WordPress Launches Dedicated AI Team to Catch Up in the AI Race
After years of lagging behind, WordPress forms an AI Team to bring advanced AI integration into its ecosystem.
2 min readHighlights
WordPress announces a core AI Team to explore and develop AI-powered functionality.
Google engineers Felix Arntz and Pascal Birchler will lead the open collaboration efforts.
The move aligns WordPress with competitors like Wix, Shopify, and Drupal in AI advancement.
Source: Source: Visual representation created by Martech Scholars using Canva Pro, illustrating WordPress’s leap into AI integration.
WordPress is officially stepping into the world of artificial intelligence with the formation of a dedicated AI Team—an important shift for the world’s most widely used CMS after years of hesitancy around AI integration.
Announced on the official WordPress.org blog, the new team will operate similarly to the established Performance Team, tasked with experimenting, building, and testing AI-focused functionalities via canonical plugins. These plugins will act as testbeds, allowing users to explore features before they’re considered for full integration into the WordPress core.
The AI Team will aim to create a centralized, strategic space for AI experimentation, ensuring that innovations move rapidly from concept to deployment. It’s designed not just for internal development but also as an open forum for the wider WordPress community to collaborate on next-gen AI tools.
Two Google employees, Felix Arntz and Pascal Birchler, will serve pivotal roles. Arntz, a Senior Software Engineer and former lead of the WordPress Performance Team, brings extensive experience. Birchler, a Developer Relations Engineer and core contributor, recently advanced AI integration through the Model Context Protocol (MCP) using WP-CLI.
The announcement emphasized the milestone nature of this decision:
“This is an exciting and important step in WordPress’s evolution. I look forward to seeing what we’ll create together and in the open.”
This move also highlights how far WordPress has to go in catching up with the competition. Drupal, now designed with built-in AI capabilities for marketers, and Shopify and Wix, both of which already embed AI into user workflows, have been leading the charge.
While WordPress is arriving late to the AI game, the formation of this team signals a serious commitment to the future—one where intelligent, data-driven experiences could become a native part of the WordPress experience.
