At WordCamp Asia 2025 in Manila, I spoke with an agency owner about a problem many people in the WordPress world recognise. Competing on price had become exhausting. New website projects were being quoted so low that it was hard to see how an agency could do thoughtful work, pay its team properly, and still make a worthwhile margin.
The answer is not to make every website disposable. It is to spend less time on the work that adds the least value.
Every project begins with a stretch of necessary but repetitive effort: deciding what belongs on the first page, creating a starting structure, drafting placeholder content, and turning an idea into something a client can react to. That work matters, but it is rarely where an agency creates its greatest value. The important work comes after: understanding the business, finding the right message, making informed design decisions, and building something that works for the people who will use it.
That is where AI has a real role in WordPress. But speed alone is not enough.
A faster start is only the beginning
It is easy to be impressed by how quickly AI can produce a page. Give it a short description and, within moments, there is a homepage, a few sections, some copy, and an image or two. For someone staring at a blank screen, that is useful. It gives a business owner or agency team something concrete to discuss.
The risk is treating that first output as the finished product. A website is not a collection of sections that happens to look complete. It has to reflect a real business, make sense to its customers, work across devices, meet accessibility expectations, and remain manageable long after launch.
The next generation of WordPress AI should help people move quickly without taking those things away. It should make the first draft easier, then leave the result in a form people can understand, edit, and improve.
I think that requires four principles.
Start with a conversation
Most people do not begin a website project by thinking about column widths, theme settings, or which block belongs above the fold. They begin with an outcome: a local service business needs more enquiries, a consultant needs a clearer offer, or a shop needs a better way to explain what it sells.
Conversation is a better starting point than a blank canvas because it lets people describe that outcome in their own words. A useful system should ask enough to turn a rough idea into a sensible first direction. It should help a user get from “I need a website for my new practice” to a structure they can evaluate, rather than asking them to make dozens of technical choices before anything exists.
That does not mean the conversation should replace expertise. It should remove the friction between an idea and a first draft, so expertise can be applied where it has the most effect.
Build with WordPress, not around it
For WordPress users, the output matters as much as the experience that created it. A fast first draft is not much use if it lives inside a separate system that an agency cannot confidently hand over, extend, or maintain.
The better direction is AI that produces native WordPress blocks. That gives agencies and site owners a familiar foundation. They can open the editor, see how the page is composed, refine the copy, replace a section, add the functionality they need, and keep working with the tools and people they already trust.
It also matters for the long term. Clients change their offers. Teams change. A site needs new pages, new campaigns, new integrations, and sometimes a completely new direction. The result should be a WordPress site, not a polished dead end.
Keep the work where the customer already is
WordPress has always been strongest when it gives people ownership and choice. They can choose their hosting provider, their agency, their plugins, and their support model. AI should strengthen that flexibility, not send users away from it.
That means the experience should fit naturally into the hosting environment a customer already uses. A business owner should be able to go from domain and hosting to a working site without being pushed into an unfamiliar destination. An agency should be able to support the customer in the same environment where it manages the rest of the site.
This is not just a technical detail. Keeping site creation, publishing, and ongoing management connected makes the whole journey clearer for customers. It also gives hosting providers and agencies a better opportunity to support people at the moment they need help most: when an idea is still becoming a website.
Leave room for judgment
AI can propose a structure. It cannot conduct a useful discovery session, recognise the nuance in a founder’s story, or decide what a brand should stand for. It can draft copy, but it cannot verify every claim or know the context that makes a message credible. It can create an attractive starting point, but it cannot take responsibility for accessibility, legal requirements, or the experience a real customer will have.
That is not a weakness to be fixed. It is where agencies earn their place.
The most valuable practitioners will use AI to get past the routine early work, then apply their time to the decisions that change an outcome: positioning, visual identity, audience understanding, conversion paths, custom functionality, factual accuracy, and final quality. The best result is not an AI-generated site that looks finished in a screenshot. It is a useful WordPress site that has been shaped by someone who understands the business behind it.
Related appearance: I expanded on these ideas in my CloudFest 2026 closing keynote, WordPress in the Age of AI.
The opportunity for agencies
Agencies do not need to choose between quality and efficiency. The opportunity is to make the first iteration faster while protecting the parts of the process that clients actually need their judgment for.
Used well, AI can help a team start with a stronger brief, build an early version sooner, and bring a client into the conversation before too much time has been spent on the wrong direction. That shortens the distance between an idea and useful feedback. It does not remove the need for good work. It creates more room for it.
That is the direction I want to see for WordPress: conversational enough to make getting started feel simple, native enough to remain in the ecosystem people know, and practical enough to leave agencies and site owners in control. More speed is valuable. More speed with ownership, flexibility, and human judgment is what makes it worth building for.
