Two weeks in New York City. Fifty-four Automattic employees. The goal: learn to build with AI and bring those skills back to WordPress.
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, ran an intensive AI training program in early 2026 that produced four categories of working tools. Participants built AI-powered chatbots customized for WordPress publications, content workflows that can summarize and draft material in a publication's voice, automated triage systems for parsing bug reports, and plugins designed to make WordPress content more discoverable by AI agents.
That last one is particularly interesting. A proof-of-concept plugin that serves Markdown content to AI crawlers is already available on GitHub. As AI-powered search (think Perplexity, ChatGPT's browsing mode, Google's AI Overviews) becomes a major traffic source, making your WordPress content machine-readable could matter as much as traditional SEO within a year or two.
Beyond Developers
The training wasn't limited to engineers. Automattic specifically designed it so marketers, editors, and project managers could build functional tools. The company's framing is that AI collapses the distance between having an idea and shipping it, meaning non-technical WordPress users may soon build plugins and automations that previously required hiring a developer.
WordPress.com also now features a Claude Connector for AI integration, though specific details on its capabilities weren't shared.
On the education front, Automattic donated to the University of Illinois Chicago to create "AI Leaders," described as the nation's first workforce-focused AI literacy curriculum for open-source development.
For WordPress site owners, the practical takeaway is this: Automattic is betting hard that AI belongs inside the WordPress workflow, not just as a plugin you bolt on, but as a core part of how content gets created, managed, and served. The AI-crawler plugin alone signals a shift in how WordPress sites may need to think about content delivery in an AI-first search landscape.