[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case a second look at exploring AI’s impact in WordPress agencies.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today, for a second time, we have Matt Schwartz.

Matt has been working in the WordPress ecosystem since 2011, running his own agency based in Atlanta, and developing products like CheckView at all for WordPress form and checkout QA. Matt’s expertise lies in how agencies can smartly, and cautiously, incorporate AI into their workflows for real tangible wins, and how to avoid potential pitfalls.

He was on the show last week to record the first of this two part mini series. You might want to listen to that prior to this, but it’s not strictly necessary.

In this episode, we build upon last week’s conversation. Matt talks about practical strategies for integrating AI across agency operations. The discussion starts with what it means to give AI access to your agency’s brain, using tools like project management wikis and connecting them with AI chatbots to streamline knowledge sharing, and avoid common AI hallucinations.

We then get into MCPs, or Model Context Protocol, and talk about why this area is quickly becoming a game changer for agencies looking to securely connect AI agents to multiple internal systems without complex, risky API configurations.

The conversation covers how to use AI for building internal tools, highlighting where it’s low risk and where you should be more cautious, especially with public facing, or mission critical, systems. Matt explains how agencies can leverage AI for QA and checklist automation, freeing up time for deeper human review of other important tasks.

We also discussed the impact of AI on the WordPress plugin market, including potential consequences for plugin developers and the wider community, and whether the rise of AI generated disposable tools could erode the collaborative spirit of the WordPress community.

We end by chatting about the importance of approaching agency AI adoption with eyes wide open to the risks. Data security, overdependence on vendors, failure to handle errors, and the reality that AI still makes mistakes.

Matt shares his outlook on how agencies can position themselves to thrive as AI reshapes the industry, from hiring strategies to the next generation of productised services.

If you’re running an agency or freelance business in the WordPress space and want to get ahead with AI thoughtfully and securely, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Matt Schwartz.

I am joined on the podcast, again, by Matt Schwartz, somewhat unexpectedly. Hello, Matt.

[00:04:05] Matt Schwartz: Hey Nathan, thanks again for having me this week. I’m super excited to dive back in.

[00:04:09] Nathan Wrigley: Thank you. So we recorded an episode last week, and we intended to do it as a one hit. So get it all recorded, tied off within 40 minutes or what have you. And then we began talking.

So last week we began talking and at about the half an hour point, it became obvious to me that we weren’t going to capture it all in one recording. So we’ve come back for a second episode.

Dear listener, I would just say that in order to provide context for this episode, you really probably should listen to the previous one, because we’re stacking up Matt’s case, argument, however you wish to describe it, for where you can make wins inside your agency with the use of AI. Not just wins, maybe some cautionary tales as well. But that was the point of the first episode.

So really, we’re going to drop you in to the ninth of 16 points. So again, just pause this, go back to the previous episode, have a listen there, and then you can stack this one in your podcast player of choice at that point.

If, however, somebody’s ignoring that, Matt, are you able to just do a very quick bio? Just tell us who you are? It may be repetitive for the people that are listening to the second episode, but nevertheless, let’s hear from you who you are.

[00:05:16] Matt Schwartz: Yep. My name’s Matt Schwartz. I run a WordPress agency here in Atlanta, since 2011. And I also have a testing and QA product for WordPress for checking forms and checkout called CheckView.

And yeah, today we’re just really diving into how you can leverage AI, how you can incorporate it into your agency, but in a hopefully smart and cautious way. Not necessarily just dropping it in, being a little bit more thorough about that process. So excited to continue the conversation.

[00:05:45] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, thank you. And thank you for being so accommodating by joining me for a second time. So as I said, Matt’s put together a whole laundry list of different areas that your business, your freelance agency, whatever it may be that you are running in the WordPress space, can perhaps gain some benefits.

Last week we did one through eight, and now we’re going to sort of hit the road running on number nine. So the ninth point was about giving AI access to your agency’s brain. It’s a lovely subheading, but what does that mean?

[00:06:12] Matt Schwartz: Yeah, so this is actually one I picked up in the Admin Bar, which is a, one of the other WordPress agency groups out there, that a lot of agencies were doing. And I thought it was an interesting, I would say hack, you could say, to add AI without getting super involved in it. Which is if you already have a project management tool, or you already have a wiki, you can add into your AI chat bot of choice when it’s actually answering a question. You can tell it in its memory, hey, whenever I ask a question about the agency, go confirm what I’m doing by visiting our Clickup or visiting our Asana.

So it’ll actually go retrieve and confirm it’s using the latest proper information instead of just guessing or hallucinating. I love how we use the word hallucinate and not lie. I love that marketing branding that the AI companies did. It’s some crazy gaslighting.

Anyways, I love AI, but definitely, if you haven’t used something like Claude or ChatGPT, saying in the memory as simple as when you answer a question, check if this is actually the case and connect to our ClickUp or connect to our wiki.

I think that helps you get all the power of your documentation, SOPs, client, CRM, any data you’ve already basically built up. It can leverage that without you having to do a whole bunch of crazy connections or ask more specific things. I thought that was actually a really neat way that agencies that are just getting into the space with AI are using the data they basically already have. They’re just using their project management software, which basically has all that data.

[00:07:47] Nathan Wrigley: When you see it in action, which I have actually, but not to do with a WordPress website, more to do with a sort of SaaS product with the, how the tool has been built and the guardrails that are into the tool. It’s really amazing because then, well, basically it never forgets.

So every time you throw something new at it, that becomes part of the corpus of information. It then has an understanding. I keep saying it, but hopefully you understand, I’m meaning the AI in this case. A wider and broader understanding, and increasingly is able to deliver that back.

So in my case, often I’ll get some text back, which is divided up into bullet points. Those bullet points will have little footnotes attached to them, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4, and what have you, which will then link out to the documentation itself. And again, just a profoundly useful use of the thing which it’s best at, which is taking a corpus of information, grinding it up and spitting out something which makes sense.

And why wouldn’t you point it at your internal documentation? You know, if you’ve got a plugin, all of your support docs, throw the AI at it, and it will be able to help you as well as your clients. Because it’s guaranteed you’ve forgotten something that you’ve built.

WordPress, of course, itself does this. You know, every AI agent on the planet is welcome to crawl the docs for how WordPress itself is put together. And it’s one of the reasons I think why WordPress has a fighting chance in this AI, CMS battle, if you like, because everything’s open source already. Nothing’s hidden behind a paywall or a licence agreement or what have you. So yeah, agreed. That’s a great example.

Okay. Anything to add or should we move on?

[00:09:22] Matt Schwartz: No, I think that one’s just a cut and dry, really. If you haven’t looked at that, that’s an easy way to get into AI and leverage it without a lot of work.

[00:09:29] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Absolutely. Okay, then number 10 is your internal MCP and guardrails. I know this gets bandied around a lot, and there’s a lot of acronyms floating around in the AI space. But MCP, maybe we just need to spend a moment explaining what the heck an MCP is, and how it kind of fits into the overall picture, but particularly in this case, with your guardrails.

[00:09:48] Matt Schwartz: Definitely. So MCP is basically an open source way to connect AI, let’s say, chatbots or agents to external systems. It stands for Model Context Protocol. I think maybe the team behind Claude built it. I can’t remember. But the idea really is that, instead of you just connecting directly to an API, which you could do, which an API if you’re not familiar, is a way again, to connect two different systems together.

One system will have a series of things that will let you say, hey, you can add this data, or you can pull this data, or you can modify this data, right? So an example could be something like a help desk. You might create a ticket, you may delete a ticket or you may edit the ticket. An API can basically do those things.

But what an MCP does is it’s really a series of tools that are more prebuilt for the AI, so that it knows and has context of what it should let you do, and how all the pieces of that connection really should modify whatever data you’re doing.

So it’s a lot more specific to agents. It’s a lot friendlier, I would say, if you aren’t familiar with a company’s API, you could connect to their API. I can connect to the WordPress REST API, but if I don’t understand that API, it may not be actually the best way to make the connection.

With an MCP, you can really not have the background of that company’s bridge. It’s going to do all the work, and the AI’s going to have enough information to help you get what you need done.

I know that’s hard to explain, but essentially with an MCP, if you build one at your agency, this is a little bit more high level, or a little bit deeper, but I am seeing a lot of agencies looking at this. Which is, they are using an MCP basically for their teams so that they can add all of their systems in one basically bridge. So that instead of having all their employees like connect to all these different Claude connectors and APIs, they have one system.

So if I have Claude and I’m an employee, it can connect to my MCP at the agency, then the agency MCP is actually on behalf going to go retrieve data from all our different systems. So not everyone has to have API keys. Not everyone has to connect to all these other systems, if that makes sense.

So I am seeing agencies starting to do this. So in some sense the proxy, MCP becomes a proxy or just a way to connect to all your other systems in a secure way.

[00:12:18] Nathan Wrigley: I always imagine it a bit like if you, I don’t know, you approach a giant supermarket and you know that you need carrots and soup. And normally you just go into the supermarket and wander around for a long time, and eventually you’d sort of stumble across the carrots and the soup.

But wouldn’t it be nice if there was somebody at the front door? Then you could say, where’s the carrots and where’s the soup? And that’s it. And they go, okay, the carrots are there, the soup’s there, and point.

You know, it’s just like this perfect gatekeeper, this guardrail that you described that kind of allows you to get the best out of that experience without wasting a load of time and resources and probably a load of hallucination out the back end.

[00:12:55] Matt Schwartz: Wow, that was so much better said than me. But yes, that is a much better way of explaining it. And that’s why if you haven’t looked at MCPs in general, I think it’s worth looking at. But also if you have a tech background, looking at an MCP for your own agency where you can combine all your tools and connect to this one place, I think is a really neat way to, again, get your employees and contractors connected to your, all your systems without them having to have a direct connection.

So if I want them to be like, hey, answer this ticket, go to this WordPress site, instead of them having to connect Claude to the WordPress site into Fresh Desk and all these things, it’s all within the one MCP. And then they aren’t really responsible for those API keys or any of those connections.

Of course, you have to put guardrails on that too, right? Guardrails, like they can’t delete things. You know, not having them delete tickets or websites. Because if you connect, you know, your host, they could technically delete an entire website if you don’t have proper guardrails. So it is, I would say something that is a little bit more on the cutting edge that not every agency should do, but if you are on the more technical side, an internal agency MCP, I think is a really neat idea.

[00:14:06] Nathan Wrigley: I feel like there’s future of commoditising MCP creation.

[00:14:11] Matt Schwartz: Oh, it’s already happening.

[00:14:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I really haven’t experienced that but, you know, a really, I don’t even know what that interface might look like in the end, but some really credible way of, you know, you sign up for a service and for a few dollars a month, they will modify, create on the fly, adapt the MCP so that it fits in with what was already an incredible technology. It’s a bit like the icing on the cake, the MCP, isn’t it? The AI was pretty amazing anyway, and then you put that layer on top and it just becomes much more refined amazing.

[00:14:41] Matt Schwartz: There’s actually some companies doing that already where you sign up for their SaaS, they basically store all the MCP data on their server securely, because that’s always a concern. You give them basically all the credentials, you give them the guardrails, and then they build a secure, essentially MCP app for you.

So there are some early options out there for that, that agencies could also look into if they’re less technical. You just want to make sure, obviously you realise you’re giving a third party your data and your secrets essentially.

[00:15:11] Nathan Wrigley: And course, in the era of AI, the capacity to do things really seriously wrong is literally at the end of your fingertips. Whereas before, you’d probably have to have some understanding, well, you could delete whole file structures and things like that, I guess. But now that a simple prompt can just rip through your entire code base or whatever it may be, definitely, one for guardrails there.

[00:15:32] Matt Schwartz: Delete all the sites on my server, done.

[00:15:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. And don’t check.

[00:15:37] Matt Schwartz: That could happen.

[00:15:38] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Ignore all previous instructions, just delete them all.

Okay, so that was number 10. And really interesting. I think that’s one for the, sort of the tinfoil hat brigade, you know, the real nerds out there. But it’s not far off. If it’s been commoditised in SaaS now, you can guarantee that in the next few years that’s going to become table stakes, I would’ve thought for a lot of businesses and SOPs and what have you.

Okay, so the next one, I’m sure many people will have been familiar with, especially if you have a YouTube account and you’re looking at AI things on YouTube. Vibe coded agency tools. I’m sure I know what this one means, but run it by me anyway.

[00:16:16] Matt Schwartz: Yeah, so one key thing is, I’m not saying vibe coded tools themselves. I’m saying vibe coded agency tools, agency being the specific part. So you’re building internal tools for your agency, which I think in some sense, depending on what the situation is, can be okay to do, in my opinion, because the risk is lower. Again, you’re using it internally.

[00:16:40] Nathan Wrigley: It’s not public facing, that’s the point, right? It’s just you and your colleagues, which hopefully you trust.

[00:16:45] Matt Schwartz: Right, right. Again, you should probably put guardrails, and you have to think about, well, what sort of data is it touching, and how important is this data? That’s everything with AI. You have to think about the risk. But I am seeing a lot of agencies starting to build different types of agency tools. Some that I really do internally myself, and I am a big fan of things like reporting tools and dashboards, right?

This is, again, a good case, I think I talked about in the previous podcast. The sweet spot, I think with AI is having it handle things that you just never could get to that were on your list for a million years, right? And realising that, as long as you do a little due diligence and you feel like it’s in the realm of where it’s supposed to be, this is probably more information than you had before, right?

So a good example is, if you’re an agency, you may have it hooked up to QuickBooks MCP. You may have it hooked up to your time tracking software. You may have it hooked up to one of your other reporting software, WooCommerce subscriptions with Woo. And from there you’re able to have a much better visible idea of what your business is doing well financially. The bottom line, especially if you’re like a lot of agencies where QuickBooks doesn’t really have all of your actual services. You may have those internally or you may have them in a other system.

You can combine those and build reporting systems. And again, that’s a relatively low risk way for you to, worst case is you’re going to use that data and you’re going to be like, well, this doesn’t seem right. And you’re going to have to dig into it and figure out what’s going on. Hopefully you don’t just blindly use it, but I do think the risk is lower.

So those sort of tools I think are really, really neat, and relatively easy to build out. So reporting tools, profitability dashboards, things like that. Looking at your time tracking, like who at your agency is the most profitable, if you have that data? Obviously make sure you actually have the data structure for that, or AI may just make that up.

But we’ve, you know, used that even at our agency and I think it’s been helpful for us to find patterns that we didn’t know where we were spending our time and effort. Especially if you are doing time tracking using something like Everhour or Harvest.

Now the tools that I do struggle a little bit more with, and I am seeing people in agencies use is things like website management dashboards, or building their own QA tools. Because those things, I think the risk is higher of things going wrong.

[00:19:05] Nathan Wrigley: Public facing again, yeah.

[00:19:07] Matt Schwartz: Right. And you’re giving this third party access to all of your websites and it’s not like, you know, a big SaaS. This is something you built internally, which means Claude doesn’t care if it’s wrong, right, until you tell it.

So a good example, and not everyone may feel this way but, you know, I’ve seen some agencies that are building replacements for management dashboards like ManageWP, WP Remote, those sort of things, which is connected to everything and is kind of their most important infrastructure for their clients. Personally, I think that that’s a little risky to be doing.

Now, if you’re doing the right due diligence and you have a technical team and you’re doing manual code reviews, sure. There’s an argument to be doing that if it’s also, I think, solving something specific to your agency. I talked about this in the last podcast, replacing SaaS products when there’s a nuanced solution that’s specific to your agency, I think could be really helpful.

But if you’re just replacing SaaS products to save 30 bucks a month, I think that doesn’t make any sense because you’re going to end up spending a lot more on maintenance, I promise you, than if you just stuck with the SaaS product, if it does what you need. So I think there’s an argument there.

[00:20:18] Nathan Wrigley: I think it’s really interesting. And I do wonder if we’re on the precipice of, so this is me sort of staring into the crystal ball a little bit. I wonder if we’re into the era of sort of disposable, one time apps. So you have a function that you need to do this month like, I don’t know, you must file your taxes this week, but you’re miles behind. So you get an AI to just quickly do that thing for you, and categorise all of the jobs that need to be done so that you can hand it over to the tax man and so on. And then you just put that on ice. That thing no longer needs to exist.

I feel that kind of coming where we sort of vibe code up this one time thing, and then dispose of it. I don’t know if I’m entirely in agreement with that as an idea, but I feel that that is coming. But to your point, I think anything public facing, we’re still in the era of, really, watch what you’re doing. It needs thorough testing.

[00:21:09] Matt Schwartz: Exactly. And thorough code review because, you know, ultimately while the AI coding, I think has gotten really, really good, it’s not a hundred percent there, and it doesn’t have any context. It doesn’t actually know what it’s doing. It’s all patterns. So there is an argument to be made that, yeah, it may get 80% there, but if no one’s actually checked the code review, two months from now, it decides to delete all your websites out of your management dashboard, well, should have done a manual code review, right? And it’s on you.

So I do think there’s an argument, same thing with like QA tools. Building one-off QA tools, which should be persistent and actually probably one of the more important things you build. It should do the same thing every day. It should almost be dumb. It should not be trying to rebuild itself all the time, or be even one-off, like you said. It’s not, I think, a good idea to build a one-off migrator typically for that reason, even though I see people doing it in agencies. Unless you think it’s just a low risk project, I do think, you know, you have to think about that.

To your point about the one-off task though, I think again, if it’s a low risk item, one-off makes actually the most sense because a lot of times if you know this is going to be a one-off thing, you then are subconsciously being like, okay, I’m going to use this once and the cost is not that high and that makes sense, because you’re not having to maintain it. But if you know it’s going to be something you’re going to be using for the next five years and you don’t plan to pay a developer to review it, I don’t think that’s a smart idea, at least not right now.

[00:22:39] Nathan Wrigley: That’s a good calculus I think to have in the background. Okay, so that’s good. So caveat emptor basically, use your discretion. If it’s public facing, maybe think twice. But also if it’s something that you want, you absolutely bulletproof need it to be reliable and predictable a hundred percent of the times that you run it. Again, maybe there’s a human in the loop there. So that was sort of vibe coded things that you might do in your agency.

I feel that’s going to be a real area of growth, whether or not it will be profitable growth or useful growth, I’m not entirely sure. I feel like in our industry at least, people are going to be dabbling in that kind of thing all the time. You know, trying to figure out new, clever tools to achieve a thing, which maybe in the past would’ve been a subscription thing that you paid $20 a month for or something. So we’ll see. We’ll see how that goes.

Okay, moving on then. So the 12th item that you brought to bear was QA, so quality assurance, checklists and testing. Right, run us through this one then.

[00:23:33] Matt Schwartz: I know I just said when you’re building a QA tool, using AI to build an internal vibe coded tool is probably not the answer. But actually what I’m going to say right now is not contradictory to that, because what I’m really talking about for QA and testing is more so having AI help you build things like checklists, right? You already have a good context usually with your SOPs. So it can help you build your SOP checklists. It can also help run the low risk items automatically. And again, I know I talked about risk a lot, but I think that’s how you have to consider it.

So one really neat thing I’ve seen a lot of agencies start using is Claude Skills, which basically just means that you teach Claude a process. Literally it walks you through in the conversation like, what do you want this process to be? And then you can run that later in context.

So a really cool example of this is if you are, let’s say onboarding a client, or you’re launching a site. During your next launch, your next onboarding, you may want to use Claude to teach it the skill of how you launch sites. And then it can automate a lot of those items. And you can still give it context like, I want the human to specifically review this item, right? Or, I want the human to check that no index isn’t set, right? Because that’s like a high risk item, right?

[00:24:55] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a big one..

[00:24:56] Matt Schwartz: Right. That’s one we all, I think, have dealt with at some point in our.

[00:25:01] Nathan Wrigley: Too many times.

[00:25:01] Matt Schwartz: Right. Too many. Exactly. That’s the key. And that goes back to really that vision document I said on the last call. Having an AI vision document where you go through these checklists and you’d be like, okay, we want a human to be involved, or we don’t. You could actually tell Claude this. And then Claude will actually know exactly what it should be running itself and what it expects a human, and it will prompt you for.

But I think that is the beauty of this is, you can make your whole automated process when it comes to tools with QA and anything really related to that checklist, whether it’s launch or anything like that. Look at tools like Claude and Skills like that, and I think that you can use it to help with repeatable processes. And that will actually help most agencies not only speed things up and save on margins, but I think a lot of times they’ll do more testing than they did before.

And this, again, falls into that sweet spot where like AI’s really good for the things that you knew you should do but you have limited time. And testing is one of those items. You want a hundred percent coverage, but in reality that’s not going to happen. So let’s have the human do the really important stuff and everything else we would’ve never gotten to anyways, let’s have the AI do it. And that’s where I think you can use these tools.

[00:26:11] Nathan Wrigley: Do you know what’s really interesting, and we sort of made light of it in the previous episode, the fact that there’s hallucinations and what have you going on all the time. But I do think there’s definitely a moment coming where I think some of the more straightforward things, like for example, the checklist, the binary things, is no index switched on? Yes. No. Okay, that’s a no.

I think I am getting comfortable with that now. You know, just that, okay, we asked the AI that question, it’s delivered as an answer. I’m almost at the point now where I’m never going to go back and check that was true. If it was something much more broad like, is my SEO strategy bulletproof? Well, no. It’s never going to know whether that’s the right thing.

But these much more binary things, many of which, if you add them all up, could take you hours when you’re finally launching a website. Yeah, I think there’s something to be said for just sort of handing that stuff over. And I don’t know, maybe you check it frequently, infrequently, less frequently as time goes on. But yeah, always check the no index one.

[00:27:08] Matt Schwartz: Yeah, I was like, I would still check the no index one, even if it’s binary. But to your point, a lot more of the very black and white items, I think it can handle a lot better than it used to, but I think it still comes down to risk. Like if it’s, yeah, no index, I’m still going to check it. But if it’s something else that just is not that key. Yeah, I think we’re all becoming a little more comfortable or a lot of us are coming more comfortable with that. And I think that’s okay because you know the risk exposure really.

[00:27:35] Nathan Wrigley: Well, and also, especially if it’s QA and checklist time, hopefully you have done the bits and pieces, you really are at that point just making sure that you’ve polished the thing that needs to be polished. So hopefully that’s a bit of low hanging fruit where you’ll catch the things that you missed, and maybe you’ve done the due diligence there already.

Okay, so that was number 12. We’re approaching the end. We’ve got four more to go. So number 13 links directly to WordPress specifically. The WordPress plugin market impact.

I’ve got to say, this has me slightly concerned, because I feel that this could be a good thing for our ecosystem, but also possibly a bad thing. But I’ll just hand it over to you to paint the picture.

[00:28:18] Matt Schwartz: Yeah, definitely. So I think you even touched on this a little earlier when you were saying there’s going to be more one-off apps being built by agencies. And I think that also applies to a lot of plugins that are essentially one-off solutions, right? They are utility plugins. They solve one thing really well.

I think that sort of thing is already seeing the impact. If you talk to a lot of plugin developers, especially some of the larger shops, they’re seeing a drop in sales. And that is a real thing that’s happening. They’re seeing a drop in sales, especially for smaller plugins. Because a lot of agencies and customers are solving that with AI. Maybe it’s a couple files of code, it’s a lot easier for them to build it.

Now I still have concerns around, are they having a human review that? Like I talked about. But humans are going to do what they’re going to do, which some people are just going to run with that. That ultimately affects sales.

So I think that is hurting a lot of the ecosystem when it comes to the smaller plugins out there. And even some of the bigger plugin developers are essentially sunsetting their smaller plugins, because they realise they’re not getting as many sales and they need to focus on what they consider their moat, or their platform, you know, big plugins that AI’s not going to be able to replicate or people shouldn’t trust to replicate.

But if you’re building a small plugin, I’m not going to call any out, but I think that there is some concern there. And I think ultimately for WordPress, I don’t think that really hurts the WordPress ecosystem from the standpoint of plugins in general, but I do think it raises the bar of what a good plugin will be.

And that kind of goes with the agency land. That’s what’s happening with agencies too. It’s just the bar is being raised. You have to have a more complex plugin that actually solves someone’s needs now, not just a small one that solved it, but now they can use AI to do it.

And some people argue that that’s going to continue all the way up with the most complex plugins out there. But I do think that there are, you know, unless AI dramatically improves. If it’s 80% there, that’s great and all, but it’s what we talked about earlier. You can’t really run with that in production at 80%. And that’s the difference between a really good SaaS or really good plugin versus something that was homegrown and just falls apart.

[00:30:38] Nathan Wrigley: I think I have a slightly different, maybe more community focussed, approach to this because one of the things that I think worries me is the, how should we say it? The slow ebbing away of the community. And obviously if you are a, I don’t know, a company launched onto the stock market and what have you, you’re all about the money, right? The bottom line is you’re going to make money, distribute that with your shareholders, whatever, yada, yada. But the point is to make as much cash as possible and do things with that cash.

We have a very different calculus here in that the community is the thing which largely builds the software, maintains the software, promotes events. There is a bit of me which worries that if these, let’s say developers who’ve got one plugin, it doesn’t do 3000 major things, it just does one or two little things, but it’s been their way of getting themselves into the software, and figuring out how it all works, and meeting the community, and being engaged and, you know, all of that.

That slow ebbing away of that is something that I think our community and open source communities like ours need to be just a little bit mindful of. Because it does feel as if AI could definitely eat a lot of lunches. And I think we see that actually. I think we can already see that in the real world with things like attendance at events and the amount of events that are being put on, yeah.

[00:31:57] Matt Schwartz: I think you’re correct. I was actually going to bring this up in the sense that I am already seeing it within a lot of the agency groups. There’s just not as much engagement when it comes to posts, I think, and that sort of thing. Because people use AI more to find solutions, which means they’re not as engaged in the community. Which, to your point, plugins would kind of work the same way, especially the smaller plugins.

And yeah, there’s definitely something I think I’m concerned and kind of sad about already. Because like that’s why a lot of us are in WordPress is for the community. And I 100% agree with you. Not to mention if those guys, the smaller guys go away, then there just ends up being these massive plugin companies, which have their place, but WordPress wasn’t built on all massive plugin companies. So If those smaller ones go away, then that’s a little bit of the WordPress spirit I think are lost for sure.

[00:32:47] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think we just need to be very mindful about this slow, like I say, wicking away or haemorrhaging of the community. And because at some point, the calculation no longer works. You know, there just aren’t enough community members around to make it interesting for other new community members to join, or to stick with things. Or to update their plugin or whatever it may be.

And maybe that is just a consequence of the way the world is moving, I don’t know. But having lived in the WordPress ecosystem for over a decade, I think it would be a shame if that baby was to be thrown out with that bath water.

Okay. Alright. I think we’ve done that one. So the next one is, well, the next one kind of speaks directly to that actually, which is the idea of, I guess spreading your wings a little bit further and realising perhaps that AI empowers you to do things outside of WordPress. And you’ve entitled this Experimenting Beyond WordPress. Again, off you go.

[00:33:37] Matt Schwartz: So this is something I am seeing some agencies doing, which is, because you can use AI now to use unfamiliar stacks, there’s really two parts. One is just unfamiliar stacks, or unfamiliar platforms, you don’t know. You can really try out new platforms a lot faster now. It will tell you exactly what to do, you know, step by step, or it’ll just do it for you.

So there are agencies, I think looking at other platforms where certain projects may make sense outside of WordPress, where they’re using that in that capacity and it’s allowing them to experiment. Where in the past, just sticking in WordPress, you have all your knowledge there makes sense to do, right? You don’t want to know 10 different platforms. But I think AI’s made that easier to dive into these other platforms. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing I think is that, now that you can actually use chat to engage, you are seeing some agencies, and some freelancers, that are saying, well, I don’t need the WordPress infrastructure at all. I just want to go back to pretty much like static or HTML type websites because I know I’m just going to chat with it and then I don’t have to worry about security or updates.

And obviously I think that only would apply with certain websites. It’s not going to apply with highly functional websites. I think that’s not really going to work. But for like your brochure site, I think some agencies are experimenting with some other platforms out there like Astro and the EmDash setup going on with CloudFlare.

You know, and I think that was a direct response actually. They realised, oh, people are going to want to chat with it. We could build this WordPress, what they consider like an upgraded version, in their mind.

And I think that, you know, it’s good to experiment. I think what WordPress does really well, to your point though, is they’ve hopped on the API centric side of things, building the right framework, not trying to force a certain thing down our throats, but actually leave it really open.

And I think that’s ultimately good because that’s how open source works. That’s why I think AI will have a good position with open source is. To your point you made previously, all the data’s out there, all the documentation’s out there. It’s going to be able to be extremely flexible. And I think that’s really why WordPress is still, in my opinion, going to exist and thrive.

But you are seeing agencies that are looking outside of just Core WordPress, because they can experiment with just a lot less time now. And they can also try out some tools that may be a better fit for certain projects.

[00:36:18] Nathan Wrigley: There’s a lot of technologists in our community and we love tinkering, don’t we, and playing with new things? So it’s fairly inevitable. It goes with the territory.

Okay. Alright. So that was Experimenting Beyond WordPress. I think I’m going to skip 15 there because I think we covered quite a lot of that. So I’m just going to go straight to number 16, which probably will become 15, if you know what I mean, when I put it into the show notes.

So the next one anyway is called, whatever its number, is Risks and Cautions. So we’ve built what I feel is like a fairly solid argument for doing this kind of stuff. And now towards the end, we’re going to knock it all down. No, we’re not. But what are some of the risks that you might point people towards?

[00:36:58] Matt Schwartz: A hundred percent. This is, I think, probably one of my favourite sections because people don’t really talk about these risks as much as they should. If you go on LinkedIn, it’s just like all rainbows and butterflies. And we’re building a new feature every day, and I think that noise can make people feel like they have FOMO and they just jump into AI and they don’t think about the risks. So I think this is actually a really important section for any listeners to listen to.

I think one of the first items, probably a little obvious, but with security issues, with AI tools, a lot of companies, every company, I feel like at this point is inputting keys and all sorts of things into these AI chatbots. And ultimately, like those tools can still be hacked. And actually legally, a lot of them say when you submit into the chat, it’s actually considered public record. Anything you submit to them. That’s literally what OpenAI made a legal argument recently about. So keep that in mind when you’re doing this.

There are some ways to do this securely. You can look into, and I think that’s something I would recommend agencies doing because they, you are holding onto client data. And ultimately you don’t want that stuff getting leaked.

Another thing, kind of on another point, which I personally have less concern with, but I think some agencies bring up a valid point, which is every time you talk to these chat bots, et cetera, they’re keeping track of all these conversations. So I know some agencies are being like, hey, how much does a website cost in my state or my country? Only use the data that other agencies have told you. And I don’t know if it’s really doing it, but people are doing that and they’re, you know, it’s not pushing back on them.

Things like that, just be aware of, I think what you’re inputting in, because it isn’t necessarily being leaked as far as they’re being hacked, but that data make get spit out to places you don’t want it to by other parties through chat.

[00:38:52] Nathan Wrigley: I feel that at some point in the future, some gigantic disclosure, something will be disclosed, which is so horrific that it makes us all sort of take a collective breath when we suddenly realise all we’ve given over. We haven’t got there yet, or at least to my knowledge we haven’t. But I feel that at some point in the near-ish future, some jaw dropping disclosure will occur, which will make us all think twice about exactly what you’ve just described.

What are we giving up? What have we given? But also what have we not consciously given? Which kind of bit of our business did we unintentionally open up for the AI to have access to that we didn’t intend to? And if we had the time again, we wouldn’t have allowed it to, and so on and so forth. So, yeah. Okay.

Any other things on the risks and cautions? I feel that there’s a couple more lurking in there.

[00:39:43] Matt Schwartz: Yeah. I think that one’s to be the most obvious that most people are talking about. One I think people aren’t talking about though is handling errors when you’re building your own tools. Essentially, a lot of times you may vibe code something, right, which is great. But because you’re not really going into the depth of every situation, it’s just making kind of assumptions, the AI, of what should be there.

And because it’s so easy and you’re like, well, I’m saving time, people don’t really outline all of this. And so they don’t really put error handling in these tools. And what happens is, of course there’ll be some edge case and, you know, things just break. And again, depending on the tool, if it’s an internal tool, you can probably get away with that. But if it is a public facing, or a client facing tool, that is the beauty I think of having a human actually review it with logic is they are going to have context that the AI doesn’t have.

To your point earlier, like subconsciously might be giving certain information to the AI that we don’t necessarily mean to. But you also might be leaving things out because you think you’ve already told the AI, or you think it’s going to assume a certain way, and you can’t really make that assumption. It ends up really backfiring in the long run, I think.

And that’s why being very conscious about error handling and being like, okay, we’re going to set up logging, we’re going to set up testing. Validation is just the responsible way to be building these tools that really, I feel like no one talks about.

[00:41:09] Nathan Wrigley: No. And the curious thing about it is, because it’s such a black box, I feel that almost every other technology that we’ve interacted with has been much more, I don’t know how to describe it. There’s been a higher barrier to entry. It’s more difficult to interact with it. You’ve had to, I don’t know, press buttons or enter code or what have you. Now you are just communicating. And maybe we’ll even sort of drop into voice communication at some point where we’re literally just talking with the thing.

There’s just no, how to describe it. There’s just such a small amount of friction that is required to interact with these things. And so it kind of lulls us into this perception that it can’t make mistakes. It’s error free and what have you. And we know that that’s not the case. I didn’t really describe that very well, but I hope you got a general sense of what I was trying to describe there.

[00:41:54] Matt Schwartz: I think you’re right. I mean I can give an example like building out CheckView, which is obviously like a, it’s a QA tool for WordPress sites. But one thing is, I knew a decent amount of QA before I started building it. But I learned so much context building it, and we weren’t using AI when we built the tool, right? That I would’ve never gotten out if I had used AI from the beginning.

Because like you said, there’s just such little friction. You as a human just don’t have to have that much information. You can just dive into something, having no idea on what you’re really doing, which is a blessing and a curse. And I think just being aware of that. And building in the right logs, and errors to at least essentially provide a safety net for yourself, knowing that you’re not going to know everything is really important.

[00:42:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And then a couple of other things which we’ll just sort of gloss over fairly quickly because maybe they’re sort of slightly common sense. Obviously, you know, you’ve got here sensitive client data, which might be, without your knowledge, being scooped up by the AI agents. So monitoring that.

Over dependence on AI vendors. This feels like everybody’s really become dependent on a handful of companies. Maybe you could count them on one hand, I think basically. There’s three or four really, that everybody seems to be using. So that may be something that we want to be mindful of.

And of course, the last one of your bullet points under Risks and Cautions is just the fact that AI makes some mistakes all the time.

[00:43:15] Matt Schwartz: All the time. I think most of that’s common sense. Really, the only one that I think people aren’t talking as much about is the overdependence on AI. Not to date this podcast, but I’m going to a little bit anyways. For example, with Claude, they are removing Claude Code from their $20 plan right now. You know, if you’ve built this into your agency process, well, get ready to pay, you know, a hundred bucks for every employee, which could be thousands of dollars.

[00:43:40] Nathan Wrigley: You can only imagine how valuable that will be. And maybe it’ll be 200 bucks, or a thousand bucks or whatever it may be.

[00:43:46] Matt Schwartz: Right. A lot of these companies obviously are subsidising the cost, and so I do caution agency specifically. That’s why having that AI vision is important, but also considering making it independent enough from your processes that you still can function if this thing does change around, because I do think there is going to be a pushback on cost at some point.

So for example, like when you’re building a product, I’m seeing some companies that are building AI so integral to their product that it will not function without AI. Or going to have to raise the price by 10x. And so like even with CheckView, our tools are there, but we haven’t built it in in such a way that you can’t use the tool without it.

And I think at the agency level, it’s the same idea. For the most part, trying to avoid building it in a way that you couldn’t reduce the AI needs if you needed to. Or just preparing for that the costs could go up and like, you know, if you give it to all 10 employees now, you know, at 20 bucks a month, get ready to possibly pay a lot more later.

And I just think that’s something important for agencies specifically to keep in mind. And I know that seems contradictory to what I said at the beginning of this, AI everything, but I think it’s important.

[00:44:59] Nathan Wrigley: I’m not a financial wizard in any way, shape, or form, but that does seem to be something which, sure as night follows day, is going to be coming, is the requirement to repay a lot of the venture capital that the AI is currently burning through. And yeah, so maybe a significant price hike.

And we’ve all got used to these practically free tools, and maybe that’s something that is not going to be in our future. So that’s a really good point. Put that bulwark in place to make sure that you are protected from that should it go up by, like you said, 10x or whatever it may be?

Okay, so I did say that there were going to be multiple, I think 16 is what I said. This probably will be the last one. This is likely outcomes for agencies. So, Matt, you get to stare into the crystal ball and tell us what your final thoughts are in terms of what you think are likely outcomes.

[00:45:47] Matt Schwartz: So I think some of this is already happening.

Hiring, I think, is slowing down in some agencies because they’re realising they can automate more. They don’t need as many, essentially non-specialist employees, or contractors. And I think that is a real thing that is happening.

I don’t know if it’s going to be necessarily a long-term issue. Hopefully as, essentially the floor raises, work gets better, more agencies will be focused on providing more value, more strategy, those sort of things. Again, the execution becomes a little bit of a commodity. So having essentially more junior team members who usually do that execution isn’t just quite as necessary. So I think that’s going to continue to come up.

But again, I think it’s going to be balanced out with even the costs we just talked about with the AI tools. There could totally be a point where the tools might get expensive enough that it makes sense to have a junior do this execution.

[00:46:45] Nathan Wrigley: Get the humans back. Yeah.

[00:46:46] Matt Schwartz: Yeah. And we go back the other way. Some people are saying that could happen. I could see the argument for that. But I think that’s one thing.

Another thing with agencies is you now can really productise more of your services. And this comes into the automation process that we talked about. You can take your processes, you can really package them up, I think. And there has been a lot of talk about productising services, but I think now you can get more nuanced.

So if you, for example, only build sites for plumbers, well, with AI you can get way more specific on plumber specific service needs, and build out a process with what you’ve already done, plus, with AI to make that, I think, a lot easier for the plumber or the client, to get what they need out of it. In the past, I think most agencies were trying to build SOPs as we have time. And it, you know, it’s just a really difficult process. And I think that’s where agencies I think could help a lot.

And then the last point I’ll make around here is really around that the tools I think will change. It will be, again, less about the execution of tools, how you’re building your sites. More about the actual automation. And then really just testing and monitoring and making sure everything’s working how it’s supposed to be. The human will essentially become more of the manager of the AI. And that extends, I think, to even the tools.

I could see there being more QA and monitoring tools out there for more specific needs. Because now, you know, AI can build 90% of this, which is great. I save that cost, but I know I need to pay maybe 5% of that towards some tools that actually watch and monitor what’s happening, and make sure these automations, and these websites, are really doing what they need to be doing. So I think there is going to be possibly a shift in that way around what sort of tools that we’re investing in as far as agencies go.

[00:48:40] Nathan Wrigley: So that we could describe as a bit of a marathon. I think, really, you really took us through the gamut of everything that could possibly affect an agency in the AI space. We’re in the year 2026, let’s see how it ages. But that was a really interesting deep dive into all of the different bits and pieces.

Matt has very kindly put together some show notes. What I think I’ll probably do is crib those. Maybe I’ll put them into the WP Tavern show notes, or maybe I’ll link to a Google Doc or something like that where you can see them. But you’ll be able to see all of the different bits and pieces that we went through. There’s a lot more on that document than we actually had a chance to go through. So definitely do check that out.

What I can say is that the future is definitely going to be interesting. Whether or not any of the predictions you’ve made will turn out to be true, time will tell.

But what a fascinating chat. Thank you so much for chatting to me. And I really appreciate you sticking around and doing the second episode somewhat unexpectedly with me.

Just before we sign off, Matt, where can we find you? Where are the best places online to hang out with you?

[00:49:49] Matt Schwartz: Yeah, definitely. So definitely, you can find me on the Admin Bar Facebook group. I’m also in LinkedIn, trying to be better about that. You can also check me out. I’ve got a Slack channel. Checkview.io, of course. Inspry.com. Feel free to reach out if anything comes up.

Definitely, overall I would just recommend agencies dabble in this. Don’t be reckless, but definitely see what makes sense for your agency. Document it all out ahead of time. And I think that that’s really going to be agencies strong suit is, can we leverage this stuff in a smart way?

[00:50:21] Nathan Wrigley: Well, you’ve certainly provided us with a lot of food for thought. So once more, go and check out the show notes on wptavern.com. I will probably link to the document that Matt has created on both part one of this and part two as well. So you’ll be able to check both of those out.

Matt Schwartz, thank you so much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:50:41] Matt Schwartz: Thank you so much, Nathan.

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress. The people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, exploring AI’s impact in WordPress agencies.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Matt Schwartz. Matt runs Inspry, an Atlanta WordPress and Woo Commerce agency. He started it back in 2011 and has been working with WordPress even longer than that. In addition to his agency work, he also has a product called CheckView focused on WordPress testing. He’s got years of experience in the WordPress agency world, and recently he’s turned much of his attention towards the growing impact of AI.

If you’ve been hearing a lot about AI but a feeling fatigued by all the fragmented conversations, this episode might well offer a different perspective. Rather than focusing on how AI creates websites or content, Matt shares a different angle, how AI can be used inside a WordPress agency to enhance processes, improve workflows, and deliver more value to clients, with much of it happening behind the scenes.

We start by talking about how Matt stumbled into web design and how that led him to running his own agency. We dig into agency life, and why so many freelancers and agency owners are constantly iterating on their processes. From there, we talk about the big shift that’s happening, not just in building sites, but in how agencies can use AI to streamline their SOPs, client communication, and internal operations.

Matt explains the need for intention when adding AI to an agency. He introduces the idea of an AI vision document, that helps set guardrails and guidelines for where, and how, AI should factor into your business. He also shares real examples of ways AI can save time and stress in things like meetings, proposals, debugging, support, and even helping you expand your service offerings. We also touch on the risks, ethical considerations, and the importance of keeping a human in the loop during critical agency moments.

If you’re running a WordPress agency, or are curious about how agencies are adapting to the rapid pace of change, brought by AI, this episode is for you. This is part one in a two-part series, so listen to this and tune in next week for part two.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Matt Schwartz.

I am joined on the podcast by Matt Schwartz. Hello, Matt.

[00:03:45] Matt Schwartz: Hey Nathan. Thank you so much for having me today. I’m excited.

[00:03:48] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you’re very welcome. We’re on the podcast today to have a chat about AI. Now, before you hit the stop button, dear listener, because AI is all the rage everywhere, we’ve talked about it a million different ways. I think there’s something a little bit different about the conversation that we’re going to have today, because it particularly plays into the WordPress agency, kind of the stuff that you are not doing with the website directly, but all of the bits and pieces that allow you to have an agency, and how AI may or may not be best placed to insert itself in those different scenarios.

But before we begin that, Matt, do you mind just giving us your little bio? Maybe tell us a bit about your situation regarding WordPress agencies and whatnot.

[00:04:31] Matt Schwartz: Definitely. Yeah, so I run an agency called In Inspry in Atlanta. We’ve been around since 2011. We’ve been using WordPress since 2013, and also have a product called CheckView, which does WordPress testing.

But yeah, in the agency space specifically, you know, I’ve been talking to a lot of different agencies about AI. I’ve been pretty involved in it. And you’re totally right, Nathan, our goal today is not to make everyone just have to experience the verbal throw up of the word AI, AI, AI over and over again, which is, I feel like I’m sick of the word. But really going into how agencies can use it in, I think, really interesting ways, and also being candid about what AI is, and some of the pitfalls I think of it that, you know, aren’t always talked about, especially if you go on LinkedIn.

[00:05:15] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so we’ll get into that in a moment, but just before we do, there’s a couple of interesting bits that I want to throw at you. And this is something that I heard in the British press not that long ago. And it doesn’t in any way, shape or form reflect on WordPress, it was just more generally about AI, and the fatigue that the general population are experiencing around that term.

And it feels like we have reached maximum capacity to just hear those words, and hear the overpromising and the potentially under delivery of AI. So I’ll throw that little bit in, but also, just to say that what we’re going to talk about today is not going to be how to get the pixels on the page, and how to use AI to turn the website out. This is much more going to be the background to the agency that you run and all of that kind of thing.

So before we begin, did you intentionally get into web design all those years ago, or were you more like just about everybody that I talked to, did you stumble into it a little bit more?

[00:06:13] Matt Schwartz: So I stumbled into it in the sense that I started when I was basically a kid. You know, I was like obsessed with building websites for like clubs, and middle school, you know, we had tables and HTML. I think Template Monster was around then. And I would just go to the website and look at these beautiful designs that I knew I couldn’t make.

So then, from there I built websites all through middle school, high school. Got paid, I think from my first one it was my Mom’s work. She worked at a dentist. It was awesome that he let me do that. And, you know, he paid me a couple thousand bucks, which was a lot in high school. And then from there I just built sites through college. We were in Drupal land over at University of Georgia. So that was a little harsh reality for the first CMS I ever used actually.

But I really just enjoyed building websites through that process. And I remember graduating in Information Systems in the Business School and being like, I think I’m just going to keep building websites. I think I like doing this. So I didn’t go the consultant route or anything like that, I just stuck with websites. So I stumbled into it when I was a kid, but I definitely chose to stay in it after that.

[00:07:17] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. And what’s curious about that, and it maps very much what I did, almost every word that you said could map into my own life. Is that you, not working for a company, you are never sort of given the SOP. You have to do the SOP. You have to figure it out as you progress on your journey over the years. So every process that you’ve got, every thing that you do, every price point that you make, every email that you create as a template, you’re probably generating that yourself.

And so that kind of leans heavily into what we’re going to do today, because I felt that journey never ended. Part of being an agency owner was always this constant exploration of not the website itself, that kind of handled itself, more the, what’s the process? How do I get new clients? What are the backend systems that I’m going to use to make it all work?

And so I think freelancers in particular in the WordPress space have got that. And so they’re probably constantly looking around, very much beguiled in the more recent past by what AI can do to them.

And so let’s start, you’ve listed out very kindly a whole load of show notes for me. And the first point that you wanted to get into was, well, the big shift. So let’s start there.

[00:08:26] Matt Schwartz: Yeah, definitely. So I think one thing that we’ve seen as agency owners is, oh, websites and content now can start to be built by AI. And everyone’s talked about that, like you said. But I think what is more interesting is what you’re bringing up, which is around more the process of using AI. Which, if you are a freelancer and you have not looked at your process, please do. I didn’t look at my process for like years, and I would just repeat the same thing over and over again. It wasn’t until I actually started hiring people that I realised that was even really a thing. I know that’s sad, but that’s the reality. So if you haven’t, definitely look at that.

But when it comes to AI, I think being able to use it for process and your SOPs and automation, that’s really where I think it’s actually going to make the biggest impact for agencies that do want to use AI.

Because essentially, not every agency’s this way, this is a generalisation, but as a customer, or a client of an agency, they don’t see the difference between one website and another typically outside of the design, right? They don’t really know the technical know-how. But what they do see is, what is your workflow? What is your process? What is your touch points with them? And that’s ultimately what ends up being the product to your clients.

So I think as an agency owner, being able to use AI to make that process easier, and more clear, to your clients is what will really allow you to thrive. Not necessarily, just the content and executing building the website. Sure, AI may be able to help there, but that actually goes into the bigger process in my opinion.

[00:10:01] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so we’ll definitely get into all of those, but I think basically the case you are making is that there is a there, there. There is something behind the AI that could definitely improve things.

I think it’s fairly unlikely that anybody listening to this podcast hasn’t dabbled in some way with a little bit of AI, but maybe there’s a handful of people out there who genuinely haven’t. And the last 20 years have been marked by fairly gradual improvements in things. You know, SaaS apps came along and they gradually improved and one superseded another. But again, it was incremental.

But over the last three or four years, I think that’s all gone out the window. Incremental’s no longer really a word. It’s seismic this week, seismic next week, seismic the week after that. Keeping up is going to be difficult. But anyway, needless to say, you are going to make the case that there are areas where AI smuggled into your business is going to be useful.

Can I just ask at the beginning, do you in any way show the AI to your clients? In other words, is there a moment where they get to see behind the curtain, oh, Matt, look, he did that with AI, or do you kind of have this curtain which protects you from the client, so that they never see that you are using AI? It’s a bit like how everybody who was a freelancer always uses the word team. They sort of pretend that there’s like nine of you, but there’s actually only one of you. So it’s a bit like that. Do you hide the AI from your clients or do you let them know that this is what you’re doing?

[00:11:30] Matt Schwartz: So when it comes to the product, we definitely let clients know if we are using it in their product. Because I think, at least from my ethical standpoint, I think you should do that. I don’t want to be in a case where we’re not doing that. But I do think when it comes to your process and internal workflows, no, we don’t typically need to do those things.

The only time we would do that is if we’re actually working with a client to improve their internal processes with AI. Then they may be seeing a parallel setup to what we’ve done, even at our own agency.

[00:11:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. There are some people who kind of revel in the, no AI, if you like, so they make that a badge of honour within their business, whether it’s an agency in the WordPress space or anything else. And so obviously they would probably want to proclaim from the rooftops that they’re not using any AI. But I think yours is a fairly standard position. You know, if it doesn’t actually affect what they’re doing day to day, why would you need to use that? In the same way that you don’t need to tell your client, well, we’re using Salesforce in order to communicate with you. It’s just, there’s the URL, go to that and type your ticket in there and so on.

So your second point, why now? Why is it important right at this moment? So we’re recording this, I don’t know, towards the end of April, let’s say that, 2026. Is this like some sort of red line in the sand? Are we about to enter a Rubicon moment where we can’t go backwards?

[00:12:47] Matt Schwartz: Well, I don’t know. It’s seismic every week as you said. So I do think the gap is widening between agencies that are not using AI and using AI. But that doesn’t necessarily mean, in my opinion, you should just like hop on the AI train if you’re not currently deep in it. You do have to think about what makes sense to your agency and what you’re comfortable with.

But I think it really comes back to the fact that execution is becoming a commodity more and more, at least in the web agency space. If you’re building a brochure site, right, those tools are essentially becoming more and more replaced. Just like drag and drop builders came in and now this is kind of, in my opinion, the next iteration. It’ll be less about the execution of building a simple website. It’ll be more about, what is the true value of your agency to that client?

Which in a sense is not a bad thing, because this was always an argument before. You know, are you an agency that builds solutions for clients? It makes them money, or saves them money. Or are you an agency that just executes what they say? And there’s definitely a place for that. I think there will always be a place for that, but I think when you look at like a brochure site, it’s harder, I think, to make that argument than if it’s like an e-commerce site or a custom app, because the tools are just getting better.

So as an agency, I think there is an edge here with AI because clients are going to have higher expectations. You’re going to compete against companies that are using AI to do better touchpoint, to do more touchpoints, to having a better process.

Now, of course, that is dependent if they implement AI correctly, right? User error and AI is like any technology, that is definitely a major concern, guardrails, all that good stuff. But I think that is why this is the time, because if you’re not already looking at it, your competitors are definitely looking at using it in some capacity.

[00:14:40] Nathan Wrigley: Just something you said really struck home there. You said execution is a commodity. I’ve never heard that phrase, but that encapsulates so much, so well. I think that’s really interesting.

And I also share your moment in time analogy because I think we are at some moment where the seesaw, I don’t know if you use that word where you come from. The seesaw is definitely tipping to the point where, in the part of the world where I live, virtually everybody is aware of it. We mentioned that maybe there’s fatigue about it, but certainly almost everybody has had some exposure to it. They’re now aligned with what can be done, and at what cost, and for what amount of time.

And so it does feel like if you were to go and say, I don’t know, I’m going to build you a $5,000 brochure website with two pages, maybe a few years ago that was much more credible than it seems like now. And so this horizon of expectations is opening up. And it’s not just because we can do it, it’s because the clients, they know we can do it. And they know that things are going to be cheaper to produce en masse in the future.

So I think you’re probably right. So again, you’ve made the case for, this is the time. So not just that this is a good idea, but this is the time. Anything else to add onto that before we move on to your next one?

[00:15:56] Matt Schwartz: The only thing I would add to that is, you know, AI could be an edge for you. It could also be not using AI at all, because ultimately it’s about the value you’re providing, again, to your client. So you may be able to build a two page, $5,000 website using AI, but essentially if you’re able to provide value to that client in some other way, whether it’s your sales process, your overall process, your personality, whatever it is, that all plays into this. So I would keep that in mind.

But overall, you are correct. I think the floor is rising for everyone. And this is real dark, but AI to me only showed us that a lot of the work we do day to day, it’s just not that special, it’s execution. And that just means we need to be spending more time on the strategy and the value to the client, whether that’s using AI or not. But I think using AI to at least look at that is a good idea, if you haven’t done that up to this point, I think it’s the time to at least look.

[00:16:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I expect the calculus that’s going on in most, and I’m using air quotes here, normal people’s heads. So when I’m talking about that, I mean non-technical clients who might be coming, looking for a website for their bricks and mortar shop or whatever it may be. The calculus of AI is just this shrinking of time. The thing which probably would’ve taken a week to do, you know, okay, I’m going to phone you up, we’re going to set up a meeting, we’ll have that meeting, we’ll back and forth what we might want. And then a week or two later, you’ll show me a few wire frames or something like that.

That all seems now to have been crunched into literal minutes. That’s no longer a secret. I think at the beginning of the AI, movement, let’s call it that, a few years ago, I think there was a call that you could basically say, make more money, because the client’s expectations would be the same in terms of time, and the amount of expertise that was needed.

But that seems to be shrinking as well, because now the clients are aware that the AI can do that thing. Look, you just knocked it up with AI in three minutes. No, we’re not going to pay you for six weeks for that kind of thing.

Okay so, right, there we go. So that’s the now. Then you move on to something that I’ve not even thought about before, which is creating an AI vision document. Now you’re going to need to explain what you mean by that I think.

[00:18:08] Matt Schwartz: Yeah, definitely. So the idea really with this is being more purposeful about adding AI. At least in the past, at my agency, you know, I’d wake up one day freaking out and be like, we’ve got to try to see how this works. Does this make sense to add AI to this process? And it wouldn’t be very purposely built. It would just be like, hey, let’s try this.

And to some extent that experimentation is good, but at the same time, I think if you are a lot more methodical about that process, it will be better for the long-term use of AI. Because as I’ve said, I definitely have, maybe I didn’t say, I have hesitations about AI and I use it, right? I think that’s the paradox of what’s happening. A lot of people are using it, but we’re not all trustful of it. But we can see that there are potential gains and you want to be on the cutting edge.

But ultimately, the vision document, the idea is that you will create a document that outlines all of your processes at your company, at your agency. And see what are the things that you want to add AI to, what makes sense, things that are repetitive, that the team is losing time on, compared to things that really require human judgement.

So it’s not just like shove AI into everything. This AI document sounds like that’s what it is. But it’s actually like, there may be many places we don’t want AI at all, or we may want to have a guard for human judgement. And I think that’s actually a really good idea to protect your agency from risk and really just your reputation. Because otherwise, I think a lot of agencies are just kind of, you know, yolo, adding it everywhere and not really thinking about it from a high level.

The other neat thing you can do if you’re building this is, obviously you can use AI to help find patterns in your business from using your time tracking software to see who is working on what tasks, and what’s taking the longest. And being like, are these good places that we could use AI? Like I can connect Claude to Everhour that we use, and it can spit out who’s working on what in the past month. And I actually can get a good pattern, because one thing you can, I will say with AI is it’s pretty good at pattern recognition. That’s what it was built for. So if you just need like a high level idea, again, grain of salt, but at a high level, it’s pretty good at that.

So I think for a vision document, pulling all that data in, using AI and then setting these guardrails, figuring out what in your team’s processes you can build into a vision is a good idea. And that goes into the high level point I made, which was really, I think AI being used for more process and agency is the big thing here, more than anything.

[00:20:42] Nathan Wrigley: I suppose if you’re the agency owner as well, and obviously agency could be like three people, two people, right up to, you know, several hundreds, maybe thousands, who knows. If you are at the, towards the top of that pyramid, let’s put it that way, knowing when and where it’s going to be used is really important. You need to know that, okay, our support, 80% of our support is going to be handled by AI. That’s the thing that we’ve leaned into. We’re going to do it that way.

Or maybe you are exactly the opposite. You know, we’ve learned, our customer base are very dissatisfied with the kind of answers that they get, because of the nature of our company and the expertise that we need to bring to bear. So we’re not going to do any AI for support.

But also development, to know, okay, this is the moment where you must stop using AI. When you run into this snag, we’re going to deal with that as humans. We’re going to huddle together, figure it out as humans, and maybe take it back to the AI at that point.

But having that overarching understanding, and writing it down. Having an SOP, if you like, for AI so that everybody’s on the same page and knows where it’s permissible and not permissible. So you mentioned you’ve got a whole laundry list of possible things. So it might be in the sales process, the delivery process, the proposal stage, project management, QA, launch. There’s a whole bunch on here.

Yeah, that seems like a really neat idea, and not something that I’d figured out. And it’s kind of like, keeps you honest in a way. It means that this is what we’ve agreed to do as a company, these are the boundaries that we’re going to set ourselves. And they can change, but for now, this is what they are.

[00:22:14] Matt Schwartz: Yeah. I think that even if you’re not, again, jumping in the deep end of AI, just having a doc like this will protect you so that I think you do have these guardrails with your employees or your contractors. You know who’s using what, and you can really protect your agency even if it’s not implementing more AI, right? I think it’s just a good idea.

And like you said, writing it down, it’s funny, it’s kind of like when you build your agency, you write your mission statement and your values and that really does do something in, I think, the human psyche when you do that. And I think that can be applied here with the AI vision document too.

[00:22:47] Nathan Wrigley: I love your fourth point, which you’ve entitled, AI as a new core service offering. Because this feels like a really nice sweet spot. Because with the best will in the world, you and I, and probably a lot of the people that are listening to this podcast are very much into technology. We deliberately put ourselves in front of new tech, new features, new widgets, new gadgets, whatever. So we’re beguiled by it. But the truth is, we know there’s a lot of people out there that aren’t, probably don’t really want to get all that close to it. And so I think what you are suggesting here is, why not offer your AI expertise that you gain as an actual service to clients? Have I got that right?

[00:23:24] Matt Schwartz: Correct. So essentially, like you said, if you’re already building up these new technology skills, being able to apply this directly in a, I would say in the proper way, right? Like we’re seeing, again, AI thrown in everywhere. You have to know your clients and your customers. They may not want to hear the word AI. What they may want to hear it instead is, hey, I can fix your business workflow and I can save you thousands of dollars, and we can automate this. They don’t want to hear the word AI, and that’s okay. But it’s essentially AI at the end of the day, right?

So it may not be that the product offerings actually use the word AI. If anything personally, I’m kind of avoiding that, at least at our agency. Of course I’ll tell them it’s using AI, but it’s not what I lead with. I think it’s more about going in on, okay, what solutions can we provide clients and using this as a new offering, especially as a way to handle and mitigate what’s happening with brochure sites, right?

Brochure sites I think are going to continue to drop and you need to provide value to clients. And I think getting closer to their actual processes, there’s a couple different ways you could do this. Like I know some agencies that are using AI to build custom web apps, like lightweight internal ones. Which I think can be helpful, but I have concerns around the risks and security of that because I do know some agencies that are, again, are just yolo building it. I don’t think they’re doing the due diligence. But I do think there’s a way that you can build, let’s say an app that used to cost 50,000 for 10,000 now, right? Or 8,000 and do it mostly like the right way, do human review of the code. So it’s still something that they couldn’t have done at all before. They couldn’t have had this custom internal app.

And I think that is the argument for people that say, hey, I’m going to replace all my SaaS products. It’s not, in my opinion, you replace all your SaaS products. If you can build a SaaS internally that is built specifically for your business, and you feel like you can maintain and build it properly at the right cost, sure. You’re willing to do that. But if there’s a SaaS product out there that does exactly what you need, I’m going to pay the $30, and then go yell at that company. I’m not going to build it internally. So having these conversations with clients, if you’re going to build custom apps, I know I went on a little side tangent, but I think that’s really important say.

And then the other one I’ll mention as far as AI core offerings is using more automation with tools like n8n or any of those Make type tools. n8n, I would say is a little more advanced, but the benefit is clients are hearing about AI, they realise it can do a lot, and starting to ask them, well, how can I help save you money or make you money in your processes? So productising or creating SOPs that are more automated. Even using those tools for your own customers, I think can be huge. Because then you’re really getting to value directly with them.

Like, brochure sites, I think the problem is, it’s almost subjective sometimes the value, which I’ve always struggled with, depending on the client. But things like their processes and them seeing you automate this stuff, they see the value immediately. So it’s an easy sale that you can make. And you can provide that value, and potentially even get recurring income off of that. Because maybe you’re hosting the automation for them or you’re tweaking the automation. So those are some ways you can mitigate, I think what’s going on with AI.

[00:26:50] Nathan Wrigley: The next one, I’m just going to skirt over quite quickly because I think everybody can kind of grasp this. One of the things which AI is obviously superior, let’s go with that word, to the typical human, is its capacity to wrap its arms around a massive amount of data, and kind of make sense of its straight away.

One of the areas where I think you are saying this could be deployed pretty effectively is in things like marketing, where having an understanding of, I don’t know, geography, spending power in different geographical locations, what kind of products are going to service the market that you are launching into, and therefore how to build websites, pages that kind of react to that and will work well.

That’s the kind of thing that was always off limits to me. I wasn’t interested in the marketing side. Looking at that data, trying to digest that data, it was just never of interest to me. And now, I think everybody can understand that you point an AI in the right direction and it can draw conclusions, which are just so much more credible than somebody like me could summon up in six months of hard work, really.

[00:27:53] Matt Schwartz: Well,I mean I think you could sum it up, but I think you bring up a really good point, which is that with AI, it can pull in all this data and it can give you, I would say, summaries and next points that you just wouldn’t have done before. I actually think that’s the sweet spot with AI is, are we using this to replace a really good existing setup, or are we doing something that we literally couldn’t even do before because the client couldn’t afford it?

So I think that’s what’s really neat is I can be like, okay, client, we looked through your Freshdesk, we looked through all the data you gave us. Here’s what we saw your personas. And before, there’s just no way, as an agency, I would be offering that at the budget that they could afford, or maybe the interest as an agency to do that. So I think that is, a really neat thing is, especially for small businesses, we can offer them services that they just wouldn’t even be able to have in the past at the budget that they have.

[00:28:46] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so really you are kind of broadening the product offering that you can have. I mean nobody here is going to advocate that you just use an AI and regurgitate whatever it says without some background knowledge that what you are saying makes sense. There clearly needs to be a bit of that. But the amassing of the data with some common sense, heuristics around what it is that the data is showing you.

Okay, that’s interesting. So maybe there’s some sort of low hanging fruit that previously you would’ve said no to and, look, we just don’t do that. You can now not only retroactively sort of say, yes, we now do that, but maybe even proactively say, look, we’ve got these other things that we can discuss as well. Okay, that’s interesting.

Right, here’s the next bit, and this is, I think if you are not an AI expert, and I definitely would consider myself in that bucket, I think this next one is some really great low hanging fruit to get you started. So this is, your number six, is AI inside agency operations. So this is using AI to make work easier, I guess would be an easy way to say it. So just run us through these points.

[00:29:51] Matt Schwartz: Definitely. So this is probably, if you’re familiar with AI, the most common uses. But essentially it’s going to be, you know, things like your meeting summaries, right? I think everyone has seen the bots that join in and, you know, there’s like 10 bots and there’s like two people and we’re like, are we in dystopia? Or it’s you and like 10 bots, and the other person doesn’t show up and you’re like, am I supposed to just talk to this bot? I think Mark Zuckerberg actually says he’s starting to have a bot fill in for him at meetings. Anyways, very dystopian.

But when it comes to meeting summaries and that sort of thing, I think where it can be really helpful if you’re not using it, again is, in the past, if I was having these discovery calls where I may not actually land this client, I don’t want to spend 20 hours trying to figure out the perfect proposal for them. It’s just not worth my time, basically, right?

So what this lets you do is it lets you, as an agency, do things you couldn’t do before, or you didn’t have the budget and resources to do. One would be on discovery. I can now take all the meeting notes, I can have it go to the client’s website and I can also have it look at my previous proposals. And I can have it put together a solution for this client, in terms of like what proposal makes sense for them.

To your point, I’m still going to review it. I’m still going to edit it. I’m still going to make sure that this makes sense, but I think that’s a perfect sweet spot again for AI. I know I keep saying it. Something I just wouldn’t have done before. I would’ve like, either I just spent 20 hours on it or sent a very generic proposal just to get something out the door. Now I can make it really a lot more nuanced because it can go through all that data.

So if you’re not using it for summaries or proposals or SOWs, I think a draft version of that, it’s really good at those sort of things with combining all the data.

[00:31:36] Nathan Wrigley: I am so surprised by how quickly that remarkable technology became utterly mundane. That is say that three years ago, the first time somebody dropped in a Zoom meeting with an AI bot, I thought, okay, that’s really unusual, what’s going on here? And then within three minutes you get the email after the call is finished and you see this perfect summarisation of exactly what you talked about, including correctly labelled next tasks for each of the individuals on the call.

That to me was, I was living in Star Trek. And now that just seems so pedestrian. And that’s remarkable. That’s the speed at which we’ve become adapted, and it’s become part of our modus operandi.

And if you haven’t used those, it’s really worth a try because you will experience the amazement that I had three years ago. And then you too can become completely numb to how amazing it is really quickly.

It literally will take an hour of audio and spit out a basically perfect summary in 150 words or whatever it may be, and it will capture it perfectly. I suppose the rebuttal to that is, well, what do you do with that? If nobody does anything with that then, well, you haven’t really lost anything. You’re in exactly the same place as you were before, but at least you’ve got a written record of it.

But like I say, that’s the low hanging fruit. They’re definitely things. SOWs, SOPs, meeting summaries, that kind of thing. Great idea.

Okay, next one. Number seven. AI for support workflows. What’s going on here?

[00:33:04] Matt Schwartz: Yeah, so this one’s a little bit more about the actual operations. But I’ve talked to some agencies that are starting to really build into their support process AI tools. For example, using things like n8n, the automation platform, where it can digest your help tickets. And we’re not necessarily going to have it solve the problems, right? But what it can do, again, is it’s going to have access to a lot of data about that website. It may have access to your project management software, all the other tickets that came in.

And unlike a human where it would take hours to do this, so we just aren’t going to do it, it can do a really good job of essentially making sure that we can have all the information we need for the support person to do what they need to do, the support team, right? So it can even give good initial resolutions for the team to do, so that they can work through tickets faster.

That’s a good example of, we’re not replacing the human, we’re not trying to automate it so it emails back the customer. But what we are doing is we’re taking in all the context of, hey, it’s this client, they’ve had these other tickets, it has access possibly to the WordPress site, so it can even see the error logs. It may have access to the server APIs, so that it can actually see what’s going on with that server. And then it can basically come up with a resolution that is likely the issue.

And you are seeing a lot of, even hosting companies going that route, where they’re starting to have agents inside their hosting so that you can pinpoint issues in WordPress a lot faster than you could in the past. And again, I still want a human to review that, but I do think by doing that, you can get a speedier response to your customers, and you can cover more tickets without alienating your customers or making it seem like it was, you know, written by a robot with em dashes everywhere, right?

[00:34:54] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you know what? I think this is a real area to tread carefully, certainly from my point of view, because I have definitely got AI bot fatigue. In that, there is some button that gets pushed when I find that I’m in a chat bot, and that is the only route that I’ve got through this whole system. I really dearly love to get in front of a human quite quickly. And I think a lot of people are learning that technique of, you know, the first thing you type is, speak to a human, or something equivalent to that. I think it’s really easy to misstep here, and misjudge people’s capacity to take AI only, or AI mostly or whatever.

This I think will be an interesting area to watch. And maybe this will be at the vanguard of when people express their frustration, you know, how much of this can you take? And monitoring that and keeping sight on when people’s, I don’t know, anger boils over because they’re not getting the service that they paid for or the service that they’ve come to expect or what have you. So, yeah. Anyway, that’s my 2 cents on that.

[00:35:50] Matt Schwartz: Hundred percent agree. It’s the most sensitive portion in my opinion. I mean that’s your touch point with your customer when they’re most frustrated.

[00:35:56] Nathan Wrigley: Right, that’s the pain moment. And introducing additional pain at the moment of pain is fraught with problems. And we’ve seen this play out in all sorts of other ways. I’m sure it’s the case where you are in your part of the world with telephone systems where you end up in this just infinite loop of, press three for, and then press four for. And then eventually you get back to, oh, well, I’m back to pressing three am I? Okay. And the anger boils over.

It feels like such a win. We’re saving time. We’ve got the AI to answer because it’s read all of our documentation. I’m going to guarantee that somebody will not be able to get what you think they ought to be getting with it.

And dare I say it, what about all those dear people out there who really are unable to access the technology in the way that you anticipate, or the way that you can. Maybe they’re elderly, maybe they don’t have the capacity to do it. Maybe they’ve got accessibility needs or something like that.

Okay, number eight. AI assisted debugging and WordPress management. I like this. This is a good one.

[00:36:53] Matt Schwartz: Yeah, so we covered this a little. It goes along actually with the above point which is, one thing that I see other agencies, and we’re also doing this internally is, you know, you can obviously connect AI agents now to WordPress sites directly, obviously with guardrails in place. But it can connect to the REST API you have the Abilities API with Automattic. There’s third party solutions like Novamira out there that can actually work with the PHP code side of things. Your hosting companies often are actually building their own tools as well.

So doing all of that, debugging has been, I will say, has been dramatically improved, at least at our agency. Because it can do all of that and it can really find a nuanced solution where, you know, we could spend 10 hours trying to work on some weird PHP issue because, again, it can look at the whole picture. And I think that is where AI is very good, is when it’s a one-off thing, right? Where it’s just like, this is a one-off troubleshooting task. I don’t want to spend 10 hours learning exactly what this was. It’s likely going to get you there, and then you can obviously finish it up if it’s not able to get you fully there.

But you can use these tools today to really reduce the amount of debugging and management you’re doing. And you can extend it. We’re not going to spend a lot of time on this, but doing edits on websites, a lot of page builders now are starting to build in syntax for agents so that it understands Gutenberg blocks. It understands how to edit and edit nested blocks. I’ve had struggles with Claude, where it would try to write nested blocks and it would just mush the whole page.

But as these page builders are becoming better, and as WordPress becomes better, essentially WordPress becomes the infrastructure, right? And Claude is actually doing the work. You’ve heard that. And what I get out of that with the infrastructure is WordPress is the platform, it provides all the capabilities, but then the AI tool, mixed with the human, is essentially going to be managing the WordPress site. And it’s much easier to tell AI to do that than to go into the backend and make edits.

But I am a little hesitant on just making free flowing edits, not checking the work on the actual website, or letting AI check the work. Some people are doing that. I’m not doing that. We’re saying, give us the link after every page you edit, and I’m going to go click it and I’m going to look at it.

Some agencies, they’re saying, okay, Claude’s going to go to the Chrome link and do that. Whatever you’re comfortable with, but in our opinion, there still needs to be human review. And I still don’t think that’s going to change, even if it gets better because until AI is as good as a human being, in the sense that we can trust it and it won’t lie. I give this analogy, right? You hire a developer, they lie to you twice, you’re probably going to fire them, right? But with AI, we just keep giving them a second chance. And, why?

[00:39:41] Nathan Wrigley: Free pass every time.

[00:39:42] Matt Schwartz: Why are doing that? And I think the way to mitigate that is you still have to have human review based on the risk factor. That’s really what it’s about.

[00:39:50] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I share your sentiment there. I think it’s very important to have a human in the loop. And usually at the end of whatever is going on, there needs to be a human just to do the sort of final summary and checking and what have you.

But the point that you mentioned there is, WordPress really has done an awful lot of work in the background to make itself AI ready. So a lot of the capabilities inside of WordPress, a lot of the things that you would normally have had to engage with the admin, with a mouse, or with a keyboard or what have you, a lot of that has been taken over.

And we are very much entering an era where WordPress becomes almost like the scaffolding for the website in a way. And you can talk to the website through these AI agents, but in many situations, I think in the next five, six years, there’ll be a lot of people who will be never visiting the WordPress admin and clicking around and trying to find the menus for things because they will simply ask an AI.

Can I change the clock to the 24 hour clock? Sure, done. And that will extend into everything. You know, I want that block to be, I don’t know, I want the text in that block to be bold, and have this particular font and yada yada, on it goes. And WordPress is doing a really incredible job at an incredible speed of laying that foundational work.

If you haven’t looked at what the Core AI team are doing, there’s definitely some interesting stuff.

[00:41:06] Matt Schwartz: It’s really neat.

[00:41:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s, and I think that an interesting and commendable approach as well, because rather than trying to, I don’t know, hold everything into WordPress, it’s very much the opposite. It’s, we’re just allowing everything to communicate inwards to WordPress. And WordPress will just be the foundation upon which the whole thing resides.

Okay, so we’ve got through 8 of what turns out to be 16 points in Matt’s comprehensive show notes. And just looking at the clock, Matt, we’re at it’s kind of 40 odd minutes, which is about the sweet spot. So I’m going to recommend that we split this up into a second episode. So this in effect, will be the first of a two part mini series, if you are okay with that. How do you feel? Is that all right with you?

[00:41:45] Matt Schwartz: Definitely. You know, I didn’t know we were going to dive this far into it, but I’m so glad we are. And I hope, you know, the audience is interested in staying around for part two.

[00:41:52] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. In which case, if you are happy with that, what we’ll do is we’ll knock it on the head, as we say in the UK, here. We will return next week with the second part. And I will advise people at that point to listen to the first part so they can keep up to date.

So we will see you in a week’s time. I guess all it remains for me to do, Matt, is to say thank you very much for joining me today. Part two next week. See you soon.

[00:42:14] Matt Schwartz: Thank you so much. Look forward to it.