Post Status Happiness Hour Session Twenty Six

Transcript ↓

In this episode of the Post Status Happiness Hour, host Michelle Frechette interviews Neel Schivdasani a product manager in the AI division at Automattic, about the integration of AI into WordPress.com. Neil discusses his background and the development of an AI website builder designed to simplify website creation for users without technical expertise. The conversation covers the evolution of AI in web development, the challenges faced, and future enhancements. A live demonstration showcases the tool’s user-friendly features, emphasizing its potential to democratize web publishing. The episode concludes with a discussion on user feedback and the collaborative spirit of the WordPress community.

Top Takeaways:

• The AI Website Builder Lowers Barriers for Non-Technical Users: The builder is specifically designed for people who don’t know what WordPress is, or who feel overwhelmed by traditional website tools. It’s aimed at helping individuals quickly create a professional-looking site without needing to learn plugins, themes, or complex design tools. The assistant guides users through content creation, layout choices, and even image sourcing.
• A Major Intelligence Upgrade is Coming: Neel teased an upcoming “step function” increase in intelligence for the assistant. This includes improved reasoning, contextual awareness, and the ability to understand abstract commands. Future iterations will allow users to describe desired layouts or functionality in natural language, and the assistant will generate the appropriate code or configuration—bridging the gap between vision and execution.
• Commerce and Custom Layouts Are on the Roadmap:The team is working to support broader use cases, especially eCommerce. The assistant will eventually be able to understand what a user is trying to sell, recommend necessary plugins (like for payment or shipping), and configure stores accordingly. Users will also soon be able to generate specific layouts (e.g., “2×2 image grid with a CTA button”) just by describing them.
• It’s Not Replacing Developers—It’s Growing the Ecosystem: There’s pushback from some developers, but Neel emphasized this tool isn’t meant to replace them. Instead, it’s about helping people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford or access web development. It gives them a starting point, and ideally, they’ll grow into more advanced needs—eventually hiring developers or agencies.

Mentioned In The Show:

• Automattic
• WordPress.com/AI
• Mailchimp
• Cursor
• Lovable

🐦 You can follow Post Status and our guests on Social Media:

• Neel Schivdasani (Product Manager, Automattic)
• Michelle Frechette (Director of Community Relations, Post Status)
• Olivia Bisset (Intern, Post Status)

The Post Status podcast is geared toward WordPress professionals, with interviews, news, and deep analysis. 📝

Browse our archives, and don’t forget to subscribe via iTunes, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Stitcher, Simplecast, or RSS. 🎧

Transcript

Michelle Frechette 00:00:03  Welcome to Post Status Happiness Hour live. And today my guest is Neel Schivdasani. Neel works with Automatitc and he has been instrumental in the new AI integration into WordPress.com. Neel, welcome to the show.

Neel Schivdasani 00:00:21  Hey, Michel, thanks for having me.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:23  Yeah. So you and I met, about, what, a month and a half ago. Now it’s hard to believe it was that long ago. Yeah, almost two months ago.

Neel Schivdasani 00:00:30  Yeah, almost two months.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:32  And at WordCamp Asia, it was slightly warmer for me there. It’s. We had a little snow today in New York, so.

Neel Schivdasani 00:00:39  Oh, wow. Yeah, I’m in Atlanta, and it’s starting to warm up a little bit.

Michelle Frechette 00:00:42  Yeah, yeah. I’ve seen people post pictures with flowers and things in Georgia, so we are not quite to that point here, but we’re getting there. We’re getting there. But I saw the announcement and I, I mean, I follow the news and WordPress, of course, saw the announcement that you had kind of baked AI  into, Baked it into. I don’t know if that’s the right terminology, but you know what I’m saying? We’re very casual here, so I go a little crazy sometimes. But then it’s part of WordPress.com now, and I had asked a question of Matt in the Q&A at WordCamp Asia as when we might see AI come to fruition in WordPress.org. Right? So in the self-hosted, not even knowing that this was coming down the pike necessarily and, the.com world. So, yeah. So I’m excited about it. I’m excited to learn more about it. And before we even, like, dive deep into that, why don’t you just give us a little bit about yourself? I know you just said you’re in Atlanta, so we got that part covered. But just tell us a little bit about what, you know, how long you’ve been working on this project and anything else you want to share about yourself before we kind of dive deep into the AI part?

Neel Schivdasani 00:01:53  Yeah. For sure. So again, my name is Neel Schivdasani. I’m a product manager in the AI division at Automattic. I’ve been there for a little less than two years, probably like one year and eight months, something like that. And that’s actually, that was my first exposure to the overall WordPress ecosystem or my first, like, deep exposure. I’ve, I’ve worked at MailChimp for eight years in the past. And, you know, that’s kind of adjacent, still helping publishers and small businesses. But yeah, relatively new to WordPress. As for the AI website builder, I think we’ve been kicking around some version of this for about a year. But then things really kind of ramped up closer to, I’d say, half a year ago. That’s actually like a fairly long product development time. But this is a challenging new space. It’s moving very quickly. A lot to learn, a lot to kind of invent from a, from a UX standpoint. And, we’re really excited to see people use it and to continue developing it.

Michelle Frechette 00:02:54  I feel like, you know, AI has been part of the social conscience for quite a while now. Like there’s been movies about it, and I mean, all the way back to like 2001 A Space Odyssey, which, you know, predates my ever having looked at movies and things like that. And I’m older than you. But, so it’s not like we’ve never heard of it before, but it really just, it really is in the last year to two years that it’s become a tool that’s truly accessible. To online. Right? So with ChatGPT and other things like that. But even with, you know, I have a if I say her name she will talk to me. But the Alexa sitting here on my desk that, you know, I can ask questions of and there’s, you know, different things that are just automated that we never even think about. Until we have that as a tool. The first time I ever got, you know, a smartphone. And I realized, like, you could watch TV on your smartphone? It was like it took me back to when I was watching, like reading comic books in my youth where they had like TV watches and you’re like, oh, like that could ever happen, right? And now it does. Like, I could actually watch TV on my watch. So like the it seems like things just moved really quickly. What they do in tech. And so that like this has just like gone boom. And everybody talks about AI. My mother hates it because like every time she goes into Facebook, it tries to tell her what she should write. And she’s like, I hate that. But she’s obviously not the target market either. So what, like how did the process evolve and like what made it move so quickly? I know you said it took like a little bit longer in development time. It doesn’t feel like it. It feels like it went very quickly, quite honestly. but how did that all come to be? And then we’re also going to everybody’s watching. We’re going to do a demo as well and show you what it looks like.

Neel Schivdasani 00:04:47  Yeah. so it’s funny, just to kind of go back to something you mentioned, like AI is really kind of boomed over the past few years. I think, I my background was like more machine learning and recommendations and things like that. And then I started working with AI at this point, probably four years ago. And it’s very different now than it was then. It’s very different now than it was one year ago. It’s very different now than it was six months ago. And so in terms of like how this kind of came to light, we just know that there’s so many people that need to get onto the open web, or want to, and, it’s just difficult for them. And, they’re maybe not yet at the point where they would hire a developer or an agency to help them out. Maybe it’s just kind of like a blog they want to write. Or they’re, you know, trying to start a small business for themselves. And we just know that there’s a need for them to get on the web. And, and we want it to be easier than it is. And so it’s, you know, like all all products that grow to be successful, which were, you know, still working and hoping for, it started with a problem more so than like the technology. As the technology started to emerge, we realized, okay, this could actually really help these people, and that’s very much different than the experience you described your mother having with Facebook, where it’s kind of like, in the way of what she wants. I don’t think your your mom probably doesn’t have a problem, you know, articulating her thoughts and writing, whereas people do have a problem building websites. And so we just wanted, you know, again, like it’s not about the technology, it’s about the problem. Once the technology starts to get to a point where it could help that problem, we decided to really jump on it and see how we could kind of play a role there. And, it’s been a really interesting development cycle because, you know, I mentioned that this space moves fast. this product, I think. It went through there were a few times where we essentially kind of reinvented it, because what we were doing was no longer relevant or current, and now we’re at a point where we’re really excited.

Neel Schivdasani 00:07:02  It cannot you know, we’ve heard people tell us, like, how much easier it has made things for them. And we’re excited to keep developing it, into, you know, kind of like an industry leading AI application, which involves us just, like, really staying on top of what’s happening, not getting swept up in the hype, but understanding when, when technological advancements can really facilitate us solving the user problem.

Michelle Frechette 00:07:27  Yeah. So as I was thinking about it, like making it easier to publish on the web really does lean right into that democratizing publishing for sure, because it makes it more accessible to people. 

Neel Schivdasani 00:07:39  Yeah, absolutely. We think that, it’s something that only grow the ecosystem in the open web by making it this easy.

Michelle Frechette 00:07:48  Absolutely. Now, is the AI part built into, you know, the free version of WordPress.com, or is it something that comes with the paid versions or the, you know, the self-hosted, the hosted, business plans and things like that?

Neel Schivdasani 00:08:02  Yeah. So right now, the AI tool, the AI website builder, it does have a free trial, but it is something that is kind of like bundled with a premium or business plan on WordPress.com. We’re we’re starting there and we’re trying to explore over time, you know, how can we further democratize things, how we can how can we make this even more available? It is something that incurs a cost even to have a free trial. And to, you know, we’re still just kind of feeling out, like what the path forward is into the distant future while solving user problems right now.

Michelle Frechette 00:08:38  Absolutely, fantastic. Well, do you want to, Do you have you got some people already saying they’re checking in. They’re watching. It’s good to have everybody here who’s who’s paying attention today. do you want to go ahead and just jump right into a demo so you can show us what it looks like?

Neel Schivdasani 00:08:53  Yeah, absolutely. Let me. All right. So do you see me kind of, scrolling up and down on this window a little bit?

Michelle Frechette 00:09:01  Yes, I do.

Neel Schivdasani 00:09:02  Cool. So this is WordPress.com/AI-website-builder. You can also go to WordPress.com/AI. And, this is the landing page where you get to try things. You know, we have some customer testimonials. We’re going to be building out more descriptions and, you know, information about the products so that people can learn about it on this page. But right now it’s really focused on enabling people to try something. And, the start of the experience is really you just describing what it is you’re trying to do. And so, for example, I might say I need a website for my bakery. And then as you go into the experience, it starts setting up the website for you. And, if you’re not logged in, it will ask you to log in. In this case, I am logged in or to create an account, which you can do without validating your email. You can just kind of very quickly get into the experience. And then once you’re in this experience, we have an AI assistant that understands what you’ll need to know to build a website. And, it, you know, if you haven’t given that information, it’ll start to collect more from you. And this is something that over time, we’ll get smarter and learn more about more things that can collect from you, in order to help you achieve your goals. Right now, it’s asking what the name of the bakery is, and I’m going to say Colette Bread, which is the name of a bakery by my house that I like.

Michelle Frechette 00:10:29  Okay. Wow, that came pretty easy.

Neel Schivdasani 00:10:34 Yeah. It’s funny because, like, I not, I don’t I don’t suspect anyone from that bakery is going to be watching this, I think like every day I think like I wish we could just build their website for them because or I wish they could use this tool because it’s so easy. I’m going to tell it, it’s located in Atlanta, Georgia, rather than give a specific address, but you can do that as well. And what do we offer? You know, it’ll it’ll also help you like, you could ask a questions. You could ask it for clarification. In this case, it says like, are there any specific types of bread or baked goods that you specialize in? I’m going to say we make sourdough pastries. And then here’s, here’s a section where you can kind of confirm everything that it knows about your site. You can change anything by clicking on it. I’m going to go ahead and say yes, create my site. And, while the site’s being built, it gives you some examples of things that you can ask it to do once you’re in the editor so you can ask it for fonts, you can ask it for colors, you can ask it to redesign your page. You could ask it to add a menu page, a gallery page, or a menu section or a gallery section. Here we see the site start to come together. And, what we’ve done is our AI is picking sections and pages and functionality that we think makes sense for the business or the, the user’s need, based on whatever it is that they’ve said they were trying to build.

Neel Schivdasani 00:12:07  In this case, you can see that the website has a hero section with a link to the menu in about section with a link to an about page, gallery, some customer reviews, a contact section with a map. And additionally, you know, I mentioned that there’s these links to different parts of the, the website. We’ve created additional pages for people. So there’s this about page, there’s a contact page, and there’s a menu page.

Michelle Frechette 00:12:33  Nice.

Neel Schivdasani 00:12:34  Yeah. And additionally, you know, the website has been populated with stock images that the user can use or not use. It’s up to them. It’s just to help them kind of envision what they want their site to be, as well as placeholder copy. And we think this is important just because even if we expect most businesses to replace all of this, you know, all of this content, all of the images and all the copy, it just helps someone who is not at all familiar with websites and how to build online. It helps them understand, like, okay, here’s like the type of image I could use here, or here’s what I should be talking about in these different sections.

Michelle Frechette 00:13:12  Yeah, I think that’s really helpful.

Neel Schivdasani 00:13:15  For sure. The next thing that we do is that once you’re in the editor, we have this little thing that pops up. This is essentially the assistant. You can move it around as you see fit. And, the first thing it does is walk you through a couple of high level decisions about your site. The first of which is layouts. And so you can immediately.

Michelle Frechette: Oh that’s nice. 

Neel Schivdasani 00:13:33  Yeah, you can immediately try some different layouts for this page. They’ll have sometimes like, generally similar images, although it picks different images depending on the aspect ratios, as well as similar content and functionality. But it lets you explore different ways of kind of visualizing your business. Next we picked some colors that just based on what you’ve described. We think would make sense. You can also tell the assistant, you know, in that initial stage what color you want. But, you know, depending on the business that you’ve described, we’ll pick some color palettes that we think are appropriate. You can also ask the eye for specific colors so you can say, okay, make my site blue. Make it. You can give it specific hex codes. You can even say, you know, click on something and say, make this, you know, green or make this darker and it’ll handle requests like that. I might say, yeah, make my site a light purple and white and it will use AI to generate some palettes. And we’re also this is something that we’re like iterating on quite a bit to make it even more capable for different users. I actually kind of liked this one. So let’s go with that. Next it walks you through font selections. And so here’s some things that we think makes sense. As well as just like options that let the user understand the variety of ways that their site can look.

Michelle Frechette 00:15:02  Sure.

Neel Schivdasani 00:15:03  And then, that’s kind of what we call the handoff. And now the user has a site with a logo that has been made for them. They can replace it.I’s got multiple pages. It’s got all these different sections, all the sections and buttons and CTAs link to each other, and they’re in the editor. And so we think that for, you know, the type of person that we’re trying to help get on the web, you know, someone who, let’s say in the case of a bakery, They’re really passionate about baking bread. They’re not necessarily passionate about building websites. They just need one. And, you know, for this, for that type of person, we’re hoping that this does like 80 to 90% of the work for them where they see this and they think, oh, this is something that, you know, I can actually see my business being associated with and feel proud of. But it’s not the end of the experience. Now that they’re in the editor, they have this assistant that they can, you know, give commands to, and in the you know, I mentioned that this is like a free trial, just to get people like, you know, work on their website quickly and easily.

Neel Schivdasani 00:16:13  In the trial, you can make 30 requests to the AI assistant. But once you know, if you’re once you’re a user, you can actually just continue to give any amount of AI commands, to update your site on an ongoing basis.

Michelle Frechette 00:16:26  Now, can you do things as simple as like change the phone number to this and that kind of thing is is it that?

Neel Schivdasani 00:16:34  It should be. There’s some scenarios in which we’re still improving its ability to understand the context of the entire site. But let’s let’s try it, change the phone number to, let’s say, 404, which is Atlanta. 1234567. And, you know, I’m, I’m going out on a limb here. There’s a chance this doesn’t work. We are still improving the AI, AI is a very fast, okay. To no contact form. Have you added one yet? Oh. So there isn’t a contact form? There’s a contact pattern again. This is something that, like, we’re constantly iterating on, I, I don’t mind at all, like, you know, trying.

Michelle Frechette 00:17:16  I mean, I don’t see that as a fail, quite honestly. It’s just I’m just curious, like, what’s, what’s the level of granularity, you know, kind of thing.

Neel Schivdasani 00:17:22  Yeah. It is, it is something that without, like, tipping our hat too much. I would say that within like a month and a half, we’re planning on releasing what would be considered like a step function improvement to the intelligence of this tool. 

Michelle Frechette: Oh, nice. 

Neel Schivdasani: Yeah, it’s it’s really exciting. We also just knew that this, as it is, is, like, so valuable to the type of people. Who are trying to get online.

Michelle Frechette 00:17:46  Oh Yeah. And you can just click in there and change your phone number anyway.

Neel Schivdasani 00:17:49  Absolutely. Yeah. And you can click on any image. You can drag images from your computer like you’re in Gutenberg at this point. So you can do so much. but I could also say, you know, like generate I can, you can fetch new stock images or generate images. I’m going to say generate a photorealistic image of a croissant. Do I know how to spell croissant?

Michelle Frechette 00:18:16  I believe so.

Neel Schivdasani 00:18:17  Yeah. And, you know. Yeah. And so it’s, again, like, these are people who don’t necessarily have professional photography. They don’t necessarily.

Michelle Frechette 00:18:27  Look at that. Now I’m hungry. 

Neel Schivdasani 00:18:31  Yeah. It’s, you know, it’s something that we see is helping people get started, helping them. We’ve had people who try to use this tool, but they don’t necessarily speak a certain language natively. And the tool will help them write content. So we’re really excited about that. But yeah, in addition to that, there’s a number of things you can ask it to do. You could say something like, you know, delete the about section, and you could be anywhere on the page and it’ll figure out what you’re talking about. Do that. I might say, let’s see, let’s, you know, add a menu to the home page. Maybe, maybe I want that to be front and center. Okay. That was actually the wrong section. Maybe, maybe that was a bad request. You know what I’m going to say? Thumbs down. We are looking at all the user feedback.

Michelle Frechette 00:19:29  We’re training it, right?

Neel Schivdasani 00:19:31  Yeah, we are training it. And, again, I’m not too stressed about that because right now, this is already extremely valuable. And like I said, we’re working on it effectively, like the next level of intelligence that is going to really, really empower users. but.

Speaker 4 00:19:46  I also.

Neel Schivdasani 00:19:47  Sorry.

Michelle Frechette 00:19:47  I’ve often it’s okay. I’ve often I used to build sites for a couple restaurants and they would talk about menu being the food, and I’d be talking about menu meaning the navigation. And sometimes there was a little bit of a crossover. So, you know, maybe there’s some, some slight variation in that as well.

Neel Schivdasani 00:20:06  Yeah. But, you know, there’s still like a wide variety of things that it can do, like add a gallery page. And then when users request new pages, it’ll generate a new page. It will show them some options for layouts. Similar should happen, when it’s adding the correct sort of section. But in a sense, we’re trying to make a WordPress as intuitive and accessible as possible to people.

Michelle Frechette 00:20:35  So what I when I first started using WordPress, I would have analysis paralysis as far as finding the right theme and, you know, figuring out what the like templating should look like and that kind of thing. This is kind of taking the the thought about that and made it super simple, like, here’s, here’s the design, here’s 5 or 6 different versions of that. Which one do you like? And you’re like, oh, that’s pretty. I’m going to use that as opposed to going through theme and theme and theme and theme. So I really do like that for sure.

Neel Schivdasani 00:21:07  For sure. Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s funny that, like, it can be difficult to imagine the mindset of someone who, as people who, like, work in web technology, it can be difficult to imagine, like, what is it like to come into software like this with no experience with the web, let alone specific software? And some people just really need someone to, like, help guide them most of the way. And, it does speak to a couple of additional things that we’ll be pursuing in the future. We do want to make this so that it’s, like, more proactive rather than just, like, accepting commands. It could have a better understanding of what the person should do and, help, like, help them understand. Like, here are the next steps for you to get online. But you mentioned themes. We’re also exploring how we make this work for other block themes. And so we think that, you know, this is great for people who just need something  to be spun up for them. But there are people who maybe have stronger opinions about, like, specific themes they want to use, and we want to enable them to be able to interact with AI to make their site building experience easier as well.

Michelle Frechette 00:22:17  That makes perfect sense. Yeah. I really do like how easy it is. I so I have a couple of quick questions. One, it’s it’s created a logo and we can keep that and use that if we’d like to.  So there’s no copyright infringement on on whatever it generates over the logo. And then also the images that are generated. Are they AI images? Are they stock photography? And if I were to use what’s created or generated here am I am I is it CCO like how am I protected from using anything that’s copyright in, you know, copyrighted imagery?

Neel Schivdasani 00:22:56  Yeah. It’s all stock photography. Like the when you request a specific image and you say generate it, it will generate the image. The rest of these are all stock photos, and you’re free to use them. There is no attribution required. It’s just free images that anyone is able to use. We do find that most people like. Again, this helps them visualize what they could be doing. But for the most part, people generally want to replace these. But we also acknowledge that not everyone has the luxury. Like a really good looking image can have a huge impact on the visitor. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to, like, capture and generate really good looking images.

Michelle Frechette 00:23:36  Right. A lot of people with cell phone images that may or may not look like they are professional photos, for sure.

Neel Schivdasani 00:23:43  Yeah. And, I do think that in the future, we plan on offering more assistance to help make cell phone photos look better. Which is another kind of, like, emerging field of this technology. It’s just not something that we do at this moment.

Michelle Frechette 00:23:57  Nice. Now, with Gutenberg, we could apply things like duotone and, like, change things to black and white. And can we do that here as well? Could you, like, hover over an image and say make this image black and white?

Neel Schivdasani 00:24:09  That’s not something that the assistant supports right now. The user is in Gutenberg. But we by default put them in kind of a distraction free mode, which kind of hides the more advanced capabilities. I think that, over time, we want to integrate this with the command palette so we can do a larger number of things. It’s just it’s not there yet.

Michelle Frechette 00:24:32  Gotcha. I also like how when you said create a gallery page and then you went to the gallery page, it was like, here’s photos of a gallery. Like it was an art gallery. So it’s very literal at some levels.

Neel Schivdasani  00:24:45  Yeah, it is.

Michelle Frechette 00:24:45 Which is not a bad thing.

Neel Schivdasani 00:24:47  No, it is. I think that, again, we’re improving the handling of stock images. But for the most part, we’ve found that people generally like. 

Michelle Frechette: They just want placeholders. Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. But I, but I do always, like, have a little chuckle when AI is like. That’s what you said. Michelle, that’s what you told me to do, I did it. You know, kind of thing.

Neel Schivdasani 00:25:09  That specific gallery behavior is something that, was gone, like it had happened for a long time, and we sorted it out and then it like, the tough thing about developing these types of capabilities is that, we’re working with technology like sources and partners that are constantly changing and evolving, and, we’re trying to provide a consistent and reliable experience to people. And, it can be it takes extra work to make sure that, like, some external change hasn’t impacted the way that we’re operating. But we’re really proud of where we are. And again, like, really excited about where we and this technology are going.

Michelle Frechette 00:25:45  Yeah, I’m I’m excited about it too. When I was again when I was first starting out, I had like logged into a website before and then thought I could do this and I could make websites for people, and I would sit there and, and just agonize over the smallest choices. Right? Like, how do I make the layouts on pages and what’s the right theme to use and what what’s the right color palette and having to create all of that from scratch. As somebody who is just starting out. Those kinds of decisions can literally just kind of stop you in your tracks and keep you from moving forward with what you want to design. This takes a lot of that sting and all of that indecision out, because I can just make choices from what it’s showing me, and then I can move forward from there. And I think that especially for somebody who’s not a builder and is it not trying like, like you said, if I’m a painter, I want to paint houses, I don’t want to make a website. Right? And so I just want something quick and easy. And this allows me to do that for sure.

Neel Schivdasani 00:26:47  Yeah, absolutely. It’s it’s kind of like I think with some pursuits in life, there’s like a hump you have to get over before things start to feel really rewarding. And we’re trying to get people over that hump as fast as possible and to like a website they would enjoy. I fully anticipate that there’s people who will start this way and will grow to, like, really appreciate web technology and WordPress and then start to like get a little more into the details, kind of get their hands dirty, you know, install plugins, do more bespoke customizations. But it’s, it’s very frustrating for that type of person if they have to spend weeks and still don’t get to something that they feel comfortable with, and we’re just trying to get them comfortable with something really fast.

Michelle Frechette 00:27:33  Yeah, and I like that. It’s offering placeholder text too. I’ll tell you my secret. And I don’t know why I picked this city, but like I’ve built, I’ve built sites for like an arborist. And I was like, I don’t know what to put on an arborist website, but I didn’t want to look at local arborists and, like, copy any of the text. Not that I ever copied straight text. I didn’t do that. But I always went to Tucson like I would be like arborist in Tucson. And then I’d be like, oh, I’d look at 3 or 4 pages, 3 or 4 sites in Tucson because it was so far removed from anything that would be here and be like, okay, oh, that’s a great idea. I should have that on a page and I should have that on a page. This basically took that research and just kind of did it for me, which is nice.

Neel Schivdasani 00:28:14  Yeah, it is interesting. And a lot of this is also derived from, like our expert opinion that we’re breaking into the patterns that we’re using and the theme that we’re using. But we still do find that there are a lot of people, particularly people who are kind of like new to the web or who have, like, are starting from zero. And, the way they think about websites and plan can be like a bit aspirational, where they, like, they have websites they really like. We’re not necessarily trying to help people, like, totally recreate websites, but again, we’re just trying to help them understand, like give them like, source material essentially.

Michelle Frechette 00:28:52  Yeah, I, I once helped I have helped people in the past who were using websites other than WordPress. That also started with W, if you know what I’m saying, And with three letters. Rhymes with fix. And like my cousin had a site for a while before she had kids and whatever. And, being a photographer. And so I have some experience in having used that platform. And it was clunky. It you know, you were bound to their themes, and I could see somebody like my cousin being able to just, like, pop in here and make the decisions herself, not have to do the go back and forth with me. And it’s, it would feel a lot more intuitive, than perhaps those other platforms where you’re so tied in to exactly what they’re telling you you have to do. So I think this is this is a nice, I don’t want to say competitor, really, but it’s a nice, alternative to, to some of those other platforms where you’re really at their mercy.

Neel Schivdasani 00:29:53  I mean, I want, I want us and our team to think of this as a competition because, like, you know, that’s how we make sure that we’re delivering experiences that that will like, you know, solve problems in unique and new ways for, for people trying to get on the web. And yeah, I don’t know, it’s a, it’s a very, very interesting time. So much is changing. But we’re just really excited  to help people get on the web.

Michelle Frechette 00:30:25  Let me clarify what I meant by that. If I were to choose between a Lamborghini and a Volkswagen Golf, there’s no competition. So that’s what I meant. Like, this is this. This is the Lamborghini, and the other one is a Volkswagen Golf. So, yeah, there’s it’s clear. Which option would be. The option is, I guess is what I was what I meant. Let me bring up a couple of, so, we have this this is interesting. And we were talking about, like, how it didn’t bring up what you wanted it to. It didn’t change the phone number that it would. It would do better over time. Menu could be confusing depending on the complex. And then, Mark Andrew says, appreciate the conversation and insights behind the decisions. All of his questions have been answered so far, which I love when we do that. That’s awesome. If you do have questions, though, people put them in the comments. and we will get, Neel to answer them for sure. Now this is really exciting. And I think it’s funny that we,we keep saying baked in and we picked a bakery to create today too. So that’s.

Neel Schivdasani 00:31:27  Yeah, that was unintentional. Yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:31:30 That was subliminal at its best for sure.

Neel Schivdasani 00:31:35  Yeah.

Michelle Frechette 00:31:36  So okay, so we’ve this is the, the first, iteration of this project. And as you tease a little bit, there are some things. What are some of the things that we might look forward to, understanding that technology is going to change and that there might be things next year we can put in this that we can’t even think of right now. But what are some of the things on the roadmap that we can look forward to over the next year?

Neel Schivdasani 00:31:59  Yeah, there are a couple of really big ones. So one, that I’ve alluded to already is that we are going to like see a step function increase in the quality of the intelligence soon. When you’re working with these tools, you know, this is this is broadly considered like an assistant or an agent. And, the architecture for how assistants or agents are built is changing constantly. And these days, you’re seeing state of the art assistants and agents in software like Cursor, which is a really popular tool for software development. Oryou know, Lovable things like that. We’re we’re incorporating something that we believe is kind of like on that level in terms of intelligence and like the type of architecture. And it will give the assistant so much more context about you, your site and what it can do, so that you can give it much more abstract commands, and it’ll understand when it has the right amount of information. When it doesn’t, it’ll be able to reason retroactively. Like did I accomplish that correctly? And if not, what should I do instead? So really impressive technological improvements that the team is working on that I’m so excited about. Another thing that should be happening soon is that users will be able to describe specific patterns of layouts and get those. So you might be able to say, yeah, you might be able to say, I want a gallery of four images, two by two on the right and a button on the left that takes people to my contact page. And I want it to talk about, you know, X, Y, and Z, and it’ll generate markup that will get people, you know, essentially, like, right now we’re delivering you something that’s in these, like, these patterns and these blocks that are, someone who’s not familiar with Gutenberg might not be able to kind of like, iterate towards, like, their perfect website. But they can describe what they want. They can say what they want. And so we’re trying to bridge that gap so that, again, people don’t have to learn new tools in order to achieve their vision and their goals. Yeah. Better intelligence. Pattern generation are both very exciting things. We’re also working on just generally supporting a wider variety of use cases. And one of those is commerce. So I know it’s, like, very difficult to set up a store. We want, you know, the type of people that we’re trying to help get on the open web. They don’t necessarily even understand the concept of plug-ins and extensions. And, you know, once you start talking about that, they they might just check out. We want. 

Michelle Frechette 00:34:37  Yeah.The eyes glaze over. Yeah.

Neel Schivdasani 00:34:40  Yeah. We want someone to be able to just say, like. Yeah, you know, like the assistant will ask, are you trying to set up a store? And if so, like, you know, where, where are you? Who do you sell to? What do you sell? And from that, it’ll understand. Like, okay, you know, they need these types of payment plugins, these types of shipping plugins, or they don’t ship, they, their site needs to be able to book appointments or it sells digital goods or physical goods. And we want to make that process as seamless as it has ever been, for people trying to get on WordPress.

Michelle Frechette 00:35:09  Nice. So, is there plans or does it already answer questions like, show documentation for how to how do I change this photo to black and white, or how do I apply a filter? Can it do those kinds of things now?

Neel Schivdasani 00:35:23  Yes, it actually can. So, if you ask it to do something that it doesn’t support, it will surface documentation and like give you a couple of options for how you can do that. We’re, we’re using the same system that we’ve built to help people when they come to support, and basically, you know, it’s right now, if it can’t do it,  we try to help you do it. And then, like, as we learn from what people are trying to do and what we’re not able to do for them, we want to start to fill out that longer tail of capabilities that will make people able to be successful on the web.

Michelle Frechette 00:35:55  I would love to see you gather some like self submitted sites that people use the AI builder for. To do a little showcase of sites that people have built themselves using the AI builder. I think that would be really cool and have like a blog post in the future and say, look at what people have been able to do who are not web builders. That would be so cool.

Neel Schivdasani 00:36:18  For sure. Yeah, we are, you know, we’re already looking at those sites. We’re trying to figure out what’s the best format to show off what people have been able to do. There’s also this angle of it, which is like the time and effort, you know, we send people surveys after they use the tool. And consistently people are saying, you know, in terms of ease of use, it’s like a 4 or 5 out of 5, and we’re seeing people who otherwise would not build sites, build them in like 30 minutes and that’s just really satisfying to see.

Michelle Frechette 00:36:47  That’s really cool. I mean, I’ve seen some of the pushback from people who are developers like this didn’t work for me, that kind of thing. But that’s not the target audience for this. The target audience for this are people who are not web builders, who want to get on the web and be able to either sell or publish what they’re doing for themselves. Right?

Neel Schivdasani 00:37:04  Absolutely. Yeah. And, you know, I don’t discount the feedback that we get from people who are more familiar with WordPress or the ecosystem. We want to grow to help people who are even pros, you know, just, like, make their lives easier as well. Right now we are aiming at people who just don’t even know what WordPress is. And they just need to get on the web. And in doing so, we’re hoping to grow the ecosystem. And, you know, we’ve we’ve had a lot of developers who also expressed excitement because in many ways, like, I can understand why some people might think like, oh, this is, you know, replacing developers. It really isn’t. This is just for people who need their first website and they can’t afford a developer. They can’t afford an agency. We’re trying to get people into the ecosystem and help them grow to be more successful businesses so that they can then, you know, build more advanced websites, take advantage of more that the ecosystem and the developer community have to offer that, sort of thing.

Michelle Frechette 00:37:58  Yeah, absolutely. Some of my past almost customers were people who couldn’t afford me to build their sites. And this is, you know, I wasn’t charging very much, back then to build a site, anyway. Who would just register domain and pointed towards their Facebook page, for example. And so this is better than that for sure. Especially for people who can’t afford to hire a developer or designer to do their site, they can get something up quickly and make them feel pretty accomplished actually, when they do. I mean, if I was starting out and I built a site this way, I’d be like, mom, look at this. Look what I did.

Neel Schivdasani 00:38:34  Yeah. It’s it’s it’s funny, you mentioned, like, Facebook and Instagram and in a sense, like that is kind of the competition. It’s just so easy for people to kind of stand something up in these walled gardens where they don’t have a lot of control. They’re just kind of, you know, beholden to the algorithm. Whereas, you know, we’re trying to give them a place that they can really make their own, with their own colors, styles, layouts, pages, images, and make that as easy as possible. Like, I think this within, you know, 2 to 3 minutes, builds something that I think people would be more proud of than, like, an Instagram profile they would build in 2 to 3 minutes.

Michelle Frechette 00:39:17  Yes, exactly. especially too, because you control what people see when they first get there. It’s not a timeline where things disappear further down the page, and you have to keep bumping things up, and it’s more static than that. And, much better display of what it is that you might want to be selling or sharing. The call to action is much, much clearer.

Neel Schivdasani 00:39:36  Yeah. And obviously there’s room for both of these places in a small businesses.

Michelle Frechette 00:39:40  Like absolutely.

Neel Schivdasani 00:39:40  With their online presents. You can even ask the assistant like, hey, you know, update my Instagram link to this and it’ll. It’ll like fix your social links and stuff like that. But people absolutely should have a website and we’re just trying to make that as easy as possible.

Michelle Frechette 00:39:54  Your social media should complement your website, not replace it.

Neel Schivdasani  00:39:57  Exactly.

Michelle Frechette 00:39:59  Yeah. Marketing girl here. Language. I got the language for you. Hit me up any time.

Neel Schivdasani  00:40:05  Yeah. You said it better than I did.

Michelle Frechette 00:40:08  Is there anything else? Excuse me. I have a frog in my throat all of a sudden. Is there anything else you’d like to share with us before we call it a day,oday?

Neel Schivdasani 00:40:15  I don’t think so. Like I said, head over to WordPress.com/AI or AI-webite-builder. That’s currently the the real main entry point to try this out, and we’d love for people to try it out, give us feedback, let us know. You know what cool sites they’ve made. We are working to make this more available within WordPress.com as well. We just found that, right now where we’re trying to give people a very zippy and instant experience where they don’t even have to understand WordPress.com. But as, we as we kind of evolve it, we’ll be landing there as well. And yeah, we’d love for people to try it and let us know what they think. You’re muted.

Michelle Frechette 00:41:00  That’s because I was coughing. Yes thank you. I said I said I’ll give it a spin and I will give you feedback for sure and let you know what I, what I discover as I start to go through it.

Neel Schivdasani 00:41:09  Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you very much, Michelle. I really appreciate it. 

Michelle Frechette 00:41:12  My pleasure. Thank you so much. And I was saying to you before we got online today that I just asked you yesterday when I had a, you know, an opening today all of a sudden. And so I appreciate you being able to jump in at the last minute and share with us a really cool project that you’ve been working on. So I truly appreciate it. Thank you for your time today, Neel.

Neel Schivdasani 00:41:28  Yeah, thank you again. Talk to you soon.

Michelle Frechette 00:41:30  My pleasure. Yeah. And everybody else. We will not be here next week. I will be in transit to Arizona for Presscon but we’ll be back in two weeks. So we’ll see you then.