I had a client last month—a high-volume WooCommerce shop—who was convinced they needed a custom “agentic AI” layer. They wanted an AI that could actually process refunds, check inventory, and even talk to their fulfillment API. My first instinct? I started sketching out a complex Python middleware to bridge OpenAI and their WordPress database. It seemed like the only way to handle the logic safely. Total nightmare in the making, honestly.
And that was it. I was halfway through the architectural draft when the State of the Word 2025 keynote happened. I realized I was about to build a massive, brittle custom bridge for a problem that the WordPress AI Roadmap is currently standardizing into core. I almost committed my client to thousands of dollars in technical debt because I didn’t see where the ship was heading. Trust me on this, you don’t want to over-engineer a solution that becomes obsolete in six months.
Standardizing the Chaos: The WordPress AI Roadmap
The big takeaway from the San Francisco keynote wasn’t just that WordPress 6.9 launched live on stage (though that was a cool flex). It was the introduction of the foundational “building blocks” for AI. For years, every plugin developer has been rolling their own AI implementation. Some use OpenAI directly, some use LangChain, some just hope for the best. It’s a mess.
Matt Mullenweg and the team revealed that WordPress is moving toward an “agentic web.” They’ve shipped the Abilities API and the WP AI Client. This is a game-changer because it means we can finally write code that describes what a plugin *can* do in a machine-readable format. Instead of me writing a custom prompt for every specific model, the Abilities API tells any AI agent: “Hey, I can manage inventory, here’s the endpoint.”
Here’s the kicker: the new WP AI Client is an abstraction layer. You write your prompts once, and it doesn’t matter if the site owner wants to use Anthropic, Gemini, or a local Llama instance. As a developer, I stopped my custom Python build immediately. Why build a proprietary bridge when I can just register an ‘Ability’ in WordPress and let the core handle the heavy lifting? You can read more about these specific technical shifts over at the [https://wordpress.com/blog/2025/12/04/state-of-the-word-2025-recap/] recap.
How to Register an Ability (The Right Way)
If you’re building custom functionality, you need to start thinking about making your code “intelligible” to AI agents. Here is a simplified look at how we’re starting to prefix and register these capabilities using the conceptual structure of the new APIs.
/**
* Conceptual registration of a custom ability for an AI agent.
* Prefixing with bbioon to ensure clean namespace.
*/
function bbioon_register_inventory_ability() {
if ( ! function_exists( 'register_block_ability' ) ) {
return;
}
register_block_ability( 'bbioon/inventory-manager', array(
'description' => 'Checks stock levels and updates inventory counts.',
'parameters' => array(
'sku' => array( 'type' => 'string', 'required' => true ),
'quantity' => array( 'type' => 'integer' ),
),
'callback' => 'bbioon_handle_inventory_request',
) );
}
add_action( 'init', 'bbioon_register_inventory_ability' );
function bbioon_handle_inventory_request( $params ) {
// Logic to talk to your fulfillment API safely
return array( 'status' => 'success', 'message' => 'Inventory synced.' );
}Why This Matters for Your Business
We’re moving away from WordPress being just a “content management system” and toward it being an “operating system for the web.” With 56% of WordPress sites now in non-English languages and adoption growing among the top 1,000 sites, the infrastructure has to be rock solid. The addition of a 24-hour safety window for auto-updates and the expansion of the WordPress Playground are clear signs that the ecosystem is maturing.
If you’re a site owner, the lesson is simple: don’t let a developer build you a “custom AI solution” that isn’t compatible with the WordPress AI Roadmap. You’ll end up stuck with a system that can’t talk to other plugins or future core updates. Standard APIs are boring, but they are what keep your business running when the next big update drops.
Look, this stuff gets complicated fast. If you’re tired of debugging someone else’s mess and just want your site to work with the future of the web, drop my team a line. We’ve probably seen it before.
Are you planning to integrate AI into your workflow this year, or are you waiting for 7.0 to bake it into core?
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