilities, teams like ours can focus on advancing the frontier: delivering enterprise-grade solutions like smarter editorial workflows for enterprise publishers and advanced content heuristics, on top of existing and more complex features like granular role-based AI permissions and smart 404 recommendations. Elevating the baseline, and working together instead of competing on basic features, raises the ceiling for everyone building on top of WordPress.
Help Shape What Comes Next
We’re proud to help shape how AI comes to the world’s most popular CMS. We’re not just testing ideas behind closed doors. We’re building what’s next, out in the open, for the entire WordPress ecosystem.
Our contributions are made possible by clients that hire us for our expertise and for custom integrations. If your team is exploring how AI fits into your product strategy or WordPress-powered sites and experiences, get in touch.
