AI Meets Woo: The Future of Ecommerce is Already Here

Thanks to Wu for supporting this episode. Welcome to the third episode of Do the Wu, the podcast where we talk about all things Wucommerce. I'm Katie Keith, founder and CEO at BAN2. And I'm James Kemp, the core products manager at Wucommerce. So last year, Automatically created its new AI team and there was a lot of buzz around that. The team was led by James LaPage. And since then, they've had a bunch of new people join the team, a lot of movement going on there. And we've seen a ton of information coming out about all of the awesome new WordPress AI tools and just pushing the AI space forwards quite consistently as well. So I would like to introduce our special guest today, James LaPage. Hello, hello. Thanks for having me, Al. Yeah, thanks so much for coming on. So to start, could you give us a bit of an overview of your work at Automatically? Yeah, so I'm James LaPage. I am the AI lead at Automatically. Very heavily involved in building all things AI across our product line. So Wucommerce being a very huge part of that. And my role is actually an engineering director. So I get to get really nitty gritty and in the weeds and see how we actually put together the AI features that make it two Wucommerce while also making sure that it's a platform that anybody else can build AI on top of. So it's a very fun, puzzle-solving job every single day. I'm also the core AI at WordPress. Core AI lead at WordPress, co-lead. And that's also really fun because I get to build some of the foundational pieces into the open source project that then get used by Wucommerce as well. So it's a fun combination of open source and Wucommerce and WordPress and WordPress.com and all things AI. It's very cool. I think it's AI touches like every area now. So it's very cool to see sort of someone leading the way across all of these different areas. So yeah, thanks very much for joining us and for anyone watching live, feel free to ask your questions. Wherever you're watching them, we should be able to pick them up. And we will try and answer them. Yeah. And before we get into the discussion about Wucommerce and AI, I'd like to invite everyone watching or listening to subscribe now. Do the Wu is part of the OpenChannel's network, but it's a new standalone podcast as well. And you need to subscribe individually and you can find all the places we're on on do the Wu.com. So subscribe there, YouTube, Apple, wherever you're watching this. Now let's get into the AI side of things. And first of all, I'd like to talk a bit about what AI is already available in Wucommerce. Because I've seen loads of developments in the WordPress side of things. I'd like to know a bit more about how that affects Wucommerce and what is available now. Yeah, so Wucommerce is, I think the core feature that we recently shipped is Wucommerce MCP. That's something that builds off of foundational work in WordPress called Abilities API. And it brings model context protocol support to Wu. And it's still a bit early. It's still something that I think people who are very excited about AI go and use and extend an experiment with. But it's also something that in the future versions of Wu is going to have a really big glow up and be a lot more accessible as that's a protocol that pretty recently has really just taken every AI integration by storm. So MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. It's a way that software can talk to AI clients. Wucommerce is just one of many different platforms that go and support this type of MCP connection. And when used, you can go and put it into a chat chat chat or a clawed, ask it questions about your Wucommerce site, ask it to do things on Wucommerce. And it's really quite a magical experience the first time you use it. What's interesting about that is it follows a strategy that we're taking at Wucommerce, which is what I refer to as enablement, where Wucommerce is this core software, this core way that you run a digital business online. And we want to make sure that that core software is available and always in the middle of whatever is happening in AI. So we want to build AI features for it. We want to make it really easy for others to build AI features for it. But we absolutely want to make sure it will meet you wherever your AI tools are, wherever the best financial analysis AI tool exists, wherever the best general chatbot exists. So to us, MCP represents a really strong opportunity there. It's also cool is if you use chat GBT with connectors, if you use cloud code with their MCP support, there's a lot of opportunity that you get when you add multiple pieces of software to one session. So if I take my Wucommerce stuff and I take QuickBooks and I take X, Y and Z, I can interact with all of them in a conversational manner. And that's got me very excited, but it's also got all the merchants really excited. That's a core feature. You can go and use it right now. It's pretty solid documentation. As I mentioned, it's also going to grow a bit and become a bit easier to use in the future versions of Wu. There's also several AI plugins and features that we see a lot of the Wucommerce users and agencies really enjoy. There are collection of plugins on the marketplace right now that are kind of these packages of AI features that bring things like image generation, things like title generation into the site. We're seeing some more forays into bulk operations for merchants. Those are first party plugins that just exist through the marketplace. Seeing a lot of developers begin trending towards the pieces that WordPress have to offer. And I'd love to kind of get into what WordPress gives developers and agencies at will. But we're seeing a lot of those foundational pieces that come with WordPress and Wucommerce be used to create really cool features. And then finally at Automatic, we've had features like Jetpack AI available for a while. Like everything, I think a common theme that you'll see today is there's a lot of effort and momentum to consistently improve these things. So Jetpack AI specifically will soon ship image feature that we've seen merchants really love generating images replacing backgrounds, taking an image that you took on your iPhone with terrible lighting and putting it onto like a professional mockup background. So there's a lot of features coming from Automatic as well. I'll also mention this doesn't exist and maybe this is a bit of a sneaky announcement, but we will be shipping WooCommerce AI features as well in the near future coming from automatic coming from WooCommerce for merchants to kind of taking everything that we've learned all the foundational pieces we've put into WooCommerce and really just enabling merchants to be as good as they possibly can be in 2026. I'm wondering, um, MCP was like a very early technology in the space of AI. You know, it's one of the first kind of protocols that was that was released in terms of like publicly accessible APIs and AI tools. What, how do you think that will live? Like is do you think MCP is the protocol that the people are going to settle on for connecting their chat tools to a eyes to their software, sorry. Or is that sort of ripe for expansion and development because I, you know, I think MCP has been around for over a year. I'm not sure when it was first announced last November. So this space moves very quickly. And I'm wondering what your thoughts are specifically on the lifespan of MCP and how reliable it is going into the future. Yeah, it's really funny because when we talk about protocols and standards as developers, and then you say, oh, this thing was like literally released last year. And it's been evolving like every two months. There's a new version. It's very funny to call that a standard. But in AI, we're seeing that with MCP and a gentle commerce protocol and universal commerce protocol. There's a lot of protocols out there already. And there's a lot of movement and discovery and exploration because the protocols themselves can improve. And it's very clear that they should improve in this way when they go to market and get adoption. But the AI stuff also changes. We saw that these kind of like node based workflow builders were super popular in the previous years. But then we've seen almost a reintroduction of the generalist chatbot with these connectors and scheduled actions. So I think my point is that MCP is absolutely changing and my direct answer to you would be indirect. Yes and no. So when we think about designing stable features for WordPress and for WooCommerce, we want to make sure that there is stability there. So we can kind of do some of the work once keep it very foundational, keep it very primitive and then take whatever work was done and adapted out to an MCP protocol, adapted out to universal commerce protocol. Build it in a way where if MCP is to update, we can update our implementation as well. If you want to get into like a nitty gritty developer discovery of if MCP is the best protocol, I will say it is and a lot of developers will probably be like, no, it's not it's not elegant. It's not pretty. And I agree with that. But I think it's a protocol that has already deep adoption. It works. It kind of does the job. It gives us authentication, which was a really big piece of the puzzle that was not standardized if you were going and saying. Fast API is going to be the way that we do these things or I'm going to go and use universal tool calling protocol, which is another smaller thing here. But MCP was the one that solved the problems because it went to market and we discovered, hey, we should add OAuth, we should add these different things. And it's also adopted by basically every major platform at this point and adoption is key. If it works, if it's adopted, it will likely remain. But if something else comes along, we'll commerce and WordPress is built in a way where it is very easy to go and say, yeah, MCP is just one tool in your toolbox to go and get that enablement piece of the ecommerce puzzle. And now there's James is incredible protocol. And we're going to add support for James is incredible protocol and we'll let the audience figure out which James designed it. But it's sensible. My understanding is that you mentioned doing things that are available to developers and agencies in minutes ago as a non developer, my observation, which may or may not be right, is that it is mostly developer tools going in core at the moment. You referred to some marketplace plug-ins which are presumably aimed more at the merchant. But is that correct that where we are with commerce and AI at the moment is that you do need really a developer to hook it all up and make it work. Yes. So yes, I think a lot of the features that we've put into the core products are for those that are interested. And it's interesting because I think the term developer, especially when you aim it at lightweight. Some semi code implementations with anything that we're doing with we were WordPress. It's now much more approachable and you can learn and you can experiment and you can poke around. So I'd say yes, if you want a really robust AI implementation that's built and fits like a glove on your store and does everything that you ever want, the pieces are there. And you can very, very easily say, hey agency, I really need to go and do this. I really need to go and do this and there are these existing plug-ins that are also using those pieces that can add some of that. It becomes very easy to build some of these pieces as an agency because of these foundational tools. But it also we've seen a lot of just experimentation given the extensibility of will commerce and WordPress as well. Where there is great documentation out there. There are an increasing number of tutorials on hey, like here's how you can set up cloud code. Here's how you can use WordPress playground to go and preview this little tiny feature. Like as an example in the past and also I think good background for this audiences. I ran a WordPress agency that started as me pretending I was a WordPress agency and then grew to 14 people. And we did we we kind of evolved from WordPress to super large will commerce sites and eventually exit that agency. But I have a lot of experience in the will commerce development and like actual merchant life cycle of things. And I remember things like we used to use the subscription plugin and we wanted to add new recurring intervals. And that's like a that's a decently simple filter I believe if I remember serves it's pretty simple to do pre AI you have to go look through all the documentation you have to understand exactly what this is how it works. And now you can explore and experiment and use things like cloud code to do so so bit of a tangent there but I think that the barrier to these basic features is absolutely rapidly dropping. And for the more boutique AI features there are now the tools that any developer needs to go and build really impressive and robust features. And then as as WooCommerce and automatic we've kind of done that foundational work for the developers and the ecosystem around. But also want to make sure that all the merchants are equipped with what we would consider to be essential features in terms of the connectivity in terms of making MCP more accessible to an individual merchant or an individual user who in terms of bringing the commerce protocols closer to will commerce itself in terms of adding these really impressive AI features that do require a ton of engineering work like some of the image manipulation and things like this. Yeah one thing I would love to know is what is planned for core possibly work press as a whole certainly with commerce in terms of like an interface built into core like how Shopify has sidekick where wherever you are you can just type what you want to do it for you. Is anything like that planned or is that still plug in territory it's likely going to remain from the automatic side of things plug in territory for a bit. But it is also going to be much much easier to build these things and all of the pieces are going to be there absolutely and word press 7.0. And the reason why it will likely remain plug in territory is because that implementation if we're looking at something like Shopify sidekick that can take action and has agency on a site and kind of addresses the merchant management side of things. It will work if we made it a very basic implementation in core or as even like a very basic plug in but it will be great when we can plug it into things like commerce analytics when we can plug it into much more complex orchestration work flows under the hood to go and do things like really bulk product optimization and catalog stuff and analytics and deep number crunching all of the fun stuff that we're actually work on. So you will see AI support in terms of this sidekick type implementation coming out from automatic in this extension territory and that extension also housing additional a features to make it a much more approachable. And experience to merchants but you'll also likely see a very easy way to build and documentation details on here's how you can build an agent of your own and here's how you can plug it into your existing systems your new systems and here's how you do a loop and will probably see agencies almost shipping. Agents built purposely for their customers as a requirement of of these types of stores and we will likely in in the near future and it's so funny because I would have never expected this to happen even like two years ago but in the near future will probably see people say hey can you like put a little agent on my Wu say I always do this and I always do this and I always do this and I need I need a safe steerable thing and something like cloud code will be hey I know who commerce has ability so. I know who commerce has ability is API know who commerce has mcp in both a server and client implementation there's really great documentation on how to go and put these things together maybe who commerce or WordPress has the component tree that connects to the back end so now you have your front and agent interface and you'll likely see that thing come out and be a purpose built plugin for maybe like three minutes of work. So we're not there yet but I think that's a future that we're moving towards where will commerce itself does have an AI agent it's a very impressive and powerful agent that does things that genuinely take a ton of engineering hours and a ton of thinking and infrastructure to handle but then you'll also see agencies and eventually individuals adding decently complex and maybe as complex agents on their own because of these building blocks and also the automatic stuff is. Not doing anything crazy special on the who side it's using abilities it's kind of using the fundamental features that we're bringing to the products. Yeah I think that's one of the key things as well as the you touched on it earlier that the abilities API is really like this layer that can adapt with changes in mcp and whatever other tools and you know become available and touch on Katie's point with sort of requiring development knowledge to set up these mp's and mcp servers and mcp integrations. I think we'll start to like see a shift away from that a little bit. We should start to see like more rappers that enable mcp and integrations a lot more easily that don't require like any complicated you know setup which I think like a lot of tools do it quite differently as well like how you actually install an mcp connection. So I expect to see some sort of standard standardization around that. But then also maybe you know maybe those tools are for the more developer or technical minded audience and the tools that actual merchants would use would be like the AI in we in we commerce itself. As James was describing which yeah I think we're we're making great progress towards that and I'm pretty excited to see what that looks like in the future especially with like analytics and just sort of being a bit more proactive like not not requiring the merchant to say I need you to do this but the assistant to be like I've done this for you. Which I think would be very cool to see. Yeah I particularly like that idea with analytics because often you don't know what you don't know and it would be really great if an AI could alert you to let's say there was a particular category of products that had a drop in sales and you weren't aware it would be really cool to call a big with proactive enough to notice on its own and draw that to your attention and that's something we're seeing as we actually build these things as we chat with the merchants. The type of like go and do this for me the synchronous assistant stuff is really cool. It's fun but it's also something that should be available in the commerce. It's also something that is very available when connecting to MCP and using a chat GBT where we can really bring value to a merchant is that type of predictive insider that type of data driven action for a merchant where there are many merchants generating a ton of data that gets lost that is hidden that is under multiple different ways of slicing it up to go and find the right information. And I think you'll see in the beginning it will just alert the merchant and the merchant will go and choose how to respond to it but in the future it will also present decisions to merchants and it will also drive the way optimization and present sales and present all of these different things that genuinely become something that really makes you succeed better as a merchant as opposed to requiring you to know at least a little bit how you want to succeed better at kind of present the menu of here's what you can do just given what I'm seeing. Yeah, that sounds good. Now let's talk about the front end because we've talked a lot about store management from the merchant's perspective. How can we expect to see WooCommerce stores changing in the front end in future so that is the experience of the customer. There are few pieces that I'm tracking right now I think there's a transition to a new type of internet which I'm calling the agent to web and it's not something where it's going to be this binary like on January 31st it's the the agent web and now it doesn't work like it used to work but we're definitely going to see a class of operators and actors on the internet that are agents and we're already seeing the beginnings of this with especially in ecommerce with the agent ecommerce and these type of AI shoppers being explored so with this agent e web I think there's going to be changes across the internet in terms of the websites that operate on them and absolutely WooCommerce is very well positioned and will track towards wherever that web points so there are few there are few things on my mind specifically around the front end of a website and it's absolutely around the front end of a website intended to sell something to a user which is we're going to definitely see a lot more structure to data and luckily WooCommerce has that already and I think we'll see a lot more schema and information in the markup of pages and ecommerce will grow to address that if or when it becomes really pressing thing and it's already there and extensible and available I think we're going to see a heavier emphasis on open data so data that's discoverable discoverable and structured both on the front end but also available in a programmatic way so maybe through mcp there's a front end implementation of mcp called web mcp that's going to early early developer preview and chrome and WordPress and WooCommerce are very well positioned to address that so I think we'll see a lot of this type of open accessible data coming from stores like WooCommerce where now an agent can understand here's exactly what's available to me here's exactly why this website exists here's what I can do on this site also see the growth of agent ecommerce and that type of structure data flows into oh now instead of a person browsing the site there's an agent browsing this site and the agent knows what the user wants what their preferences are maybe the user directly asked or maybe it's built up a profile of who that user is over two years of them interacting with something like chat and how it's searching for a product how does it actually go and find the right stuff and how does it go and purchase that so we'll see heavy moves and investment towards that you've already or we've already seen agent ecommerce protocol go closer to WooCommerce core we've seen what we have done experimentation into universal commerce protocol and we'll have some announcements around that soon and we'll see just like the more lower lift things that I think are becoming more expected like AI chat becoming a really big thing on front end sites and in the past that was quite difficult to do and you essentially had to go through a thin chat bot from ecommerce something like this this is now very easy or not a lot easier to do for a merchant and I think that AI chat where a user can ask hey what's the state of my order if they're logged in or if they aren't logged in what's the best product for me I like these different things will also probably see that evolve into an agent that represents the site itself and growing towards this agente web of as a merchant I have somebody who's representing me and going out and going doing things on this internet but as a consumer I also have the same thing that's absolutely a futuristic perspective and again like I don't think there's a binary transition of oh like on this date everything changes and people don't look at pages and click through the images and then save it and then come back to it three days later and then go and click the purchase button and see a payment method that they want to choose that one and go through it we will absolutely continue seeing that but we'll see this new class and there will be a lot of front end action in the commerce that will track where this class goes yeah I think it's a space that's also ripe for like proactive engagement from whatever your agent of choice is you know if you've been using your AI agent to search for something specifically don't make a purchase and then maybe a few days later it kind of reminds you that you were looking at this thing or or it's gone and found some better version of whatever it was which I think leans into a lot of sort of agentic side of things where the agent is acting on your behalf and like finding products and you know reviewing feedback on those products and making recommendations based on you and not just like a general person who is looking for this specific product so I think personalization is going to be a massive thing and that AI is kind of enabling quite easily like your AI tools begin to know a lot more about you and what your preferences are you know where you shop what types of products you like what types of reviews and feedback you like to see on a product and it can use this information to make the right suggestions to you and I think that's very important in terms of we come as a platform James touched on like the fact that data is going to be very important like having all of the right data available for the AI agent to ingest is something that we aim to offer as a platform you know we want you to be able to populate your product data without having you know plug ins to add specific fields that should be you know common like mpn is a good example of that and yeah I think that's that's an important like stance from we commerce is to have the this sort of structure and the out of the box features that allow you to enter all of this information and also for it to you know process some present information in a way that the AI will understand. I also think garden the information as well because I've seen too many merchant catalogs where it's been built over eight years and it is extremely fragmented and messy and it's no fault of anybody's just how any store works it's not a will come or saying it's not it's not a e-commerce it is an e-commerce thing so I think we'll also see a lot of tools coming from will come or specifically to not just make sure that all of the fields exist but make sure that all of the right information is in the fields so then when it is presented to these agents it's extremely structured and it's the best on the market because of the investment into that type of visibility accessibility and cleanliness of a product catalog. Sure I think it'll be interesting to see like on-site personalization as well and I'm not sure what that looks like technically but you know the actual website itself see and not browsing through a chat interface like called or chat GPT but you're actually on the website and maybe it's a browser level AI agent that you're that you kind of browse alongside and it personalizes the website for you. Yeah that would be interesting it's an area that pre AI I was always surprised didn't really take off more in WordPress there were a few plugins like personalized WP is one of them that allows you to do that in a non AI way logically you'd think that personalizing the content to the user based on what you know about them would improve conversions and things so it's really interesting that this hasn't taken off but maybe AI is the way for that to happen in the future. One of the big challenges of running an online stores managing costs and that's where a woo really stands out with who commerce you own and control your site which means you control your cost too. There's no hidden fees no penalties for growth and a scales on your term whether you're handling seasonal spikes or steady long term growth who gives you the flexibility to adopt without breaking the bank and if you ever wonder what it actually cost to run a e-commerce business today who has a great tool to help their total cost of ownership calculator. It gives you a clear picture of where your money goes and how to plan for a sustainable growth so take control of your costs and your future growth visit WooCommerce dot com forward slash TCO. So what about actually buying and paying for things with AI all I've ever seen is AI recommending products and then clicking through to the site but then I've seen things like announcements with tools such a stripe about actually being able to pay for things in AI where are we with that. So there are two predominant ways well there are three predominant ways to kind of bring AI into that purchase journey of a shopper and the first is what you just described where it's kind of discovering hey here's where all of the products are and I know James really likes these specific things so I'm going to go find the product and I'm going to go and suggest the product and these are things that are already available in things like perplexity and the AI searches and also. Also Amazon I think Amazon is a really good example of somebody who's now passing through traffic to merchants directly based on your preferences which is pretty cool to see. But it's not going and actually purchasing yet so then we get to while we're discovering and we're sending the user maybe to a checkout or a cart and we're building that off of a payment link or something but I actually want this thing to go purchase and there are two predominant. And I would say probably first it's important to think through the protocols and the reason why these things exist and that's because there are many different AI purchasing platforms that exist or could exist. So to get stability in the purchasing journey you need both sides of these both sides of the marketplace to conform to some way to go and address this stuff and the thinking around payment protocols has existed for quite some time in the context of AI and some of the first came from open AI but then we also saw some movement on the card processing layer. So there were kind of like agent payment tokens that are still being proposed and worked on but then we saw swing back to all right as open AI as somebody who runs chat ebt I'm going to go work with stripe and create this protocol. Agente commerce protocol and then recently we saw Google say I'm going to go and create a universal commerce protocol and they both try and solve the same problem which is well we know how to discover the products or we think we know how to discover products we know how to get the product into the car but like how do we actually take. Mainly a payment method that's stored on the AI side of things or payment preference that store in the AI side of things and go through that merchants checkout and actually get the product purchased so these two protocols have popped up and there's complexity there and there's complexity in the engineering but there's a lot of complexity in the adoption and change management so. We're commerce was a launch partner with stripe that is a feature that I believe in James you can correct me from wrong but I think the ACP support itself is now in we core or coming to a very soon future version of we core. Same with universal commerce protocol that's not in core but that's something that will be available very soon for merchants. Both take a different route and I can go into the the differences between the protocols but I think what we're seeing right now is the early days of the discovery on how this stuff will work and the second begins to work there will be a flood of merchants and AI tools and opportunities to really get into this early on and we're commerce will support that because. It's extensible because we've built the primitive pieces that need to exist for these two protocols and anything else and we built support for the two protocols to so we're going to continue tracking where they go and how they work and make sure merchants are in on the ground floor. I think to touch on your point about the state of ACP I believe it's almost ready to go out there I'm not sure it's in an actual released version yet unless it's behind a feature flag which it may well be. I think we have some pretty interesting market projections in terms of ACP and UCP which I think is interesting to touch on so McKenzie have said that three to five trillion dollars in global consumer commerce will be mediated by AI agents by 2030 which is pretty substantial in I guess four years. They've also said one trillion in us B to see retail alone by 2030 nearly half of online nearly half of all online shoppers will use AI shopping agents by 2030 say prediction by Morgan Stanley and 50% plus of consumers are expected to use AI shopping assistance regularly by the end of 2026 which is very soon I just thought yeah I thought they were they were interesting stats sort of the progression and the rate that. AI is kind of taking over very interesting data also say I don't know if I probably I'm a little bit ahead of some other folks but I've used AI deeply for as long as it was possible to use deeply and I have seen my personal shopping and absolutely discovery apparatus change crazily whereas in the past I would be doing these searches on Google and I'd be going through products in this way and now I always know what I want and I always put a great detailed description into chat you be tea or Google AI mode or whatever these that really the most accessible services to me at the time and I'll be presented with a list that is almost always accurate and what I like is that it seems like at least based on how I search in the stuff. That I purchase it is actually going and finding stores and products that I would not have necessarily discovered so I I know for a fact at least on a personal level my shopping habits are not going back to the the old way and that type of discovery is a absolute change but it's also an absolute opportunity which I guess is is a illustrated by the three three to five trillion number. Yeah that's incredible. I mean on the one hand there is a reason that you are the head of AI as automatic you are the ultimate power user but yeah most people I know in the WordPress space are very deeply into AI and sometimes I see stats that the typical person is not and even like in my family everyone is always laughing at me for going to chat GBT for everything and like it's not everybody does and so it's really interesting to hear those projections about figures across the world. So I think that's about figures across the general population and how it will continue to escalate. Yeah I think we're definitely the the early adopters you know we're in the text space so we're kind of made aware of it especially now like every day pretty much every message you see on on the X or LinkedIn or whatever is typically about AI in some way. I'm not very conscious of that when I write messages because I think they tend to be quite like 80% AI now and not not written by AI but about AI and B.I. I agree James that my shopping habits are very much led by the way I'm going to talk about it now which doesn't in my opinion do it quite as well as chat GPT did and but applaud is like my tool of choice and it knows the most about me and what I what I like it just doesn't present them in the best way yet I expect we'll see some improvements there. I also think that we'll see it almost goes back to my point about the the MCP protocol being one year old which is these things being discovered in the second that are discovered in terms of how does it best work what's the technology and when both sides of the marketplace are solved when the demand in the supply side are solved. We will absolutely see probably the biggest push to market this possible across every single AI solution will see VC money going into new tools will see large funding rounds going into tools that pivot towards agenda commerce especially with those McKinsey numbers there is the opportunity there so I think that we are definitely ahead of the curve we're seeing glimmers of that type of future I like as a shopper I like that type of future it makes my life really easy and the discovery is discovery that I would not really do because I didn't have the time in the past. But more and more people will discover the simplicity there and I think trend towards it especially as it becomes more mature I think what's nice as well is these tools aren't just recommending like the big retailers like when when I do a search these days whether it's for a service or for a specific product it will always recommend places nearby you know it knows my location so it's it's aware of that when it's making these recommendations I hope that's something that is maintained you know that these smaller stores that perhaps don't have as big of a presence as something like Amazon will still get these recommendations and I think that's somewhere that we can help and you know just having good content good data will definitely help you as a merchant get you know visible in these tools. And that's that's almost the primary reason why enablement is the first thing I mentioned I think the AI tools are really cool and automatics investing into we're making sure they're foundationally available the pieces are available for others to build we're seeing really fun implementations there's genuine value to bring definitely from the predictive aspect of things but the way the merchant succeeds is following where the internet points and making sure that WooCommerce is in a spot where it is not behind it is a little ahead of wherever that points and then we're able to make sure that merchants understand how to change with this that's that's absolutely one of my biggest goals with both we and WordPress make sure that this is something that is an integral foundational infrastructure and the layer of this future agentech internet of however the current consumption browsing internet interaction models change so that's why enablement is one of my favorite words right now. Let's get to a question from Nick McLaughlin from Skyverge he says most of the AI functionality here core agent structured data etc best to be built built by the Wu team where do you want it's gone where do you want to see contributions from extensions and community devs today. From my vantage there are a few things so WordPress 7.0 is coming out in like six days or nine days or very soon as a beta and this is a release that right now as a proposal includes a lot of the core AI building blocks that we had proposed. I think last summer at this point and these building blocks are intended to make WordPress into a platform or developer can build any AI solution that they want so already in WordPress 6.9 we shipped abilities API this way register the capabilities of what a site can do and these things can be used by agents inward press they can be used by agents outside of WordPress through mcp. But to use them in the past you've needed to go and create your own way to access lm's so I'm going to go query open AI I'm going to go query whoever proposed for WordPress 7.0 and and likely shipping in 7.0 is the WPA client and this is a unified way to go and query these models so now you have all of the pieces you need to build whatever you want with AI. And I think that's been missing in WordPress so we've seen really fun solutions but they've all been exploratory solutions what many have been exploratory solutions and now we can go and really say hey I know that this merchant problem exists and automatic maybe didn't address it in the way that I know my customers want or there's a gap and we can build towards those gaps so I would love to see experimentation and exploration. Around AI using those core pieces from developers from hosts with this new WPA client you are able to provide a provider as a service yourself so if there's WooCommerce hosting you can say and now my WooCommerce hosting comes with AI and any plugin that uses the WPA client and says I'll use whatever providers available is able to offer these AI powered features basically built in. And I think you'll see some of this stuff coming from WooCommerce well where we basically didn't have the perfect toolkit to build AI in WordPress and now we do so that's really exciting to me it's exciting to me as somebody building solutions of my own but it's also way more exciting to me when I see plugins and solutions and I'll give Mark Westgard a shout out WS form really adopting these. Specific pieces and saying yeah like this works really well and look at this crazy feature that has been introduced that could have never been introduced before so long answer short. Please use the pieces let's see what we can build. Yeah I think that's really cool that you know offering AI at the host level like that makes a lot of sense and the ability to to pay for that as part of your package as part of your hosting package makes makes perfect sense and then you know all of the tools can adopt that. And I think as well as like spotting the gaps and creating new solutions using the tools available to you now or the tools that will be available to you very soon. There's also scope for updating any existing extensions that you know perhaps you offer to integrate into the abilities API and enable people to use their AI tool of choice to interact with your solution and so I think you touched on marks forms plugin I believe he's implemented a lot of these abilities API functionality. But things like you know customer management systems or learning management systems like all of these tools can integrate with the abilities API and just enable any AI to interact with their tool and you know read right update like all of the all of the things that you can do via the back end all the front end. And manually you can now enable in a sort of consistent way which I think is really cool. I heard the term skyver so let's assume we're a company that has built a really popular membership plugin and we want that membership plugin to be able to be managed by. MCP but also plug into the will commerce AI agent but also plug into the many other AI solutions and agents out there the way to do that is to just add abilities and define hey I want an agent to be able to do this and I wanted to do it in this way. And once those are contributed you can use them in your own solutions but you can also say hey agent I would love if you go and consume these or I actually don't want you to consume these hopefully you do and now that is a one one shot addition for unlimited AI possibilities. So I see a really interesting future where a merchant site that comprises of multiple plugins that do multiple things really well can almost be glued together in a better way for somebody who maybe doesn't even know what the term plugin is. Because all of these things support abilities and because there's this universal AI interaction layer that they're operating their site from something like cloud or they're operating their site from a browser sidebar or from a will agent or from another agent in the industry. So it's very exciting and it sounds confusing and complex but it's not it's made to be extremely simple so hopefully developers can see that and we end up with the crazy ecosystem that outpaces anybody because. What commerce is successful because of the partners and because of the extensions well before we finish let's talk about what would you recommend that merchant to do now and developers on behalf of their customers in order to prepare for these changes. I will keep my answer short I think developers and agencies and inclined merchants should just explore and experiment and say I always wanted my image background to be different and I'm going to go use nano banana by Google to go and do that. And I've always wanted to update all my content and I'm going to go and see if I can use cloud code or a script or mcp or maybe build an agent and just have that kind of spirit of discover spirit of discovery in terms of what who has what can be bill and what's out there. I think that's number one for the developer and number two for the consumer I'd say there's some actionable things for me which is keep an eye on where the industry is going keep informed so watch these things like agenda commerce watch these overarching trends and then watch will commerce to understand what we're bringing to the table based on these trends. Get excited for the way I native extension stuff get excited for WordPress 7.0 and then also start thinking about the data because the data is some of the most important stuff that you have as a merchant or business and in an ai led future that data can be built into incredibly visual pages or images or presented to chat to be tea. So it kind of all goes back to what do I have available for something like cloud code when prompted to go and say well I know all these fields exists so I'm going to make a plug into go do this or for a chat GBT to go and say I'm going to go find James a bunch of shoes in a five block radius of his New York apartment. It all comes back to data so even if you don't want to use AI just start looking at the catalog start looking at your stuff and say hey like I can add some more information I could add some FAQs I can make this more accessible to human users and agent users like. And if you do want to use AI you can get the AI to explore your site for you and tell you what's missing and but yeah definitely. One of the easiest things that you can do is just make sure that the data is there for the AI to understand and you can just give your AI tool of choice a link to your product page and say you know what can you see here what what's missing like what data do I need to add specifically if you've got tons of products. And it's it's quite straightforward now to just get the AI to explore the whole site especially if you have you know an mcp integration setup. So I definitely recommend doing that it is possible to do it manually but I think the AI will enable you to do it a lot quicker and because it is the AI it knows what it needs to know so. Yeah and we've got a follow up question from Nick who says thanks folks ability a b i if the main avenue I've seen discussed on board with that more looking for how we can contribute to new AI disappear new AI feature present rather than expose existing pieces so I think this is about the community and what you want from them. From my perspective there to avenues and opportunities the first is the core of WordPress there is a core I team that's a team that is building features that have been fundamental and foundational but now that these features exist there's a lot of opportunity to go and add really impressive things on top of it. So as an example if you check out core I there's an evolution of abilities API into a sister API called workflows and you can chain multiple abilities together and that is a primitive of crazy automation in WordPress that can be packaged into a book on this plugin in a native WordPress way. So I think those type of opportunities are very available and those stem back toward press core for who commerce itself there's now opportunity to build into the core of who commerce because WordPress offers these pieces so it would be really awesome for us to see these quality of life features open up as PRs or even issues like hey I need this or I want this as a feature or or a hook or filter whatever so I can go and build on top of that. We are very receptive to this and we've seen some of it but I would love to see a lot more of that on the web project itself so those are my two suggestions. So good suggestion yeah I mean honestly we haven't seen many requests for like AI features yet and I think because the deprimatives in WordPress haven't existed it is not being clear what that looks like. So I'm hoping as that begins to reveal itself we can start to see a lot more of these either like you say PRs being submitted or feature requests or you know needs and desires based on the functionality available and any gap that you know developers agencies merchants are seeing that they need enabled. And I'm definitely keen to dig into those types of issues and feature requests. It's a bit funny but I think when we added abilities API to WordPress core somebody had opened a PR and it was like an event on the WooCommerce repo at automatic where it's like yes somebody's used our work in the way it was designed and this is so awesome to see that contribution and there are a few others that I remember but that was a clear one so. I can say firsthand we love that type of contribution and even request coming into the repo from the end user who wants a specific AI feature to the developer who needs this thing to go and build this thing for somebody we would we would love to see that and are super receptive to it. There's also a channel in the woo Slack think it's AI and woo maybe do you know James I can find out after for AI and MCPs as a channel that's what you mean I think so. Well thank you so much for that I think that's been a really good discussion on particularly the AI and the woo side of things rather than just AI and WordPress generally so I think that's really good to see. So thank you so much for coming on thank you all for having me I enjoyed the discussion. Yeah thank you and so next month we have a red alpha from business blima and check out summit which is the we commerce focused event. And that's going to be a really cool event and red alpha is coming on to talk about we commerce events and how they're growing and what value you can get from attending so drop that in your calendar for Tuesday the 10th of March and we'll do some sort of promo around that nearer the time as well. Yeah and after that James Kemp and I will be back every month to discuss a different area of we commerce so again please subscribe because we're new podcast and you may not be subscribed yet you can find all the places that you can subscribe on do the woo dot com. Thanks again to woo for supporting this episode until the next time take care.