A client once sent me a 50-page persona PDF that said nothing about why people abandon checkout. Functional personas built with AI from support tickets and order notes tell you what a customer is trying to finish and where they stop.
A WooCommerce client’s GPT search assistant was inventing products and discount codes. Prompt engineering did not fix it. Confidence thresholds, source links, and honesty about the limits did.
A client spent six months AI-powering their onboarding flow and ended up with hallucinated shipping dates. The prompt was never the problem, the context was. Here is what UX has to own before the model ships.
An 85% churn score with no reason attached is a support ticket waiting to happen. What worked instead: a plain-language because statement, the charts behind a link, and code that maps feature names to words.
A client’s organic traffic fell off a cliff and nothing on their site was broken. Google had started answering the queries itself. Here is what I checked, and where the real work sits in a WordPress build.
WordPress 6.9 beta ships the server-side half of the Abilities API. You can register and retrieve abilities in PHP, but the client-side JavaScript moved to the Gutenberg repo, so there is no native AI interface in the editor yet.
Nobody checks whether $wpdb exists before running a query. The AI team wants models treated the same way in WordPress, with hosts providing the model and developers registering Abilities instead of wiring up API keys.
Custom REST endpoints leave AI agents guessing. The MCP Adapter v0.3.0 turns registered WordPress abilities into tools an agent can discover, and logs the calls.
A client built a business site in twenty minutes with an AI prototyping tool. It looked great and could not talk to his inventory system or be crawled properly. Here is where AI website building stops and production work starts.
I almost sold a client a custom Python bridge between OpenAI and WordPress, then State of the Word 2025 made it pointless. Notes on what the Abilities API and the WP AI Client actually change for developers and site owners.