An AI engineer wires up models that already exist. A machine learning engineer builds the model. Which one you hire decides whether you ship in two weeks or spend six months in a sandbox, and here is how I tell the two jobs apart.
I once spent three weeks bolting a permissions layer onto custom REST endpoints so an AI agent could not wreck a client’s product catalog. The Abilities API landing in WordPress 6.9 is the standard that job was missing.
A real question from WordPress Core AI work: should a shared AI adapter ship as a canonical plugin or a Composer library, and why that architecture choice shapes maintenance later.
A WordPress agency published solid dev tutorials and still landed no clients. The fix was not more SEO, it was writing content around what clients actually struggle with.
A client asked whether his store needs new AI features. WooCommerce’s agentic commerce lets AI assistants browse and buy through an API, so the prep work is clean product data and stable APIs.