AI Meets Woo: The Future of Ecommerce is Already Here

Katie Keith:
Welcome to the third episode of Do the Woo, the podcast where we talk about all things WooCommerce. I’m Katie Keith, founder and CEO at Barn2.

James Kemp:
And I’m James Kemp, the core product manager at WooCommerce. So last year, Automattic created its new AI team, and there was a lot of buzz around that. The team was led by James LePage, and since then they’ve had a bunch of kind 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 sort of 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 Lepage.

James LePage:
Hello. Hello. Thanks for having me all.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, thanks so much for coming on. So to start, could you give us a bit of an overview of your work at Automattic?

James LePage:
Yeah. So I’m James LePage. I am the AI lead at Automattic. I’m very heavily involved in building all things AI across our product line. So WooCommerce 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 to WooCommerce 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 WooCommerce as well. So it’s a fun combination of open source and WooCommerce and WordPress and WordPress.com and all things AI.

James Kemp:
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.

Katie Keith:
Yep. And before we get into the discussion about WooCommerce and AI, I’d like to invite everyone watching or listening to subscribe now. Do the Woo is part of the Open Channels 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 dothewoo.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 WooCommerce. 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 WooCommerce and what is available now?

James LePage:
Yeah, so WooCommerce is, I think the core feature that we recently shipped is WooCommerce MCP. That’s something that builds off of foundational work in WordPress called Abilities API, and it brings Model Context Protocol support to Woo. 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 and experiment with. But it’s also something that in the future versions of Woo 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. WooCommerce 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 ChatGPT or a Claude, ask it questions about your WooCommerce site, ask it to do things on WooCommerce. 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 WooCommerce, which is what I refer to as enablement, where WooCommerce 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’s 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. What’s also cool is if you use ChatGPT 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 WooCommerce 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. There’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 Woo. There’s also several AI plugins and features that we see a lot of the WooCommerce users and agencies really enjoy. There are a 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 Woo. But we’re seeing a lot of those foundational pieces that come with WordPress and WooCommerce be used to create really cool features. And then finally at Automattic, 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 an 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 Automattic 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 Automattic, 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 as good as they possibly can be in 2026.

James Kemp:
I’m wondering, MCP was like a very early technology in the space of AI. It’s one of the first kind of protocols that was released in terms of publicly accessible APIs and AI tools. How do you think that will live? Like, is— do you think MCP is the protocol that people are going to settle on for connecting their chat tools to AIs, to their software, sorry? Or is that sort of ripe for expansion and development? Because I think MCP has been around for over a year. I’m not sure when it was first announced.

James LePage:
Last November.

James Kemp:
Last November. Yeah. So the 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.

James LePage:
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 2 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 Agentic 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 adapt it out to an MCP protocol, adapt it out to a 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 FastAPI is going to be the way that we do these things, or I’m gonna 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, WooCommerce 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 e-commerce puzzle. And now there’s James’s incredible protocol, and we’re gonna add support for James’s incredible protocol, and we’ll let the audience figure out which James designed it, but it’s extensible.

Katie Keith:
Yeah. My understanding is that you, you mentioned doing things that are available to developers and agencies a minute 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 plugins, which are presumably aimed more at the merchant. But is that correct, that where we are with WooCommerce and AI at the moment is that you do need really a developer to hook it all up and make it work?

James LePage:
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 Woo or 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 plugins 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 WooCommerce 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 audience is 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 kind of evolved from WordPress to super large WooCommerce sites and eventually exited that agency. But I have a lot of experience in the WooCommerce development and like actual merchant lifecycle 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 my memory 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 a 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 Automattic, we’ve kind of done that foundational work for the developers in 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 WooCommerce 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.

Katie Keith:
Yeah. One thing I would love to know is what is planned for Core, possibly WordPress as a whole, certainly WooCommerce, 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 and it will do it for you. Um, is anything like that planned or is that still plugin territory?

James LePage:
It’s likely going to remain from the automatic side of things, plugin territory for a bit. Um, 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 in WordPress 7.0. And the reason why it will likely remain plugin 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 plugin., but it will be great when we can plug it into things like WooCommerce Analytics, when we can plug it into much more complex orchestration workflows 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 working on as we speak. 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 AI features to make it a much more approachable AI experience to merchants. But you’ll also likely see a very easy way to build and documentation and 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 or your new systems. And here’s how you do a loop and we’ll probably see agencies almost shipping agents built purposely for their customers as a requirement of these types of stores. And we will likely in the near future, and it’s so funny because I would have never expected this to happen even like 2 years ago, but in the near future we’ll probably see people say, hey, can you like put a little agent on my Woo site? I always do this and I always do this and I always do this., and I I need, need a safe, steerable thing. And something like Cloud Code will be, hey, I know WooCommerce has abilities API, I know WooCommerce has MCP in both its server and client implementation. There’s really great documentation on how to go and put these things together. Maybe WooCommerce or WordPress has the componentry that connects to the backend. So now you have your frontend agent interface. And you’ll likely see that things come out and be a purpose-built plugin for maybe like 3 minutes of work. So we’re not there yet, but I think that’s a future that we’re moving towards where WooCommerce 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 Woo side. It’s using abilities. It’s kind of using the fundamental features that we’re bringing to the products.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think that’s one of the key things as well, is that you touched on it earlier, that the abilities API is really like this layer that that can adapt with changes in MCP and whatever other um, tools, you know, become available. And to touch on Katie’s point with, um, sort of requiring development knowledge to set up these MCP servers, um, and MCP integrations, I think we’ll start to like see a shift away from that a little bit. Um, we should start to see like more wrappers that enable MCP integrations a lot more easily. That doesn’t require any complicated setup, which I think a lot of tools do it quite differently as well, like how you actually install an MCP connection. So I expect we’ll see some sort of standardization around that. But then also 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 WooCommerce itself, as James was describing, which, yeah, I think 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 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 will be very cool to see.

Katie Keith:
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 if it was proactive enough to notice on its own and draw that to your attention.

James LePage:
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 WooCommerce. It’s also something that is very available when connecting to MCP and using a ChatGPT. Where we can really bring value to a merchant is that type of predictive insight or 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. It kind of presents you the menu of here’s what you can do just given what I’m seeing.

Katie Keith:
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, commerce stores changing in the front end in future? So that is the experience of the customer.

James LePage:
There are a 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 agentic web. And it’s not something where it’s going to be this binary, oh, like on January 31st, it’s the agentic 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 AI agents.. And we’re already seeing the beginnings of this with, especially in e-commerce with agentic commerce and these type of AI shoppers being explored. So with this agentic 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 a are a few, there few things on my mind specifically around the front end of a website and 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 WooCommerce will grow to address that. If or when it becomes a 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 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 WebMCP that’s going to early, early developer preview in 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. We’ll also see the growth of agent e-commerce., and that type of structured data flows into, oh, now instead of a person browsing this 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 2 years of them interacting with something like ChatGPT and out 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 Agenta Commerce Protocol go closer to WooCommerce Core. We’ve seen, well, we have done experimentation into Universal Commerce Protocol, and we’ll have some announcements around that soon. And we’ll also 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 Fin chatbot from Intercom or something like this. This is now very easy or a lot easier to do for a merchant. And I think that AI chat where a user can ask, hey, what’s the status 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. We’ll also probably see that evolve into an agent that represents the site itself and growing towards this agentic web of, as a merchant, I have somebody who’s representing me and going out and going and doing things on this internet. But as a consumer, I also have the same thing. And 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 3 days later and then go and click the purchase button and see a payment method that they want and 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 WooCommerce that will track where this class goes.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think it’s a space that’s also ripe for proactive engagement from whatever your AI agent of choice is. 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 reminds you that you were looking at this thing, or it’s gone and found some better version of whatever it was. Which I think leans into a lot of the sort of agentic side of things where the agent is acting on your behalf and finding products and.

James LePage:
Reviewing.

James Kemp:
Feedback on those products and making recommendations based on you and not just a general person who is looking for this specific product. So I think personalization is going to be a massive thing that AI is enabling quite easily. Your AI tools begin to know a lot more about you and what your preferences are, 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 WooCommerce 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 you having, know, plugins 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 WooCommerce is to have the, the 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 and present that information in a way that the AI will understand.

James LePage:
I also think guarding the information as well, because I’ve seen too many merchant catalogs where it’s been built over. 8 years and it is extremely fragmented and messy and it’s no fault of anybody. It’s just how any store works. It’s not a WooCommerce thing. It’s not, it’s not an e-commerce. It is an e-commerce thing. So I think we’ll also see a lot of tools coming from WooCommerce 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.

James Kemp:
Sure. I think it’ll be interesting to see on-site personalization as well. I’m not sure what that looks like technically, but the actual website itself, so you’re not browsing through a chat interface like Claude or ChatGPT, but you’re actually on the website. Maybe it’s a browser-level AI agent that that you’re, you kind of browse alongside and it personalizes the website for you.

Katie Keith:
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 PersonalizeWP is one of them that allows you to do that in a non-AI way. And 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.

Katie Keith:
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 as Stripe about actually being able to pay for things in AI. Where are we with that?

James LePage:
So there are two predominant ways Well, there are 3 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 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 what 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 protocols to address that. And I, I’d 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, and there are many different commerce examples. 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 OpenAI. But then we also saw some movement on the card processing layer. So there were kind of like agentic payment tokens that are still being proposed and worked on. But then we saw a swing back to, all right, as OpenAI, as somebody who runs ChatGPT, I’m going to go work with Stripe and create this protocol, Agentic 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 the products. We know how to get the product into the cart., but like, how do we actually take mainly a payment method that’s stored on the AI side of things, or a payment preference that’s stored on the AI side of things, and go through that merchant’s 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 WooCommerce was a launch partner with Stripe. That is a feature that I believe, and James, you can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think the ACP support itself is now in WooCommerce or coming to a very soon future version of WooCommerce. 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 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 it begins to work, there will be a flood of merchants and AI tools and opportunities to really get into this early on. And WooCommerce 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’ve built support for the two protocols too.. So we’re going to continue tracking where they go and how they work and make sure merchants are in on the ground floor.

James Kemp:
Yeah, 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 McKinsey has said that $3 to $5 trillion in global consumer commerce will be mediated by AI agents by 2030, which is pretty substantial in, I guess, 4 years. They’ve also said $1 trillion in US B2C retail alone. By 2030. Nearly half of all online shoppers will use AI shopping agents by 2030. It’s a 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 interesting stats at sort of the progression and the rate that AI is kind of taking over. Very interesting data.

James LePage:
I’ll also say, I don’t know if I probably am 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 ChatGPT or Google AI mode or whatever these— the, the 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 and the stuff that I purchase, it is actually going and finding stores and products that I would not have necessarily discovered.

James Kemp:
So.

James LePage:
I know for a fact, at least on a personal level, my shopping habits are not going back to the old way. And that type of discovery is an absolute change, but it’s also an absolute opportunity, which I guess is illustrated by the three 3 to 5 trillion number.

Katie Keith:
Yeah, that’s incredible. I mean, on the one hand, there is a reason that you are the head of AI at Automattic. 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 ChatGPT for everything and like it’s not what everybody does. And so it’s really interesting to hear those projections about figures across the general population and how it will continue to escalate?

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think we’re definitely the early adopters. We’re in the tech space, so we’re kind of made aware of it, especially now. Every day, pretty much every message you see on X or LinkedIn or whatever is typically about AI in some way. I’m very conscious of that when I write messages because I I think they tend to be quite like 80% AI now, not written by AI, but about AI. But yeah, I agree, James, that my shopping habits are very much led by Claude now, which doesn’t, in my opinion, do it quite as well as ChatGPT did. But Claude is like my tool of choice and it knows the most about me and what I like. It just doesn’t present them in the best way yet. I expect we’ll see some improvements there.

James LePage:
I also think that we’ll see, it almost goes back to my point about the MCP protocol being one year old, which is these things are being discovered and 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 and the supply side are solved, we will absolutely see probably the biggest push to market this possible across every single AI solution. We’ll see VC money going into new tools. We’ll see large funding rounds going into tools that pivot towards agentic 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.

James Kemp:
I think what’s nice as well is these tools aren’t just recommending like the big retailers. Like when I do a search these days, whether it’s for a service or for a specific product, it will always recommend places nearby. It knows my location, so it’s aware of that when it’s making these recommendations. I hope that’s something that is maintained, that these smaller stores that perhaps don’t have as big of a presence as something like Amazon, we’ll still get these recommendations. And I think that’s somewhere that WooCommerce 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.

James LePage:
And that’s almost the primary reason why enablement is the first thing I mentioned. I think the AI tools are really cool and Automattic’s investing into it. 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 a 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 Woo and WordPress. Make sure that this is something that is an integral foundational infrastructure layer of this future agentic internet of however the, the current consumption browsing internet in interaction models change. So that’s why enablement is one of my favorite words right now.

Katie Keith:
Yeah. Let’s get to a question, uh, from Nick. McLaughlin from Sky Verge. He says most of the AI functionality here— core agent, structured data, etc.— are best to be built by the Woo team. Where do you want— oh, it’s gone— where do you want to see contributions from extensions and community devs today?

James LePage:
From my vantage, there are a few things. So WordPress 7.0 is coming out in like 6 days or 9 days or very soon, uh, 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 where a developer can build any AI solution that they want. So already in WordPress 6.9, we shipped Abilities API. This way you register the capabilities of what a site can do. And these things can be used by agents in WordPress. 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 LLMs. So I’m going to go query OpenAI. I’m going to go query whoever. Proposed for WordPress 7.0 and likely shipping in 7.0 is the WP AI 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. Well, many have been exploratory solutions. And now we can go and really say., hey, I know that this merchant problem exists and Automattic 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 WP AI 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 WP AI client and says, I’ll use whatever provider’s available, is able to offer these AI-powered features basically built in. And I think you’ll see some of this stuff coming from WooCore as 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 Westguard 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.

James Kemp:
Yeah, I think that’s really cool that, you know, offering AI at the host level, like that makes a lot of sense. The ability to pay for that as part of your package, as part of your hosting package. Makes perfect sense. And you then, 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. So I think you touched on Mark’s Forms plugin. I believe he’s implemented a lot of these Abilities API functionality. But things like 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, write, update, like all of the, all of the things that you can do via the backend or the frontend manually, you can now enable in a sort of consistent way, which I think is really cool.

James LePage:
I heard the term SkyVerge. 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 WooCommerce 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 want it 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 Claude, or they’re operating their site from a browser sidebar, or from a WooAI 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 a crazy ecosystem that outpaces anybody because WooCommerce is successful because of the partners and because of the extensions.

Katie Keith:
Well, before we finish, let’s talk about what would you recommend that merchants do now and developers on behalf of their customers in order to prepare for these changes?

James LePage:
I will keep my answers short. I think developers and agencies and inclined merchants should just explore and experiment and say, I, I’ve always wanted my image background to be different and I’m going to go use Nanobanana 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 Woo has, what can be built, and what’s out there. I think that’s number one for the developer. And number two for the consumer, I’d say there are some actionable things for me, which is keep an eye on where the industry is going, keep informed. So watch these things like Agenta Commerce, watch these overarching trends, and then watch WooCommerce to understand what we’re bringing to the table based on these trends. Get excited for the WooAI 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 a business. And in an AI-led future, that data can be built into incredibly visual pages or images or presented to ChatGPT. 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 exist, so I’m going to make a plugin to go do this. Or for a ChatGPT to go and say, I’m going to go find James a bunch of shoes in a 5-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 could add some more information. I could add some FAQs. I can make this more accessible to human users and agent users alike.

James Kemp:
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. 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’s missing? Like, what data do I need to add specifically? If you’ve got tons of products, it’s quite straightforward now to just get the AI to explore the whole site, especially if you have, you know, an MCP integration set up. 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.

Katie Keith:
Yeah. And we’ve got a follow-up question from Nick who says, thanks folks. Ability API is the main avenue I’ve seen discussed. On board with that. More looking for how we can contribute to new AI— keeps disappearing— new AI feature presence rather than expose existing pieces. So I think this is about the community. And what you want from them?

James LePage:
From my perspective, there are two avenues and opportunities. The first is the core of WordPress. There is a Core AI 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 AI, 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 WooCommerce plugin in a native WordPress way. So I think those type of opportunities are very available, and those stem back to WordPress core. For WooCommerce itself, there’s now opportunity to build into the core of WooCommerce 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 a hook or a filter or whatever. So I can go and build on top of that. 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 Woo project itself. So those are my two suggestions.

James Kemp:
That’s a good suggestion. Yeah. I mean, honestly, we haven’t seen many requests for like AI features yet. And I think because the primitives in WordPress haven’t existed, it’s not been 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 you that, 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.

James LePage:
It’s a bit fuzzy, but I think when we added Abilities API to WordPress core, somebody had opened a PR and it was like an event on, on the WooCommerce repo at Automattic where it was like, yes, somebody’s used our work and 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, I can say firsthand, we love that type of, um, contribution and even request coming into the core 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 love to see that and are super receptive to it. There’s also a channel in the Woo Slack. I think it’s AI and Woo, maybe. Do you know, James?

James Kemp:
I can find out. I have to do a follow-up. AI and MCP, there’s a channel. That’s the one you mean.

James LePage:
I think so.

Katie Keith:
Well, thank you so much for that. Um, 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.

James LePage:
Thank you all for having me. I enjoyed the discussion.

James Kemp:
Yeah, thank you. Um, so next month we have, uh, Rodolfo from Business Bloomer and Checkout Summit, which is the WooCommerce-focused event. Uh, that’s going to be a really cool event. And Rodolfo is coming on to talk about WooCommerce events, uh, 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, uh, that nearer the time as well.

Katie Keith:
Yeah. And after that, um, James Kemp and I will be back every month to discuss a different area of WooCommerce. So again, please subscribe because we’re a new podcast. Podcast and you may not be subscribed yet, you can find all the places that you can subscribe on dothewoo.com.