AI & WordPress: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly
Discover AI & WordPress pros and cons! From automated content creation to security risks – get the complete guide to using AI with WordPress.
Our Special Guest This Week Is Matt Medeiros of Gravity Forms & The WP Minute Podcast.
In this week’s show, we delve into the powerful intersection of AI and WordPress, uncovering its advantages and pitfalls. From enhancing content creation to potential automation challenges, we explore how AI can streamline your workflow while also presenting ethical dilemmas. Join
This Week’s Sponsors
Kinta: Kinta
LifterLMS: LifterLMS
Rollback Pro: Rollback Pro
The Show’s Main Transcript
[00:00:54.900] – Jonathan Denwood
Welcome back, folks, to the WP Tonic Show. In this episode, we’ve got a returning friend from the show, a master of WordPress and podcasting. We got, like I say, a friend. We got Matt Madeias with us. It’s going to be a fascinating show. We’re going to be talking about all things AI and WordPress, and WooCommerce. I’m sure it’s going to be a lively discussion. Matt has been saying some fantastic insights nights lately around these subjects. Matt, would you like to quickly introduce yourself to the tribe?
[00:01:38.500] – Matt Medeiros
Sure thing. Matt Medeiros is from the WP Minute. You can find me over there. You can find me at my day job at Gravity Forums at GravityForms.com. Excited to dive into WordPress and AI today.
[00:01:51.640] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it should be a great discussion. I’ve also got my ever-patient and helpful co-host, Kurt. Kurt, would you like to introduce yourself to the new listeners and viewers?
[00:02:01.780] – Kurt von Ahnen
Yeah, thanks, Jonathan. My name is Kurt, Kurt von Ahnen. I own an agency called Mañana Nomas. Also work directly with the good folks over at WP Tonic.
[00:02:10.040] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah, it’s fantastic. But before we go into the meat and potatoes of this great show, I’ve got a message from one of our major sponsors. We will be back in a few moments, folks. Three, two, one. We’re coming back, folks. We’ve also got a sponsor of the month, and Kurt will be telling you about it. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:02:32.020] – Kurt von Ahnen
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[00:03:21.360] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s fantastic, Kurt. Let’s go straight into it, Matt. Really, I think what you’ve been saying lately on your own great YouTube channel about your feelings around AI. It really matches my own because I use a ton of AI myself, Matt. I’m not being in vibe coding like you, but I do use a lot of it. But my feelings about it are that saying they’re all over the place would be the understatement. I’ve verbalized that to Kirk, and Kirk got similar feelings about it in some ways. Could you encapsulate where you are at the present moment? Because you’ve had a little more time to think about it, haven’t you?
[00:04:08.260] – Matt Medeiros
Yeah. Well, I mean, this is going to be a tough conversation after OpenAI said they’re going to get into more erotica stuff yesterday. I’m like, Oh, man, I’m in for it tomorrow when I talk to Jonathan about this stuff. But the point is, now I just feel like, Okay, what happened to the real innovative stuff that I really thought we were going down. I’m not an AI scientist. I’m not an engineer. I might not be using this stuff at the same I know I’m not using it at the same pace that a lot of these real hardcore AI folks are. I’m using it as a power user, and I’m specifically using it in the WordPress context of a WordPress professional agency owner, work at Gravity Forms. How does AI help with Gravity Forms? I use it as a content creator, ideating, helping me do all this other stuff, running a business, yada, yada, yada. I feel like I’m the prosumer for, let’s just call it OpenAI for now. I just feel like we’re not really seeing those wins. On my podcast or one of my podcasts last week, there was a blog post that Sam Altman put out about the Sora 2 updates.
[00:05:31.510] – Matt Medeiros
So like, Sora 2 launched, everybody went, Oh, my God, we can make all this video. Then he put out a blog post saying something like, I’m just paraphrasing here, but I think it’s almost word for word, is like, We need to figure out a way to make money with a video. It’s like, Wait a minute. You just got a trillion dollars in 7,000 acres of US land for data centers, and now you’re coming to us going, You need to make money with video? I thought you already figured I just start seeing all of these little red flags pop up, and I feel like we’re just re-witnessing a more immersive way, the same way Facebook lured everybody into Facebook and own their content and own their data, I think that’s what’s happening now with, again, OpenAI and many of them, where they’re just trying to get us into the platform and then, aha, here’s how we’ll make money off of you with your data and all this other stuff. I’m still optimistic with it as a productivity tool. I’m less thinking about it as, Is this thing going to take my job? I don’t see that just yet because everything I feel like is starting to tighten up a bit.
[00:06:50.220] – Matt Medeiros
The progression of its usability and what these leaders are saying about AI, it seems like it’s starting to slow down, and I’m like, Oh, I know what’s happening You all hyped us to get on this train, and now it’s like, We’re not going to get there yet.
[00:07:05.760] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, to me, I just want to put the actual… It’s all around their hype around general intelligence, isn’t it? And trying to get as much money, and I’m talking about OpenAI here, their attempt to establish the data centers, get with the leading chip manufacturers, get in with Oracle, get in with Microsoft, and put a garden fence around them. They’ve got the money, but they’ve also got so many key players in bed with them that if it goes a bit pair-shaped, they’re going to be one of the survivors. This is only my interpretation. That’s the impression I’m getting. Then you’ve got all this hype around general intelligence. I think some of the people in not only Open AI, but in the AI industry have a little bit of a religious zealot about them. They actually do believe it. Others, I think it was just a hype to encourage the market to give them all this financial resources because I’m no expert on it, but I listen to a lot of media and they’re constantly talking about it and they have leading experts on their show. A lot of these people that not only external critiques, but are leading head of departments that are a little bit critical about scaling, about the possibility that you that we’re going to get increased functionality through scaling.
[00:09:04.940] – Jonathan Denwood
How would you respond to what I’ve just outlined?
[00:09:09.260] – Matt Medeiros
I think you’re heading down the right path. I think with all of this AI stuff, there is a… For years on the internet, we were just like, Man, how do you scale this thing? It was always about improving the processor, the CPU, the memory, the storage in the server, and then replacing those servers in those data centers. I’m loosely painting that picture, but that’s what we were thinking. We would optimize what we already had. Then this AI thing came out and it was like, No, we need to clear the land. We need to bring in water and electricity from all over the nation to run these data centers, and we got to buy all of these GPUs, and we can’t sell to these other countries. What the hell just happened between then and now? The scalings for this stuff is so it’s so just like unproportional compared to what we were doing in the past that it just doesn’t make sense. It’s like people say a billion People are just throwing billions around like it’s nothing, like it’s ouch change. I don’t think we’re all really ready for that expense as a people and as a nation.
[00:10:28.620] – Matt Medeiros
It’s funny. I use this as an example. It’s just my canary in the coal mine is this platform called Replit. I did a lot of vibe coding and building all of these React-based apps. I don’t know, a year ago, I could build something and it was pretty amazing. It was like, wow, I built this and it was fast and it was like 20 bucks a month. I was just like, I could never do this because I don’t know React. I don’t know how to build these things. I was like, Oh, this Replit thing is really cool. Over the last year, it has got slower and more expensive to build on replet. I’m looking at that going, I see what’s happening here. They’re trying to figure out their… In the beginning, they just had all the investment in the world and they were just hyping it up. I think the guy was on Joe Rogan’s podcast, hitting all the media and everyone was hopping on, and I was like, Oh, yeah, this is that story again. Hype it up, everybody gets on it, and then they accrue as many monthly users as they possibly can. Then they have to figure out how they make money.
[00:11:28.670] – Matt Medeiros
All the while they’re using technology from Claude and OpenAI. Those prices are going up, too. Now the consumer is sitting there going, Wait, why is my replet bill now from 20 to 150? What happened? I think we’re all going to start to realize the cost of AI really soon when it comes to these products that are built on top of OpenAI and Claude and stuff like that.
[00:11:56.660] – Jonathan Denwood
Before I throw it over to Kurt, I think that’s really insightful, what you just said. Not with some of the AI I’ve been using, because I bought some lifetime deals and yearly deals and that, but what you’ve just outlined, I’ve heard from a lot of people. The other thing is, do you think, obviously, there’s a desperate need to monetise this, and they’re going to attempt to monetise it through advertisement. But the problem with that, and probably I’m only surmising this, I just want to see what you feel about this statement. I think they’ve been a bit leery about taking advertisement, not because they couldn’t even do it now, but there’s a contradiction because people just seen whatever it’s, Claude, Gemini, or OpenAI, whatever answers they give you, people just, Well, that’s got to be true. That must be the right product. I’m just going to go to that website and buy it because this agent tells me that it’s the best. But if they’re taking advertisement money, do you think people are going to be so naive to think that the top result they recommend to you isn’t going to be the result. They got the most money through advertising.
[00:13:27.260] – Jonathan Denwood
What do you reckon?
[00:13:29.560] – Matt Medeiros
I I think you’re right. I’m starting to look at this now and just talking about OpenAI because I would say that they’re the bigger… If you don’t count Google and what they’re up to, OpenAI, probably the biggest in the room. I really think that they’re just trying to go after Google, right? Hands down, trying to go after Google search. Google search has owned this space for, I don’t know, whatever, nearly, whatever we’re at, nearly 30 years or 20 years. And they’re going after that huge pie of search. And they’ve been able to do it because, or they’ve been able to, what I’ll say, maybe mask it because everyone feels like this thing is thinking and talking to you when it’s not really that. They’re shaping it to be that. So it’s that experience. I think you hit the nail on the head is if all of a sudden you see an ad in this response, you might not even know it. It might not even in the back of your head because I feel like I’m having a conversation with ChatGPT when I’m using it. I know it’s not really talking to me. But as soon as you start to see an ad or a promoted spot, I think the human brain goes, oh, this is just This is just me searching for something again.
[00:14:47.660] – Matt Medeiros
This just feels like Google again. I think they’re being very wary about that. That’s why you see stupid blog posts like, We need to figure out how to make money. Now we might do this erotica thing, and we need you to age, authenticate, and essentially get your information just like Facebook did and lock you into that account and really start matching up that memory feature. I know I sound really pessimistic about this stuff, but I really do enjoy the productivity side of what AI gives me, and that’s the lane I want it to go down. I haven’t been able to really wrap my head around an intelligent approach to this comment I’m about to say. But when I look at technology’s advancements in CPUs and how CPUs have transitioned over the many decades from, I don’t know, 64 hertz or 166 hertz to where we’re at today, which is 5 gigahertz, and these little speed increases, and memory got better, and faster and smaller, and storage got better, and faster, and smaller, motherboards, faster, smaller, all this other stuff. I see AI being a part of that tech stack, and it’s just another lane of technology for me, it’s not this thing that, hopefully, that takes over everything.
[00:16:09.240] – Matt Medeiros
It’s like, how fast is your AI processor? Which I know they’re already marketing, but How fast is your AI processor and what can it do? I don’t see it, hopefully, taking over everything. I just see it as another processing unit in our tech stack, if that makes sense.
[00:16:26.960] – Jonathan Denwood
Sure. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:16:31.420] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, on one hand, I’m overcome by a little bit of pessimism, especially if we isolate it to our WordPress space. But then recently, I was just exposed to a couple of young automation experts, I guess that’s what we call them, And they were doing some really cool amazing tying tools together to make things happen. And things from the perspective of using AI that I didn’t… I guess it was there. I mean, I guess I realized it was there, but to watch them do it, right? And And so like leveraging Telegram as the trigger. So they messaged themselves in Telegram to get it to create content, format content, add graphic elements to the content, and automatically create a blog post on their WordPress page, but in draft status, so they could go sign in as the administrator and either approve or disapprove the draft. And so when I looked at that example, I was like, well, that’s pretty cool because the thing where I get lost on the AI, Matt, and maybe you have some better insight on this is you go to this window, you type in a prompt, you get some things. Sometimes You can copy and paste it and it’s great.
[00:17:46.680] – Kurt von Ahnen
Other tools, you can copy and paste. It’s pre-formatted. Other tools, you got to delete asterixes and bold things and make it an H1 or an H2 as you put it in. With everyone that’s combining AI into WordPress tools and building products, and then talking about frameworks that I just mentioned, what do you think the lessons are for not just us, but for people that are developing products in the WordPress space?
[00:18:13.960] – Matt Medeiros
That analogy that you brought up actually makes me want to shift my comment to maybe AI is just a better peripheral to computing. We have a keyboard and a mouse, but we have to manually type and we have to manually move the mouse and click things. Ai is just taking that and just doing it for us. I see it as that evolution of automation that just makes things a little bit more powerful. The thing that drives me nuts the most is when I hear other leaders talk about deploying AI in their organization. I’m talking to enterprise folks and bigger businesses and stuff like that. The answer is always like, just go play with it. Just go play with it. That’s our approach. Well, what happens if we don’t know what to do with it? Well, you just ask AI, and AI will tell you what to do with it. From a leadership perspective, that drives me nuts because there should be some game plan. How does your organization want to deploy AI for the benefit of the organization and the employees? Ai literacy and all this stuff is important. Being able to cobble together solutions like what you witnessed with the folks that use WhatsApp to post to WordPress, that’s all really cool.
[00:19:42.460] – Matt Medeiros
I want these organizations, the leadership, to of these organizations to fully understand how it’s going to help their organization now and how to get people to at least leverage it from the productivity side. Go into ChatGPT and understand the difference is between from just like vanilla prompting to what a GPT is, what a project is, what memory means across all of that stuff. Like ChatGPT’s memory, do you even want to have that on? Is something that should be a question in an organization. I think it really, for me anyway, the first step is that literacy component to all of this stuff. How are you understanding it and applying it to the business? And do you understand the implications? Here’s another example. I talked to this friend of my wife’s friend. He works for this massive construction company in New York, and they build really big buildings for really big financial companies. It’s like the real deal. I was asking him when I saw him a couple of weeks ago, and I was like, Are you guys into AI? He said, Yeah, they just tell us to use it. I was just like, What does that mean?
[00:21:00.960] – Matt Medeiros
You are a multi-billion dollar company building these for other multi-billion dollar companies, and your directives are just, play with it? And he’s like, Yeah, that’s all they do. He’s like, I just use it to summarize slides and write emails to clients. And I’m just like, How is this? How is this this? This is the plan. And I think that when you just start shipping things that you don’t care or know, that’s when a lot of the faults come in. If you just all these people who are just sending emails and summarizing stuff and just taking it for what it’s given you, that’s where we’re in for trouble across the board. And we’ll never see value in it if that’s just the case.
[00:21:44.760] – Kurt von Ahnen
Not at all. No, to expand off of what you’re saying right there, that’s my internal, my internal conspiracy theorist, paranoid person thinks, right? Yeah. Is like, we used to sit down back in the day and think about what we wanted to communicate and write a letter, fold it, put it in an envelope, put a stamp on it and send it. And then we got email and we were told that it was going to make things more efficient and better and make our lives easier. And now I delete 200 spam emails a day, right? It’s like it just becomes slop and mess. And then when I look at the way the average person is using AI, and keep in mind, I’m thinking averages, grand scale, right? When I look at the way the average person is using AI, it’s not productive, it’s not It’s not clean, it’s not pretty, and the output’s not good. It just makes us lazy. It’s like the difference between knowing 25 phone numbers as a kid and being able to dial a phone real quick from your friend’s house, right? And then now if you lost your cell phone, you’d be lost because you don’t memorize any phone numbers anymore.
[00:22:47.400] – Kurt von Ahnen
All this stuff makes us lazy. And I don’t see the average person really benefiting from AI. I see AI benefiting from 20 bucks a month from everybody that’s not optimizing their 20 bucks a For the average person where I really…
[00:23:06.480] – Matt Medeiros
Once again, I am not this leading AI scientist. I’m just looking at it from technology that I’ve experienced in the past with a boom, with a hype cycle and how I’m using it and the results I’m getting from it. But really where I want to see AI win for the average person is that lack of education on stuff that’s extremely impactful in their life. Contracts, terms of service, medical records, understanding their local policy. These are the things that AI should be solving for people. I do this, man, all the time now. When any app gives me a new terms of service that I agree to, I copy, I paste into ChatGPT, and I say, Please find all the stuff in this agreement that impacts my privacy, my data, selling my data. I try to understand these legal things because that’s important to me. I’m not going to read through 9,000 pages of legalese. This is where I want to see AI really help. I want AI to really help the average person understand how their local government works so that they can actually make an impact on whatever it is that they need to do.
[00:24:23.160] – Matt Medeiros
Making videos and coming up erotica through a chat system That is not something that I see as human value to the tune of trillions of dollars. No. I want that more, that advantage of the stuff I just said.
[00:24:43.660] – Kurt von Ahnen
Jonathan, over to you.
[00:24:45.620] – Jonathan Denwood
Before we go to our break, I think that’s a great point. I was listening to the big technology podcast a couple of days ago, the YouTube channel, and they had an interview with the joint founder of Salesforce. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the gentleman’s name, but it was a fascinating discussion. Obviously, Salesforce, about two months ago, said they were reducing their headcount by 5,000. But I also noticed that sales for share price was under pressure. They were feeding the heat a bit. I think that was one of the main reasons why this guy, very insightful, went on the big technology podcast because I I think it was a PR job to defend the share price. I think what you just outlined in your discussion with your friend that works for the construction company, other companies, is that corporate America really hasn’t found a real use case for this. Would you agree with that?
[00:25:52.760] – Matt Medeiros
Yeah. I mean, that’s where I really keep pushing myself to find the benefits. I It was just on another podcast before this one, we were talking about it. I try to watch the extremes, both extremes. So you and I, or the three of us, have been around in the WordPress space long enough where you remember 15, 18 years ago when it was like, how to make a million dollars with blogging, right? Then it became like, how to make millions of dollars with selling courses and how to make millions of dollars doing XYZ. Now you’re seeing that same cycle, that same thing come back this time. It’s with AI. I watched the extreme of that, of like, what are these 20-year-olds doing on the weekend to make a zillion dollars with this app? Then I look at the enterprise companies and I go, what are they doing? They’re doing nothing. This guy over here is making $100,000 in a weekend.
[00:26:46.500] – Jonathan Denwood
Somewhere, there’s a mismatch. Or he’s saying he is.
[00:26:49.820] – Matt Medeiros
Or he’s saying he is, right. I’m trying to like, here’s the hype, and then here’s what’s actually deploying. Is there anything in the middle where this is actually working? Again, I’m just looking at it from some of those workflow advantages, the automation, the ideating, and stuff like that. But I don’t see a complete solution of how big business is deploying this stuff yet. Maybe that’s just because we’re witnessing all this. We have a heightened awareness of technology these days, and we’re all trying to, or is this Is this the one? Where are we in the gold rush?
[00:27:32.960] – Jonathan Denwood
Like, are we missing? Like the Salesforce, it’s been reported. I don’t know if this is true, but it’s been reported. Yes, they fired a lot of their front-facing customer support. But on the same breath, they’ve imported a ton of programmers and others that can help them expand their AI because they feel under threat. They got to develop That’s what’s been reported. How true that is? I don’t know. I’m just saying that what’s been reported.
[00:28:06.760] – Matt Medeiros
These big businesses, they let people go at every big news cycle. Downward economy, get rid of everybody. Recession, get rid of everybody. Ai, get rid of everybody. But they’ve replaced them with the productive AI. That’s the thing to figure out.
[00:28:26.480] – Jonathan Denwood
Been a great discussion so far. We’re going to go for our middle break. Our great sponsors that are really… We love their support. We will be back in a few moments, folks. 3, 2, 1. We’re coming back. Also, I want to point out we’ve got some great deals from the sponsors, plus a created list of the best WordPress plugins and services that will help the power user, the freelancer, or the small agency owner. All the stuff that we recommend we either use ourselves at WP Tonic, or I’ve used personally myself, so you can trust it. We’ve got some great special offers. You can get all these goodies by going over to WP-tonic. Com/deals. Wp-tonic. Com/deals. That’s where you get all the goodies. What more could you ask for, my beloved tribe? Probably a lot more, but that’s all you’re going to get on that page. It’s only a bit of the show the night, but Let us go forth. I’m going to diversify from the questions. Where do you see WordPress with AI Do you think… Because I was listening, I’m not going to name him out, a very popular YouTube influencer. He does a lot of WordPress-type content, but he’s not very engaged in podcasting.
[00:30:01.220] – Jonathan Denwood
He’s got over half a million subscribers to his YouTube channel, and he was saying, You’re not going to have to buy all these plugins. You’re going to be able to replace all the form plugin, this plugin. I agreed with some of what you were saying because some of these plugins I think are ridiculously priced. But he was saying, I don’t think any plugin should cost more than $50 a year or something like that. I’m not going to name him because I don’t want to get a letter. But where do you stand? Do you think the plugin, the pro-plugin, is going to be really hammered in the next 18 months?
[00:30:47.180] – Matt Medeiros
Yeah, I watched the same video, saw the same hype. It’s going to be interesting as next word camp if he goes to them like that reaction. But I think, again, a year ago, I was saying things like, I could never. How are you ever going to forecast five years seeing all of this stuff happening in this rapid pace? Now I’m saying, Yeah, we got time. And 18 months, five years, I think plugins are still safe. The commercial plugins and the reliance on the support and development of those plugins, I think we’re still on safe ground, at least in that I recently launched courses at the WP Minute, and I built a calculator to put in my Lifter LMS lesson. I built it using TELX, which is automatic’s AI tool for building Gutenberg blocks. Really cool, pretty seamless 20, 30 minutes, little vibe code session to build this little calculator that helps people figure out what they need for a hosting provider. But relatively, I It’s really contained. It’s really just calculating some math and spitting out some text. Could I ever replicate Gravity Forms to the level that Gravity Forms has, where my day job?
[00:32:13.380] – Matt Medeiros
I could build a simple contact form, sure. But as soon as I start going into integrations, multi-users, APIs, no way. You’d have to be an engineering team to develop all this stuff. It’d take you just as much time. I think the reliance on… It’s easy to Can I quickly…
[00:32:33.020] – Jonathan Denwood
I totally agree with you, but the only area is, and I’m going to hopefully not be too controversial here, I’m really attempting not to change in my ways, Matt. I think there’s, and I understand where they come from, there’s a whole industry in WordPress of offshore developers that bid on very low type of work. I’m not going to name the platforms either, but they bid really low.
[00:33:06.720] – Matt Medeiros
You’re out of legal tokens this year. Come back in 2026.
[00:33:12.060] – Jonathan Denwood
People are very I’m looking for the right word. They’re sending out the letters left, right, and center, so you got to be very careful lately, right? But I’m drawing a fin. They’re looking to They save money left, right, and center because they’re bidded really low. I think what this influencer, I think that influences that crowd. Do you think I’m right there?
[00:33:42.000] – Matt Medeiros
Yeah, I would say so. I would say that there’s One of the things that WordPress suffers from because it’s the biggest target and the broadest use case of website building, which leads to so many things across the globe, that there’s just this massive amount of people who just want the cheapest. It’s just like, I don’t see the value in anything but just like, Give me this thing. I’m not going to spend a lot of money for it, and I’m just going to move on with my life. But we’ve been bat, like WordPress has been battling that ever since I started podcasting. It was a whole reason. One of the reasons why I started my podcast was to go up against the person down the street that sold a $500 website and then left. That client came to us and was like, Fix this for us. We said it’s going to be $5,000. They were like, Oh, my God, that last guy only charged me $500. I was like, Yeah, where is he now? We’ve been battling that for years, and unfortunately, AI is going to accelerate that. But I also think that AI is going to accelerate the visibility of a well-coded plugin.
[00:34:52.060] – Matt Medeiros
If you actually sat down, and let’s say you had my capabilities, which is just a power user, and I tried to build Gravity through vibe coding, or even A Form that connected to MailChimp just did some simple stuff that Gravity Forms does, it would be 30, 40 hours of even trying to get that to work as a plugin with all these other services, why don’t I just go spend 50 bucks at Gravity Forms and buy the plugin? I think what happens with these tools, at least in their current iteration, is people will play with them and they’ll go, You know what? I should have just used WordPress, or I should have just bought that plugin. I’ve now spent all of this time. I could have just bought that plugin that I once said was too much money. I’m going to get support and updates, and somebody else is thinking about the roadmap and not me. I think there’s What is that short term thing where people look at and they go, Yeah, this is really cool. I can replace all this stuff. But then that long term is, Oh, my God. Now I’m responsible for this thing.
[00:35:55.760] – Matt Medeiros
Now, what do I do?
[00:35:56.790] – Jonathan Denwood
I was looking at a platform. I think it was lovely. It was Lovable, that’s right. Thank you. They had a FEMA converter, and then it would build off the FEMA, and then it could export a WordPress fee into WordPress. That looked interesting. That looked interesting. That could cut… I don’t know how well it worked. It was an elevator, converted it into an elevator. There’s some interesting stuff, but there’s also a lot of hype, isn’t there?
[00:36:31.490] – Matt Medeiros
Yeah, there’s a ton of hype. Again, I said this before, but I think we’re going to start to learn the true cost of AI. In my replet example, it used to be 20 bucks. Now, my base, as soon as I start prompting it, it warns me and says, You’ve already used your base $20 a month tokens. It’s starting to do things like… It’s starting to push the… I guess in its defense, it’s starting to push the right way of development. Now, Instead of just burning all those tokens when I ask it to make a mini app, it says, Well, would you like to do it this way? If you do it this way, it takes 20 minutes for it to complete. If you do it this way, it’s 40 minutes to complete. Or we can just wire frame it and you can look at it before we start to burn all of those tokens. I’m starting to realize they are looking at that cost factor now going, We can’t let people just go at this thing anymore. We need to slow them down, do it the right way, or else we go out of business.
[00:37:29.460] – Matt Medeiros
Then it’s It starts spauning off agents to do optimizations for security, performance. It’s all the right way. But I think what we’re going to realize is in a year or two years, Replit will be $500 a month, which on On paper, you go, Well, it’s still better than paying an engineer, but it wasn’t 20 bucks, not 20 bucks anymore. Now it’s 500. Then it’s going to go into the thousands to get that better engineer. That’s when I think the world is going to be like, Oh, damn, do we use this or do we just pay a human to get it right for us?
[00:38:03.720] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah. Over to you, Kurt.
[00:38:05.660] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, I’m listening to you guys have the conversation. I’m the one out of the three of us that has the burden of running an agency. And I’ll tell you guys- The wording is a good word.
[00:38:17.520] – Jonathan Denwood
I’ll tell you guys- Well, I’m running an agency. It’s a hybrid I’m running, isn’t it?
[00:38:24.680] – Kurt von Ahnen
Clients bring us a project. Oh, we have a pre-existing website, Yellow Flag. Well, where is it hosted? Another yellow flag. And then, well, we’ve got some custom development on it. Another yellow flag, right? So where did you vibe code this thing at? And my agency, I’m just going to tell you guys, it’s that walled garden thing Jonathan talks about. It’s like, well, sorry, Mr. Customer, you’ve backed yourself into a corner. You can either pay us to rebuild this thing with known viable tools that have support, or you can just find someone else to work on this mess because I just don’t even want to touch And there’s a lot of people that I talk to that are in that same space. And so there’s a part of me that’s like, yeah, I see the messaging, right? Oh, don’t pay for expensive plugins. You can vibe code your own, use these cool tools. But then you back yourself into a corner where you’re not going to be able to get professional support or help down the road. And if you have any hopes of growing and scaling your business, hopefully it’s that you don’t want to be a webmaster the rest of your life.
[00:39:30.000] – Kurt von Ahnen
Want to focus on the business you are trying to run. I really worry that people are going to work themselves into a corner and then be trapped in their own mess.
[00:39:39.200] – Matt Medeiros
Yeah. On that previous podcast that I was just recording, the gentleman said to me that he heard from Gary Vanechuk. So this is just me playing the game of telephone, but this definitely sounds like something Gary Vanechuk would say, is Gary said that it’s already starting that in the next year or so, you’ll have people who are starting come walk with me companies because Is everyone so remote and AI that you’ll want to pay somebody to go for a walk and talk and engage with another human? That’s where it’s going to be for that future agency owner to just be the human on the other side. Even if AI is doing everything for us, I think we’re always going to want that human reliance and insurance and to be able to talk to somebody like, Am I doing this right? Are we going down the right path? Can you help me strategize? I get it. I think we might be backing ourselves into our corner with the AI tools, but as you said, Kurt, the person who’s running the agency, you want to be helping that customer with their business, even if they’re using AI.
[00:40:44.850] – Matt Medeiros
It might just take a different shape.
[00:40:47.460] – Jonathan Denwood
Yeah.
[00:40:48.420] – Kurt von Ahnen
Well, that’s interesting. Jonathan, are we going to the video review that we were talking about with Andre Carpathy?
[00:40:55.480] – Jonathan Denwood
No, I think we jumped to… I think we’ve covered that in a way. Would Do you agree with that, Kurt? I think in the conversation- Well, we didn’t get to say that AI was a spirit person yet. Well, we. Well, do you want to quickly ask Matt a quick question on that?
[00:41:13.400] – Kurt von Ahnen
No, I mean, It’s just interesting. For listeners and viewers, there was a video that had come out with OpenAI’s former director and Tesla’s Andre Carpathy, and he had some remarks about artificial intelligence. We watched the video we were going to discuss with some. What I found the most interesting, and about all of these AI videos. So I wanted to… My comment fell into almost all of these big executives talking about AI. I noticed they’re not talking about, Hey, let’s see what it does right now. Let me show you this cool thing I can do right now with it. Let me do this kink. Let me show you in real time what this awesome thing does. Instead, it seems like they’re all casting this vision of some just weird abstract future of, this is the way we think it’s going to develop. This is the way we think it’s going to expand. This is the way we think it’s going to scale. In this guy’s case, he’s saying, We’re not even having a hardware discussion.
[00:42:10.500] – Jonathan Denwood
I just wanted to say one. Can I just say one quick thing? It’s your show. Say what I’d want. No, it’s our show. I pay for the attitude of that, but it’s our show. I I do want this really to come across as negative to AI because it’s made an enormous difference to me, Matt, because my personal circumstances, I’m not going to go into detail, but I think the tools and for the specific things I’m using it for, it’s made a big difference to me, Matt. I use a lot of AI, and it’s made a big difference to my own personal production and what I can do, and it’s made me more efficient. I think there’s a lot of people that could say that. It’s finding this middle ground, isn’t it, Matt? Would you agree with that?
[00:43:08.120] – Matt Medeiros
Yeah, I agree. I’m also trying not to come off as super negative to it because I do have those efficiency gains, and there’s definitely some value there. Yes, it’s saving time. But yeah, when I, again, look at the global leaders or any leader of these bigger organizations, and I don’t see the now stuff that they’re painting It’s always the future stuff. I’m just like, Where are you taking us?
[00:43:34.380] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, I think just because I want to get onto story four, and we probably have to call it a day. Hopefully, you’ve got enough time because I love to have a quick chat with you after the show, but you have to clear off, I understand. But I think a lot of this is about the core of what we’re dealing with, and I’m no expert. I probably spent in my background listening to podcasts, listening to YouTube as I’m trying to make my living, not part of this inner circle, but trying to understand it, is that it’s fantastic technology. It truly is pattern recognition technology on steroids. We’re Really on steroids, really on steroids. Amazing technology. It is not consciousness. It knows nothing. It’s a glorified parrot, but that’s not diminishing it because it’s amazing pattern recognition technology. Like I say, on steroids, that will make a difference. But I think it’s these people in the industry that got this religious tone about them, that are trying to sell it as human consciousness. That it knows, it knows nothing. How would you respond to that?
[00:44:51.540] – Matt Medeiros
Yeah, I mean, there’s definitely some edge cases about, again, this partnership level of looking at ChatGPT and a lot of the stuff that they’ve talked about with not using it as a life partner and all of this stuff. I get the attractiveness to that as somebody who might not have social connections or abilities to be social and all this stuff. And this is literally at your fingertips. And that feeling of it being real is right on the edge, man, of should you trust it? Should Is this legal? It brings in a lot of those deep connections. I don’t want to say people are wrong for engaging with it that way, if that’s what they’re doing. But it’s up to OpenAI and all these other systems to put those safeguards in place and also put those, whatever, warnings or be more transparent about what’s going on in the future. These results that people are getting so that they avoid any like, Oh, this is a thing that I’ve fallen in love with, or this is a thing that I believe is my God, or this is a thing that’s giving me great business advice. There has to be some protection there other than the one sentence that appears on every chat dialog, which is, This might give you wrong information.
[00:46:24.560] – Matt Medeiros
Please check your work. Imagine if we all had that out in our business. This might not perform with you. Please double-check our work before you press go live on the website we just built you. I don’t know. It just teeters along this real weird edge of humanity that we’re in right now.
[00:46:43.460] – Jonathan Denwood
It’s really strange times, isn’t it? Let’s go on to Wu Thomas. You had a great interview recently with the general manager, Castiel, Ian Minster. I’ve actually asked him on my own show in December, based on your compensation. I don’t know if he’s going to… I think he’s listening to this interview to make his mind up. He’s probably going to say no now. But hopefully, you will agree to come on. Where do you see where Woocommers is? Because I listened to the interview and Ian seemed to make a lot of sense to me. But I just think that automatic and Woocommers I just missed the enormous opportunity to build a self-hosted solution that could really compete with Shopify, but still have, when people want a more customized solution, they’ve also got the whole self-hosted and the community around that to offer it. It just seems to me a totally missed opportunity, but it could be a retrieved. I’m not even sure, but I don’t know all the inside story. It’s easy me as an outsider to put this, but I’m not in the trenches. What do I really know? But they seem to be trying to do better marketing, again.
[00:48:15.440] – Jonathan Denwood
Against Shopify, but it just seems to me that automatic should have had and can still have a laser focus on building a hosted solution that really should compete with Shopify head-to-head. And does AI have some linkage to this? Over to you, Matt.
[00:48:41.520] – Matt Medeiros
I’ll try to summarize that because I have a lot of thoughts on this, but I would say that, obviously, over the course of the last year, things have not been great for automatic. And through that, the perception of WordPress, and through that, the perception of the stability of WordPress. And you would also, I’ll make the argument so that you don’t get the legal letter, but I would say that whatever happened just over a year ago, it was in the works for at least a year prior, if not two years prior to that. And we can easily say that automatic has been distracted by doing too much. We have, whatever, 45% of the Internet. Why are we doing things likeumbler and all these other products? All these other products, of which some of the products I really love. Pocketcast, SimpleNote, some of the things inkjet pack I really like. But why aren’t we just doubling down on WordPress and Woocommerce? That should be the business. I put a prediction post out in January this year that of all these things I would do at Automatic, and one of them is cutting the fat and doing all the stuff and doubling down on the product.
[00:49:50.100] – Matt Medeiros
I think they’re finally doing that with Woocommerce through the hire of, I think it’s a new general manager or a new president of Woocommerce, or at least marketing person. I’m seeing much more marketing coming out, which is good. I’m seeing a lot more developer advocates like Brian Cordes joining the team. I think just when you’re part of a 2000 person organization in which many just, a lot of the stuff, maybe just default to Matt, they’re trying to pivot that battleship amongst all that stuff that’s been happening. Let’s just be honest, they lost two years, which is five years in tech, and especially up against somebody like Shopify. The advantage is open source and free and lots of web hosting.
[00:50:36.920] – Jonathan Denwood
I still think the opportunity to turn it around is still not being missed.
[00:50:43.540] – Matt Medeiros
Here’s what I think. As I talked to people over the last couple of months and asking people, How’s business number one? How’s your marketing? Are you going to these events? How do you feel now that we might be at this tail end of this I don’t know. The biggest feeling that I get are people are just… They’re still for WordPress. They’re just heads down working, I got to get the job done to make the business happen. Whereas The last 10 years has been everyone just like, We love each other. It’s the community. My friend over there. I’ll share my ideas with you. Here’s my plugin. You want mine? I’ll take your plugin. Come on my show. Now I think people are like, Hold damn. Whatever happened with this lawsuit got everybody heads down and back to work. You know what? I got to be more serious about this work, and I got to be more serious about being profitable in this WordPress space. I think that Woocommerce is also having that same moment. I would say to the service folks that are out there that I think that Woocommerce is the next best opportunity for people to double down and build their business on.
[00:51:53.900] – Matt Medeiros
Because we’re starting to see a lot more competitors come up, which is an indication of people want e-commerce on WordPress. They’re going to try to attack WuCommerce as the big place to go, but I think that’s only going to motivate and actually make Wu and WordPress better in the long run.
[00:52:09.500] – Jonathan Denwood
I heard a whisper that they’re planning to spend even more money on jet pack.
[00:52:18.600] – Matt Medeiros
Yeah, I would imagine so.
[00:52:20.320] – Jonathan Denwood
I don’t understand it. Got nothing against the team, nothing. But they need to be laser focused on word on WooCommerce, in my opinion. I think you agree, don’t you?
[00:52:32.180] – Matt Medeiros
I do. I can also make the case for jet pack, but definitely on WooCommerce. Because what happens, all the stuff we’re saying about AI and all these business, like replet prices going up. We’re seeing it with Shopify already. Once you get into Shopify, the prices go up. Whatever, a lot of people are like, That’s fine. I’m running an e-commerce business. That’s just the cost of doing business. I think that’s the The advantage that WordPress will have and WordPress will have is the cost of switching and managing it all will be a lot better.
[00:53:08.880] – Jonathan Denwood
There’s a stage, though, where a SaaS environment makes sense. But if you’re one of the lucky ones that grows, there’s a time where you want a more customized. And dropping a system completely and going to a new system, it’s such a decision to make. But if you’ve got a SaaS platform and then you can then move it much easier to a more customizable, anybody that’s got any common sense, that’s a great That’s a great sales pitch, isn’t it? Yeah.
[00:53:48.280] – Matt Medeiros
Just real quick on the AI thing in Woocommerce. I think Matt said this at the recent WordCamp US, his fireside chatter keynote, whatever you call it. He brought up a good point, which I hadn’t been thinking of, is as AI starts to get baked more into the browser, because look, they’re all fighting for it. They’re all fighting for the attention of the user. Chatgpt wants you to log into ChatGPT. Eventually, they’ll want you to use their browser. Google is going to want you in their thing. Meanwhile, if you’re building websites, Elementor is going to want you in their site builder as an example.
[00:54:23.160] – Jonathan Denwood
I’m going to have to, because we’re getting close to the hour, and I’ve taken up too much time in this podcast My co-host has been extremely patient and allowed me, but I know he’s going to have to go soon. This wrap up. So, Kirk, would you like to take the opportunity to tell people how people can find more about you? I do apologize for taking up. No, it’s all good.
[00:54:50.900] – Kurt von Ahnen
It’s all good. Talking to Matt is always a blast, and I always learn something. You can reach me at maniananomas. Com. Maniananomas is also my social tag for X on Facebook. I’m on LinkedIn. Kurt Von Anden on LinkedIn.
[00:55:06.140] – Jonathan Denwood
Matt, what’s the best way for people to find out more about you and what you’re up to, Matt?
[00:55:12.380] – Matt Medeiros
Thewpminute. Com. Check out Kurt’s podcast on thewpminute. Com. Agency Action. You can find that right in the podcast link and mydayjob@gravityforms. Com.
[00:55:22.640] – Jonathan Denwood
Have you got time for additional 5, 10 minutes and then three or four minutes afterwards, or do we need to end it, Matt?
[00:55:30.000] – Matt Medeiros
Yeah, no, I’m good.
[00:55:31.040] – Jonathan Denwood
We’re going to do some bonus content, folks, which you’ll be able to watch on the WPTonic YouTube channel, but we’re going to close out the podcast part of the show. But one thing I’ve got to ask, if you really enjoyed this interview and I thought it was a blast. Mate, and you’re listening on Spotify, on iTunes, on your phone. Can you leave us a review? Both me and Kurt would be very appreciative because it’s the best way to promote the show on those platforms. If you could do that, we would be really happy. We will be back next week with another great interview. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye. So onto bonus content. I don’t know, but do you think I’m just too critical? Because it’s easy for me to point the obvious, but I have no idea what’s really going on with how difficult it is to make a really SaaS environment with woocomers. I have no idea what I’m really talking about. In some ways, it just seems the obvious to me, but these are really bright people. Maybe I’m wrong because I’m not the brightest, but I’m not the bluntest tool in the toolbox.
[00:56:52.980] – Matt Medeiros
I’m sure it comes down to a lot of internal infrastructure stuff, plus a decade plus of selling add-ons and marketplace and an initial shock to maybe revenue and how do you do rev share. In case of Woocommerce, it’s like, how do you incorporate the add-ons from third-party makers like Ian from Castral? How do you do all that stuff? It’s easy for us to Monday morning quarterback it, but I’m sure that’s the challenges they’re going through. Now, of course, in the case of AI, AI, it’s just… It’s time. It’s like, okay, even if you have that path of how you’re going to execute on the tech stack side, now you got to do it, which just takes time to test and to deploy and do all this stuff. Maybe it’s already in the works. Maybe it’s already in the works. Maybe it’s already in the works. Maybe it’s It’s the obvious thing. It’s been the obvious thing for many years, but I think there was just too much distraction. I really think that now they’re going to double down on it and make it work.
[00:57:56.020] – Jonathan Denwood
Let’s go back to AI and a bit, what’s your opinion of these I was listening to Kevin in Art Gallery. He was doing a live YouTube stream, and he was talking about agencies. I don’t agree with everything Kevin says, but I did agree with 99% what he was saying in this live stream about how you sell and that. He’s very passionate, he’s very opinionised. But I had to say, I agreed with 95% of what you were saying. What’s your own feelings about… Obviously, when it comes to agency, AI builders don’t really matter, do they? But to some degree, apart from, will they take the way you’re feeding your family? But I do think having a website up and running quickly is one thing. Having a website that actually gets clients, actually makes a difference to your business is a totally different ball game. Totally different. What do you reckon?
[00:59:08.800] – Matt Medeiros
I haven’t gone too deep into the WordPress AI site builders beyond playing with them. Wordpress. Com, Elementors, and just getting a feel for them. I did use TELX, as I mentioned earlier, to build a Gutenberg block. What I noticed is, the output was good. It achieved what I wanted. It just didn’t do it in the traditional WordPress way. In other words, yes, it made a Gutenberg block that I could download as a plugin. So yes, the baseline was acceptable. But if you click to modify a block, it’s using all kinds of… It’s not built from individual blocks. In other words, it’s not taking all of what Gutenberg gives you. It’s just wrapping all this custom code in a block and saying, “Here you go.” I think, hopefully, as that evolves, you’ll start to see it break out the components of whatever you’re building in a block to use the other default blocks, much like you might build something with Generate Press or Cadence or even Elementor or ACF. You’ve got all these individual blocks in that one big component. If AI continues to get better as a productivity tool and coding tool, I’ll tell you what the most interesting thing is —and this is where I was going with the Mullenweg comment.
[01:00:27.560] – Matt Medeiros
If browsers start to have native AI in it with automation in the browser, like Perplexity does, if WordPress code is so good, and Gutenberg code is so good, eventually, and well-documented, that you can just prompt your browser to make the Gutenberg block for you. Do you even need TELX at that point? Do you even need Elementor at that point or Kevin’s product? If the browser can just write the great WordPress open source code and Gutenberg open source code in the browser, and put it right into your editor. I think we’re maybe at a battle soon of abstracting where that happens. Is it going to be inside somebody’s Elementor Edge plugin, or is it going to be at the browser level? Where WordPress —Yeah, but he was arguing, and I was really totally against it, really, but I’m now reconsidering.
[01:01:23.610] – Jonathan Denwood
I do see where he’s coming from. He says a lot of the time, he doesn’t even allow them access to the website. They have to sign a call. He gave the example: you got a landing page and you optimized the title and the main message. It’s part of the deal that you’re getting results and monitoring them through Google Analytics or whatever analytical package you’re using. It’s part of your response. Then the client, or whoever has access to the website, changes the title, and the conversion rate drops. He says, Anything that goes wrong with that website, they’re not going to blame themselves. You’re the one who gets the blame because they’re giving you some money. I don’t. It’s all right. That’s my experience, and I’m sure it’s yours. He’s right, isn’t he? He is right. Anything goes wrong, they never take any responsibility for their actions. It’s always your fault.
[01:02:29.260] – Matt Medeiros
I’ve never fully agreed with his stance on that stuff. Look, at the end of the day, it’s when you turn to somebody and you say, Well, now that’s why in my contract, hypothetically speaking, it’s just like, if you break something and you need an emergency fix. An emergency fix is $500 an hour because if you call me on a Sunday and they need to fix this for you, that’s how much it’s going to cost. You can have the keys to your website. Just know that it comes with these things. I’m not going to do it for free. I never agreed to fully own that— Yeah, that’s my own position.
[01:03:06.460] – Jonathan Denwood
That’s my own. Thanks for pointing that out. The other thing before we wrap it up is I want to go back to the YouTube influencers, and I’ve tried to build up my own YouTube channel, and I’ve been reasonably successful, and I’m going to be really concentrating on that. But I love podcasting. I love radio, and I’ve gotten into podcasting because I do. But I am probably going to concentrate more on YouTube. I think you can do both, though. I don’t want to give up on podcasting. It’s been good to me. But these influencers —the other one, and there are 2-3 I’ve been watching —have an actual, visceral loathing of Gutenberg. There are about three or four major influencers that I watch their videos, and they all loathe Gutenberg with real venom. What do you think that’s about, Matt?
[01:04:16.320] – Matt Medeiros
I think that’s just about them catering to that negative hype that inspires many people to engage. Whether it’s like, I can’t stand my city council and this person on the city council, all the way to, I can’t stand Gutenberg blocks. It just gets people fired up and engaged in chat. Sure, you might not like it. You might not use it for your business. My real problem is influencers who don’t understand why Gutenberg exists and why it needs to win, given what it does for WordPress’s longevity. Wordpress. When you stop seeing that, you can not use Gutenberg all you want and bring in your own page builder. That’s fine. But if you’re leading these folks into using WordPress, you should at least understand why it exists and what it means to the project. It’s just like humans. It’s just unfortunate. They’re never going to understand why. They’ll never make the case for it at the end of the day. It’s easy for them to beat it up and then show something else as an alternative. Plus, YouTube is YouTube. It gets engagements, clicks, and people chatting, and that’s the downside of social media.
[01:05:38.560] – Jonathan Denwood
Well, one of the two of these, because I’ve been a little bit critical of Gutenberg, but I use Cadence, and I also like Generate. I’ve used Generate Press, and they’re the two I recommend if you’re going to use Gutenberg. I think there are others, but I don’t recommend them because I don’t dislike them. But I only recommend stuff that I have some personal knowledge of, and I’ve used Generate Press and more of Cadence. I know a lot of people, a few people whom use Generate Press, and I trust their opinion. I also like Cadence. I like Ben as well. I think they’re both really good products. But some other people, I think they are doing it for the YouTube channel. But others, they really do dislike Gutenberg, don’t they?
[01:06:30.000] – Matt Medeiros
Yeah. It’s just one of those standout decisions that people can… And it makes sense. If you’re not analyzing the WordPress space or understanding what’s happening in the community. That’s the decision. When you got into WordPress, this is me, hypothetically, that person came into WordPress, they started using WordPress, and then all of a sudden, they don’t know how the community works, how open source They hear that that’s the next greatest thing. They don’t care about… They just want to use WordPress as a free tool. They’re not caring about its longevity and its importance in open source. It’s easy for them to be like, I can’t believe this is the thing they’re trying to force down our throats here. It’s an easy thing for them to attack. Unfortunately, it’s not going away, and they will make it better. It’s going to continue to evolve. It’s just at a slow pace.
[01:07:30.960] – Jonathan Denwood
I think we’re in the ‘added content’ section. Thank you so much, Matt, for coming on the show. It’s been a blast. I think we’ve covered a ton of stuff, and I think it’s been an interesting discussion. We’re going to end it now, and hopefully Matt will return in the new year for another great discussion. We’ll see you soon, folks. Bye.
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