The WordPress project has a new AI team — and the news is already drawing positive reactions and excitement across the community.

WordPress Executive Director Mary Hubbard announced the formation of the team on Wednesday, saying the team will steer AI “responsibly and in the open”, lean on canonical plugins for rapid iteration, and collaborate with other Make teams.

“These folks bring a deep blend of technical skill, product vision, and open-source wisdom, and they’re already coordinating across Core, Design, Accessibility, and beyond to make sure AI in WordPress enhances everyone’s experience, not just the loudest voices in the room,” Hubbard posted on LinkedIn.

The initial four-person team brings together some well-known and highly-respected developers in the community: James LePage, Automattic’s Director of Engineering for AI, Google-sponsored core committers Felix Arntz and Pascal Birchler, and Jeffrey B. Paul, 10up’s Director of Open Source.

Between them, LePage, Arntz, Birchler and Paul have delivered major performance wins for WordPress, developer tooling, and high-profile AI plugins. Now, they’re gearing up to explore what AI could look like in WordPress, with plans to publish a public roadmap of initiatives, develop canonical plugins, and define developer-friendly standards that make it easier to build with AI.

The announcement has drawn praise across the community. Core committer Tammie Lister acknowledged that the announcement coincided with WordPress’s 22nd birthday, writing, “We’ve come a long way, and now we need to start thinking about how to approach the future. I am delighted to see this team formed for the simple reason we need this team to help us chart what lies ahead.”

How the team came together

LePage said he started lobbying for a new AI Make team soon after Automattic acquired his startup, WPAI, in December 2024. He reached out to Arntz, Birchler and Paul to gauge their interest in forming a team before approaching WordPress leadership.

“Things aligned and we got the green light to form the team, and we moved pretty quickly after that,” said LePage, who will serve as one of the team’s first reps alongside Arntz.

LePage pointed to the Core Performance Team as a model for how he envisions the AI team operating, describing it as a “north star.”

“They’ve focused on specific issues in WordPress, or specific improvements, and have gone from ideation to building and releasing the Performance Lab plugin, and then actually getting things into core,” said LePage.

“From my perspective, the shining light of what a good team is is the Performance Team. They have incredible communication cadence. They’ve succeeded in building and then merging and interacting with the community, and understanding what makes sense, and where the industry’s going. I want to mirror that.”

To kick things off publicly, Automattic-sponsored contributor Anne McCarthy has scheduled a Hallway Hangout for June 3 where the team will introduce itself, outline early goals and invite community discussion.

Who’s who on the new AI team

• James LePage (Automattic) brings applied-AI credentials. He helped launch WordPress.com’s AI-powered website builder that turns natural-language prompts into block-based sites, and his former company WPAI produced tools such as CodeWP, AgentWP and WP.Chat.
• Felix Arntz (Google), a core committer since 2016 and co-founder of the Core Performance Team, created the AI Services plugin to help developers integrate AI capabilities more easily into their plugins.
• Pascal Birchler (Google) is a long-time core committer, a member of the WordPress Core Performance and Security teams, and co-maintains WP-CLI. At this year’s CloudFest Hackathon he led the WP-CLI as an MCP Host project, bringing AI-powered development workflows to WP-CLI using the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
• Jeffrey B. Paul (10up) brings years of WordPress release team experience. His team at 10up built ClassifAI, an open source plugin that connects to AI models, helping large-scale media companies to publish content faster.

A plugin-first strategy

Rather than pushing AI features directly into WordPress core, the team plans to start with canonical plugins and shared developer tools — an approach that mirrors the Core Performance Team’s model.

LePage said the goal is to create infrastructure that makes it easier for others to build with AI in WordPress, without having to solve the same problems repeatedly. “We want to build the systems so people can look at this team and say, here’s what they’re doing, here’s how I can get involved,” he said.

Their first priority is to publish a public roadmap outlining early initiatives and longer-term ambitions. The team hopes this will offer clarity for contributors and companies working on AI, while giving the wider community visibility into what’s coming.

Arntz emphasized the importance of keeping the team focused. “There are so many different areas of AI. We need to be careful not to focus on everything, which means focusing on nothing.”

When asked how the team will define success, LePage said it won’t be about getting flashy AI features into core. “It’s about empowering other teams and developers to build things more easily, and doing that in a way that’s open and collaborative,” he said.

Next week’s Hallway Hangout will be the first opportunity for contributors to speak with the AI team directly. After that, regular meetings and updates will happen in the #core-ai channel in WordPress Slack, where there’s already discussion underway.

Image credit: Chris Clarke, WordCamp Europe 2024.