I remember working on a massive product catalog for a client about three years ago. We were dealing with roughly 50,000 SKUs, and the search functionality was a total nightmare. The client was frustrated because customers couldn’t find “crimson sweaters” if the product was tagged as “red.” I did what any senior dev would do at the time: I went deep into the SQL weeds. I wrote complex join queries and built a massive synonym table. It was a performance killer. My first thought was to just cache the results in a transient, and yeah, that worked for a bit. Until the cache cleared and the first visitor triggered a five-second hang. Not good.
I eventually realized I was trying to force a relational database to do something it wasn’t built for. I was missing the “intent” behind the data. That’s why the recent discussion on Make WordPress Core about AI as a WordPress fundamental resonates so much with me. We’re moving toward a world where integrating AI into WordPress isn’t just a fancy plugin feature—it’s going to be as foundational as the database itself.
Why AI is Becoming the New Database Standard
Think about it. We take the database for granted. You don’t check if $wpdb exists before you query a post. You just assume the data persistence layer is there. The proposal from the AI team is to treat AI models the same way. If a host provides the model, developers can stop worrying about API keys and just start building “Abilities.” This is a huge shift. Instead of writing a custom wrapper for every LLM, we’ll use a standardized API. This is very similar to how AI for WordPress hosts is becoming the new standard.
When I first started playing with the “Abilities API,” I made the mistake of thinking it was just another way to call a chatbot. Wrong. It’s about making your site’s functions discoverable. Here’s a quick example of how you might register a custom ability for a store. This makes a specific internal function available to whatever AI model is running on the site.
/**
* Registering a custom ability for product stock checks.
* Prefixing with 'bbioon' as per our internal standard.
*/
function bbioon_register_stock_check_ability() {
if ( ! function_exists( 'wp_register_ai_ability' ) ) {
return;
}
wp_register_ai_ability(
'bbioon/check-stock',
array(
'description' => 'Checks the current stock levels for a specific product SKU.',
'parameters' => array(
'sku' => array(
'type' => 'string',
'description' => 'The unique product SKU.',
'required' => true,
),
),
'callback' => 'bbioon_handle_stock_query',
)
);
}
add_action( 'init', 'bbioon_register_stock_check_ability' );
function bbioon_handle_stock_query( $args ) {
$product_id = wc_get_product_id_by_sku( $args['sku'] );
if ( ! $product_id ) {
return 'Product not found.';
}
$product = wc_get_product( $product_id );
return 'The stock level for ' . $product->get_name() . ' is ' . $product->get_stock_quantity();
}Standardization Over Fragmentation
The beauty here is that once this is in core, we stop building silos. Every developer has been there—trying to bridge three different AI plugins that all want to do the same thing differently. Total mess. By using standardized building blocks, we ensure that a plugin from one dev can “talk” to the theme of another via the AI layer. I’ve talked about this before when discussing why standardized AI features matter for the ecosystem. It prevents the “wild west” of conflicting endpoints.
Trust me on this, this isn’t just hype. When the Workflows API lands, your WordPress site won’t just store data; it will understand it. It will know that when a user asks for “warm clothes,” it should pull the “crimson sweater” without me having to write a single line of SQL synonym logic. Finally.
The Reality Check
The key takeaway is that we need to start thinking in “Abilities.” Stop thinking about AI as a chat box in the corner of the screen. Think of it as a way to expose your plugin’s functionality to a smarter processing layer. If you’re building a custom WooCommerce setup or a complex directory, start looking at how your data can be interpreted, not just queried. The “mental experiment” of WordPress without a database is a great way to realize how much we depend on it. In five years, we’ll be saying the same about AI.
Look, this stuff gets complicated fast. If you’re tired of debugging someone else’s mess and just want your site to work with these new standards, drop my team a line. We’ve probably seen it before.
Are you ready to stop fighting with complex queries and start using the AI layer? Or are you waiting for core to make the first move?
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