AI For WordPress Learning Management System Websites With James LePage

In this LMScast episode, James LePage from Automatic and Chris Badgett explore how AI is changing WordPress, online education, and coaching.

From creating websites for neighbors to managing a prosperous organization that specialized in WooCommerce and online learning systems, he began working with WordPress as a youngster.

In this episode, James talks about how he went from working as a freelance WordPress developer as a teenager to managing an agency. Exploring AI, and ultimately selling his firm, WPAI, to Automattic. He emphasizes how AI is revolutionizing automation, website building, and course production, simplifying difficult processes for non-developers.

The topic of formal education’s applicability in the IT industry is also covered in the conversation, with James highlighting the importance of experiential learning and incubator settings.

Here’s Where To Go Next…

Get the Course Creator Starter Kit to help you (or your client) create, launch, and scale a high-value online learning website.

Also visit the creators of the LMScast podcast over at LifterLMS, the world’s leading most customizable learning management system software for WordPress. Create courses, coaching programs, online schools, and more with LifterLMS.

Browse more recent episodes of the LMScast podcast here or explore the entire back catalog since 2014.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMSCast. We’re joined by a special guest. His name is James LePage. You can find him on Twitter or X at James W. LePage. James is a leader in the AI space, particularly in WordPress. And we’re going to dive deep on artificial intelligence, WordPress, and specifically around courses and coaching and teaching and things like that.

But first, welcome to the show, James. Thank you very much for having me. I’m excited to be here. Awesome, man. I can’t wait for this conversation. We met briefly at an event, but it’s going to be really cool to dive deep and get into what you’ve been up to. Tell us about just your journey with WordPress and artificial intelligence, just to lay the groundwork for, where you are, what you’re doing and your area of focus.

James LePage: Yeah, I have been involved in WordPress basically since I’ve grown up. So I’ve grown up in this industry and I got started when I was a pretty young teen and working in a kitchen and realized I didn’t like working in a kitchen. There was a chef who was mean to me, threw knives at me. I was like, I don’t like this.

I need to go do something else. And that’s something else ended up being tinkering with WordPress and eventually realizing, hey. This is a really easy thing to break into and get started in. So started building WordPress sites for myself and the neighbors and. Started off on page builders, but grew into learning the basics of HTML and then CSS and then JavaScript and PHP.

And I think that type of story is something that I’ve seen a lot of stories similar in the WordPress industry. So I started and grew into a developer. Was freelancing for a little bit, ended up making an agency. That agency I ran for a few years. It went from just me as a credit credibility device to getting a first developer and then a designer and growing into eight people doing some pretty big DTC projects, specifically.

On WooCommerce, but also some course websites, which I had mentioned to you. So we have some of that course experience in the background of my mind ran the agency for a bit and ended up selling the portfolio in college. In college, I also was studying AI when a lot of AI research was coming out around transformers and gen AI and things like that.

And then left WordPress for a bit, did a venture backed startup. I was the technical co founder. It was called chair club based in New York city. And. That was a big idea that didn’t work out. So after it didn’t work out, trying to figure out what I wanted to do. And it was like do I go back to the agency world?

Do I go try to break into Fang and the more traditional software development, or do I do what I love doing and found something again? And I ended up taking option three and option three was really clear to me because. AI was becoming really powerful at that point, GPT two, and then GPT three were coming out and it was really clear to me that, Hey, I had a lot of problems in my agency building things.

And I think AI could be really beneficial on the code side to start. So launched the first product in what grew into WPAI, which was another venture backed startup. Specifically, as the super creative name suggests for WordPress and AI and launched the first product called CodeWP, which was a very creative name again, a code generator for WordPress ran that for a bit and then also started down the path of creating an AI agent for WordPress that did things for you before it was cool and Yeah, built that and then very recently in December ended up getting acquired by Automatic and still breaking into the role at Automatic.

But we’re thinking about big picture AI specifically in the context of WordPress and the open web and publishing and what that looks like in the short, mid and long term future. So that’s a long introduction, but that is my entire background in WordPress.

Chris Badgett: That’s a very well stated introduction is quite the journey you’ve been on.

I have to ask just because education is important to those who watch this. It’s interesting. You studied AI in college. What did you get out of that? And would you recommend that to somebody entering college years these years in 2025? How important is it?

James LePage: It’s an interesting question. So my approach to college was very anti college and it was difficult for me to actually go to college because I was running a very successful agency in high school that was, it was doing very well.

And we had really big projects and I was apprehensive of doing that and school at the same time, ended up going to school. I went to Syracuse university and they had a really great entrepreneurship track. So I actually, Ended up taking the major in entrepreneurship. And as a part of that major, it was college and you still did your classes, but it was entrepreneurship.

So you had your opportunity to work on your business and you were essentially mandated to study topics. And I was in school at the time that the AI was having a lot of research. Published about it transformers and then also the application of transformers around gpt2 and that grew into gpt3 and chat gpt in the systems that we see today that was happening.

So for me, it was logical. All right, I’m forced to study like I have to learn. Oh, no. So I ended up studying AI and that provided an incredible base and foundation. For me to be able to understand how these systems actually work. And I think that’s one of my superpowers where I can look at these systems and be like, Oh, this is how it works.

So it makes the actual thought of how you implement it. For example, with code WP, the idea of, all right, I can really easily. use one of these models fine tune an understanding of WooCommerce code into it, provide relevant code samples and get a really crazy system that takes my request and spits out a WooCommerce code snippet, which was the actual original idea behind CodeWP.

So the education was really important. And I don’t know, I don’t know the place of college in software. I think that I actually do know a lot of software developers who didn’t go to school and think differently. And they’re really effective because of that. I know many who have comp sci degrees and are really effective because of that as well.

So it’s an interesting question. My education is legitimate, but it’s a bit different than the path that a lot of other people took.

Chris Badgett: That’s really cool to combine your entrepreneurship, the business you’re actually building and working in with school at the same time. And that’s it just creates some synergy there or whatever.

That’s a pretty cool way to think about it. Like you’re not just, getting ideas and studying. You’re like working on your business and learning technology.

James LePage: It was almost more of an ideas incubator. And the most impactful part of Syracuse specifically was they had an incredible incubator and they had.

A lot of people, there were a lot of people in AI who actually run pretty successful AI startups at this point. There are a lot of people out of AI and everybody just talking and sharing ideas paired with the mandate to actually learn paired with the fact that a lot of my buddies in this incubator, we’re also running either services, businesses, or trying to raise for a startup, or in some cases, actually running a startup and that ecosystem and environment was really helpful.

So I actually would hope that. Education goes that way in the future, especially as we see more impact with AI. And there’s a whole nother podcast to do on AI and education, but I think that moving towards that collaborative environment is really helpful. And I actually see a lot of parallels with the course industry.

So I’m sure we can touch back on that in, in the future.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Take us into the future a little bit. The whole world is a gush with AI, my old parents are using chat GPT but like particularly around WordPress and publishing and building websites. What do you see the future?

That’s how the masses aren’t really seeing yet as a deep practitioner of AI, like the opportunity, like what is it?

James LePage: I think there’s a really big. And there are a million different answers. So I’ll try my best to do some of the answers. The first answer is us as people who build WordPress and the creators and WordPress and those in agency, those trying to do their own site, those freelancing and building for others.

I think that. There are a massive amount of AI tools coming out that are here to stay, and those who adopt these AI tools become super, super powered in terms of being able to code, being able to ideate on content, being able to ideate on images and designs and things like that. So I think the immediate opportunity for everybody is to really embrace these tools and look at how you can use them in your day to day lives and be a more effective creator.

And those who adopt that, I think, are really well positioned for whatever the future of AI holds. You’ll notice that I didn’t say write an entire WordPress site, or click one button and create a WordPress site, or paint a painting by clicking one button and creating an image. And I really think that In the grand scheme of things, human creativity is really important, and it’s going to become more and more important in the future, as we’ve already seen, I think, with these AI generated articles, and they all sound the same, and it’s all it’s content, but how beneficial really is it to us?

I’m already seeing people who are not liking this and like against the AI side of things. So I think that aspect of how do I augment myself? How do I improve my workflows, not replace them with AI becomes important right now, but also how am I creating and maintaining that human element of what I do in that near future.

So that’s the near future question. I think you can become really powerful. Especially in WordPress. So that’s why in WPAI, we built CodeWP and we built AgentWP. It was like, how do we provide these tools to the people who build to just be quicker? And I hated writing code snippets that were 80 percent the same for WooCommerce.

So we built the tool to fix that. I think that was like the real mentality behind those products. That’s also what we’re thinking about at Automatic. And I think the whole industry is thinking about this. Like, how do we build tools to be more effective on the web? So that’s the short answer. I can also do a long answer, but I’ll break if there are any questions in between.

Chris Badgett: I just, I’d say, I think GitHub Copilot has a really good name because the Copilot, the AI is there to sit beside you, not replace you or take your job. If you get really good at leveraging your Copilot. You’re going to be like 10 times more productive and save time and have more room for the creativity.

And a quick clarifying question for the technical folks out there. How does chat GPT as an example? Differ or get hub copilot differ from

James LePage: code WP started as this single turn prompt tool that you could say I want this functionality for my site and it would do its best to generate a single code snippet that you would install into functions PHP or like a plug in like code snippets to extend this little functionality.

So a good example is that in WooCommerce You have a WooCommerce subscriptions plugin and you want to add this like additional subscription term. I think it comes with 12 or 24 months and I want 36 months. And if I wanted to code that, I could go on stack overflow. I could go on the WooCommerce docs.

I can look through like the actual setup for this, but it’s simple enough and we can put it into this AI system and have this system output a really good. Piece of code for that specific functionality. And that was the origin of code WP. And it went through a few iterations. We ended up selling as we were working on the third iteration, but it really started growing more and more into an IDE.

Where you would be conversationally working with this development environment and creating multiple files. It wasn’t just a PHP code snippet, now it could create a PHP primary file for a plugin and then generate the JavaScript and the CSS and enqueue those and create like a little functionality plugin.

And that’s what it was really good at. It wasn’t anything to go and create the next lifter LMS with one button or gravity forms or whatever it was. And I don’t think we’ll ever have systems that really do that, but it was one of those things where it’s okay, I need this functionality for a client and I know what I need to do.

I just don’t know how to do it. Exactly. So I’m going to have this tool do it for me. And we saw a lot of people love it. It was awesome to ride that wave of growth and appreciation as everything else was happening. So that product was launched a week before chat TBT. So we just rode the wave on the WordPress side of things, which was awesome.

And that also allowed us to do a lot of real discovery of what people wanted. In terms of AI for WordPress where people were asking like, Hey, code WP, can you go and help me do a performance scan or a security scanner? Tell me why this page is blank and white. I have no idea. And that led to the second product agent WP, which was this thing in WordPress.

And it was like, okay if we have this agent in WordPress and we can give it access to the file system in a safe way, and the ability to run and execute code in a safe way. Then at some point, this thing can read your error logs and tell you why this page is white and sit beside you as that copilot and do things for you, but also use what WordPress has to offer, which is this framework for data and functionality, basically and help you do really anything.

So that was actually the motto is do anything WordPress and got pretty far along on that and then ended up at automatic and we’re keeping that mentality of. What can we do with AI and WordPress in a way that makes sense for the users of our awesome CMS? So that’s what we’re thinking about now

Chris Badgett: How do you think about that across different types of users, like the developers, the power users, the first time user, it seems challenging to make everybody happy, but maybe I’m not thinking about it the same way, or maybe somebody, one segment, you got to focus on first or whatever.

James LePage: It’s interesting because there are a lot of approaches that you have when it comes to AI and WordPress, because you have so many of these little user groups, and one approach is, AI is fairly robust and you can build a pretty robust system that. You can scale it up and down in terms of complexity and what it can do and what it has access to.

So for the really basic first time user who just needs to know how to change their homepage to home from the blogs page, it can just say, Hey, go click this link and it will bring you to the relevance settings page. And it will say, here’s the settings page. And when you do this will happen. But for the developer, it can identify, Oh.

This is a question that is not as simple as moving to a new page. This is a question that requires code. So I’m going to go and use that functionality that’s been built into the system to go and generate relevant code. So that’s one approach where you have a super generic system that adapts to the user base.

Another approach is. Using user interface to silo different products. So for example, code WP it’s actually, it’s up and there’s always going to be a reference of what the code WP product was because I’m really proud of what we had built. Same with agent WP code WP. Was million buttons, a million options, a code editor front and center, like really built for a developer built for somebody who is ready to develop.

And it was an AI product and it was still a conversational AI product, but that was built in a way where you had this tool bench to go and work on. And the agent. Was built with a single text input and it handled everything under the surface. And it was all using similar, actually it was using a lot of the same shared models and data infrastructure between our two products, but it was packaged in a way where it made it a lot easier for one group who was.

Less technical in one group. We were super technical to go and make it happen. Those two approaches, I think each have their merits and I don’t really have a clear answer because we have done both at this point. So it’s a, it’s an interesting thing to think about.

Chris Badgett: We paused after talking about the near term.

What do you see further out with AI and WordPress?

James LePage: I think it makes WordPress really important. So I think WordPress ends up becoming this. I mentioned this before, so there’s a mantra in automatic and throughout WordPress is the operating system for the open web. And I always looked at that and I was like, I don’t know, like I build websites with this. But I think that becomes much more true as these AI systems and AI content and AI, everything starts taking hold.

And I think. The place WordPress has in this is a way that you can build sites in the near term But in the long term this is a way that you manage all of your personal content all of your writing all of your videos all of your images and it can surface as a website, but it can also surface as A source for maybe a voice assistant coming from some speaker somewhere, some AR VR experience or whatever else AI pushes the interaction model towards.

So the WordPress product becomes super important because you need a way to manage all your stuff. You also, in the midterm, still need a way to manage your functionality, and maybe you still want a website. I’m not saying websites are going anywhere. I love websites. You still need that underlying system to make it all happen.

There aren’t too many underlying systems that are open source, that power 42 percent of the internet already, and are built for headless with a great API. With extensibility like wordpress. So I think it has a really big places that operating system such framework for the web as The internet does change because I think it will.

I think what will remain constant, which is what we started on is the human element. There’s always going to be the need for human created thoughts, human created ideas, images. It’s actually probably going to be way more important. And I’m hoping that at some point there’s going to be a standard, maybe.

at the browser level or the OS level to verify this image was taken with an iPhone. This content was written by James himself. There’s the stamp. So we know, and you can repurpose the content however you want. You can present it as a website, you can present it as an AI bot, whatever, but the actual content and the way you manage it and the way you handle it will be really important.

And I think The human bit will be the most important. I

Chris Badgett: like that. It’s a it’s like a much bigger vision of what a content management system means. Like that content is not just images and texts on a screen on a webpage, right? It could go a lot of places for the human. They need a central place to manage their human created content and maybe some AI generated content as well.

That’s really cool. Let’s turn the focus to the somebody who’s trying to teach online. Let’s say they, they want to make an online course and make money selling that through the internet all over the world. Maybe they have a coaching aspect where they do zoom calls or maybe that’s an upsell or whatever.

How can course creators leverage AI these days? And where do you see the industry going for the e learning website powered by WordPress?

James LePage: Yeah, I think probably the most important first thing is that I probably wouldn’t try to make a course with AI. I would lean on the human element. The reason why you’re making a course because you’re the expert in your domain and you want to Provide that knowledge to other people, be it for free or for profit or whatever it is.

So focusing on that aspect of the human bit is the first step. I’d say it’s probably really, I haven’t created a course. I actually always thought about creating courses, but never ended up doing it. And I’d probably be pretty tempted to. Use a lot of AI to make my stuff. I think that the general trend of where everything’s going is people are picking up on AI created content and when they do, they really don’t like it.

So in, in a specific scenario, so one of those scenarios would probably be education for those who are creating the courses and putting together this experience. that surfaces in a website or is an app or whatever it is. I think that AI is going to really help those individual creators who need to navigate WordPress and need to navigate complex data models and user interfaces that surface as really well built products like lifter.

And they can use these tools to be. Much quicker with what would ones take maybe like a day or a week. Now you can focus all on the content and you’ll probably see really smart implementations of AI on a plugin level, on the WordPress level, on a browser and a device level as well, to really assist you in the process of actually how do I put together this page?

How do I actually like. Assign this video content to this specific lesson. And how does this lesson play into a more general course structure? I think that type of usage of AI integrated, but also in systems like chat, dbt, where you’re trying to plan out I know how lifter works. I know how WordPress works.

Let me like think through maybe my structure of the course before I start or how I’m putting the actual content together in a logical presentation for the user. I think those are immediate things that we can do. And in the near future, there’s going to be a lot of tools around, let’s make it easier for you to create this website and create this experience and get this content out to people.

And then I think in the longer term, AI is going to modify and merge and you can probably use a I in the context of education where you have all this knowledge and you want to make it really easy for somebody to access that knowledge and There’s always the place for this structured style of education, but sitting next to that structured style of written content or videos, there could be an assistant, and it could be answering questions in real time, maybe anchored to the video providing that perplexity style search where you’re looking through things, and it’s like, Oh, James wrote about this in a community aspect of his course, or James had a lesson about this, and here’s what he had to say.

So I think that type of generative aspect of AI is going to be Pretty helpful in the mid future. And then again, like as the interaction model with technology and it’s whole starts to change the human aspect, especially like the video stuff, like I’m just speaking to you person to person.

Here’s what I know. Here’s what you want to know. I think that’s going to be really important as well. The concept of education online and the course online honestly, probably won’t be that disrupted by AI and I’m going to, like I said I’m going to be looking for people created content and hopefully there’s like actual verification.

James actually made this to be able to have that experience.

Chris Badgett: Can you talk us technically through this concept of an AI assistant for the student or an AI tutor? A course should work for everybody, but it should also work in challenging circumstances. And as we all know, in a classroom some people are doing better, some people are doing average, some people are really getting stuck.

How would an AI tutor work? It’s essentially trained on All the content and the student could be like, Hey, I’m stuck on this part of what James said over here tell us about how, an AI tutoring system would work

James LePage: technically. I think that there’s a lot to think about first the system itself.

So of course, you could look at a course, like just a repository of data. This is a lot of information. Yes. Like I put together all of these lessons and they’re the written lessons, plans, and maybe like quizzes and courses or quizzes and videos, and all of this results in the user purchasing this to fulfill their goal of learning this specific topic.

And. When you think about it, like a whole bunch of data, structured data, then you can think about, okay what does AI need to be really good? What does it need to answer the right questions? And if you go and ask chat, GBT, and it’s gotten way better over the years, but if you go and ask this thing, a super complex question with no access to the web, no access to anything, maybe it will answer it.

on a surface level. It’s not going to answer it in a super detailed level. It’s not going to answer it in a super personalized level. Worst case, it’s actually going to answer it and it’s going to be wrong. And it’s going to hallucinate this response. Now me as the student is going to be like, Oh, I know this crazy formula and it’s completely wrong.

And I think where you can implement this AI tutor in the context of a course is this tutor can draw on the information that the course has to offer. And instead of you can use it as this like artificial intelligence, or you can use it as a really powerful search tool that can present information in a personalized way to the user.

So I’m on a video and I’m learning about this specific topic. And I paused the video at X timestamp. And I’m like, wow, I really did not understand anything that was just said here and I can rewind it. I watched it like 500 times. I still can’t figure it out. At that point what does the student do?

If education, like being able to contact the instructors included, I’d probably call up the instructor and I’d be like, Hey, can you explain this in a different way? And that instructor would use the same information that was probably presented, but presented in a different way. That’s unique to my request, my, my request to understand.

And this assistant can do the same thing. It can pull in all of the information from the course. It can pull in information from that specific lesson. And I can ask about. Hey, can you dive a little bit deeper onto this specific point that maybe the video glossed over, but maybe the information is available in the course or something like it, and it can surface this in a really unique way, and it can actually cite the lessons, too.

So I see the interfaces like, let’s have this thing like a copilot sit beside you and be available to answer these questions, be available to repurpose the human content. And cite the sources. So we know that this is a relevant and accurate answer, but it’s an answer structured in a way that best matches your question.

And I think that’s a really powerful education device because you basically have that on demand answering aspect of the instructor. And the instructor always has the position in the education of, Hey, like I need to really understand what this user is. I’m the subject matter expert. I’m going to answer in this way.

I don’t think the copilot could ever really do that, but I think it can surface those immediately. Relevant questions, and that excites me a lot. And I actually already do this with ChatGBT, and I’ll take AI papers, and I’ll put it into ChatGBT, and I’ll read the paper, and I’ll bump into a problem, and I’ll be like, Oh, let’s talk a little bit deeper about that, and let’s reframe how this paper presents things, maybe in a simpler way, or in a different way.

And that style of education, paired with AIs, is really helpful to me.

Chris Badgett: Based on what you’re saying, it gives me even more excitement about WordPress in terms of being a educational content management system. So if a teacher is old school and has like folders of paper, lesson plans or whatever, their content is not digitized.

But the more people have their content digitized in videos. In courses or whatever, it could be often Google Docs and other tools outside of WordPress, but it’s making sure that as a teacher of the future that your content is managed and accessible by AI is really important and WordPress is going to play a significant role in that, I think.

James LePage: Absolutely. And that’s a lot of what I’m thinking about and focused on at Automatic, but also as a community member and somebody who’s been. With WordPress and AI since the start of all this generative stuff. It’s like, how do we make WordPress an easier way to take what you have and then surface it in a website?

Like, how do we make building websites easier? Because that’s the purpose of a website. How do I present myself digitally? But then in the mid future, like how do we. Get the right content for the right context and then present it to a user in a unique way and circling back to what you said about the education and maybe these professors or teachers have all of these like written documents and these crazy things.

I think that WordPress. Paired with AI can help the digitization process and help classify and tag and categorize this information and make it more accessible to users. So you don’t really have to take the super long process of Oh, I have all these paper notes. I have to go through them and type them out.

I don’t want to do that. So that’s a really interesting thought about how you make information more accessible. Then also another interesting thought is say you have this. educational system and you have 50 students and they all read and look through your course and There are a lot of questions that arise from it.

And how do you make this Educational system better for users in the future and for students in the future? You can have an FAQ or they append information on to Maybe has a new video like, Hey, here’s some common questions that popped up from the first cohort in this style of system. The teacher can go and answer these questions.

And now these questions are relevant and available to an AI assistant or however else you’re choosing to present information. They can also like scribble notes like if you have WordPress as this content management system and you have it integrated with AI, maybe I draw a diagram to better show the user that student.

A specific concept. And now that diagram is always available to the user and can be used as the A. I. To refer to or maybe make a diagram of its own to try and answer the question. So you have this ever growing collection of knowledge, and that becomes really powerful. And it’s a different way of presenting education, but it all comes back to you need the expert behind all of this stuff.

And it’s just how are you presenting content that comes from the expert? To the actual end user.

Chris Badgett: Speaking of subject matter experts, some folks don’t really understand AI agents yet. So how would like a course creator first, what is an AI agent? Second, like how would a course creator leverage an AI agent either for education or just for their business?

Like the thing that pops in my mind is if I build. A course that targets a very specific type of person. I would love to set an AI agent loose to go find all of my ideal students and send them this personalized email and invite them to my free training and see if they’ll be a fit for the paid course or whatever.

But tell us, riff a little bit on AI agents. 

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James LePage: I, so I started smiling when you asked for the definition because we started building this agent a year and a half ago and agents really picked up maybe like in the past three months and have really become a topic of discussion, but they’ve come from marketing.

So there was never really a clear definition of what this agent is. It’s this crazy AI thing that does things and it’s going to change the entire world, but it was always like if I can say that as a company, I can go raise. 50 million and try to figure out what an AI agent actually is. And that’s been the case for a while.

And for us, when we started working on our agent, our definition was, all right, we want this thing to live in WordPress and do tasks for users and start in a synchronous manner. I ask it to go and. Update a setting and maybe I don’t know where the setting is. So it goes to the settings page and it updates it and says, here’s what I did.

And in the far future, the goal with that agent was, all right, let’s have this proactively just exist in WordPress and help do the plugin updates and help do the performance and security scans and the stuff that I don’t want to do. I just want to push it off to this expert assistant. So that was our agent.

And I think recently the industry has converged on the same definition of it’s an AI system that does things for users. And it can do things in front of you. It can do things behind you, upside down, whatever it is. It’s a system that does something, an AI system that does something. And the reason we’ve come to these.

Pretty clear definitions at this point is because now there are systems that can actually do things for you in specific applications and industries. So like in WordPress, but also opening eyes, pushing systems like operator, they just announced this thing that can see a computer screen and click around.

And there’ve been systems like that in the past. This is probably the biggest marketed one. So we’re getting to systems like this. I think the way. People online should think about these systems is as right now, really powerful automation tools. Instead of building a Zapier flow or a Zapier flow, I’m going to go and think about, and then prompt this assistant to do something similar.

And maybe it’s going to work. Maybe it’s not. The thing with the operator product is the web is a wild place that is made of many different frameworks and. Sometimes accessible, sometimes not. So computers have problems with the web as people do. So it’s not the most stable right now, but at some point you’re going to have these things that do things for you.

You can automate away a lot of the busy work you can in the context of education, maybe I’m trying to do research for a new lesson that I want to push out. I can have this go and probably pull in maybe a hundred relevant articles and. Maybe pre scan them and say here’s why I think that this paper is relevant to your AI course.

And obviously not have the thing, read the paper for me. I don’t think it’s going to be good at that, but classifying and categorizing and then helping me go and say, all right, I should read this paper to make this lesson. That’s probably the way. That style of like general agent is going to be really impactful.

I think in the context of WordPress, I know in the context of WordPress, we’re working on things that can make the annoying parts of WordPress easier. So the maintenance, the updates, the security actually using WordPress, like how do you make that experience better so people can focus on what they’re good at?

Like course creation or website creation or selling physical products or running my bakery, which I need my WordPress site to go and link off to. So that’s probably high level how I look at agents. It’s really fluid. It’s something that there’s a lot of like grandiose ideas. If we’re going to have like swarms of agents talking to agents and the agents will do agent things, and then eventually it’ll tell the human that it just bought a car for a super great, like maybe we’ll have that. Maybe we won’t. My main thought about agents is there are probably some immediate automation benefits. There are probably some really fun industry specific applications. And it’s probably something that in the concept of an AI that does stuff for you, you should probably watch.

But I don’t know if we’re going to have like swarms of agents buying cars and piloting Tesla robots anytime soon. Who knows? We’ll see.

Chris Badgett: What do you think about like a website builder who’s not a developer and they start getting, more ability to create custom code using AI tools or doing it in future WordPress tools.

How do you, like the human is also still needed for example, you could build a whole app without being a developer. And now you have an app, but what if it breaks? What if there’s security problems? Like how should people think about using AI to code without having a human coder around?

James LePage: There are two sides to the question. The first side is the tools that companies make. So the tools that we made at WPAI, and now that we’re working on at Automatic, it’s up to. Us, the creators, to make these tools in a way that are safe and accurate and as good as we possibly can make them.

So when it came to CodeWP in the beginning, there was like no thought towards security, no thought towards accessibility. And as the product grew, we got much more focused on, okay we need a system that makes sure there’s a bulletproof sanitization of anything going in or out of these code snippets and these plugins eventually.

So that was our responsibility. And we had to build the tools to use the models to apply them to our specific products and use cases in a safe, accurate manner that was intended for our industry. So that’s one side of it. And the other side of it is. Just going and creating systems that actually offer value and tying that back into the responsibility of the builder.

I don’t think the responsibility really ever falls into the user’s lap, unless you’re using general tools and generalist tools. And eventually I think these systems will be so good that. We can move a lot of the crazy stuff towards the AI. So the user themselves is acting as the expert in their business and in what they do.

And they’re piloting this system, knowing that it’s outputting good stuff. Or it’s saying, no, I can’t do that. I don’t know how to do that. And that’s a really important system that we were working on with our agent. AI always says yes. So you have to create systems for it to say no, to not do something.

As opposed to doing something and blowing up your site or doing something and it not being what you want it to do. So it comes back to build really good systems. And then follow and subscribe to the mindset of the do it with me user. So I’m an expert. I’m, I like using the bakery example, because one day I’m going to open a bakery.

So it’s I run my bakery. I know the customers that come in, I know my location. And I know why people come to my bakery. I know we cook our bread in this awesome, incredible, specific way. I don’t want to build a website really, but I want to present on a website. So I want to have this AI do it with me.

I want to walk it through, like here are my needs and my requirements. And I want it to either build the site or tell me, no, I can’t build the site.

Go hire a real professional. I’m just a little AI agent. So when you build good AI systems that know their limits and are really accurate and you have the do it with me style user, I think that opens up the accessibility to.

A lot of people that would never create websites or pay people to create websites anyway. And that means more usage of WordPress. That means my bakery becomes more impressive. So at some point I need to hire a full marketing agency to create the brand, to create a better website. And it’s just, I think it’s beneficial for everybody.

Chris Badgett: Last question for you, James. One of the things that excites me about WordPress and AI is the open source. Nature of WordPress so that, the code is easily accessible to the entire world for like free open source software. Whereas like a closed environment, SAS application, it’s like a walled garden and things can’t, AI can’t necessarily train on it unless it’s internal inside that company or whatever.

What are the benefits of, Like open source software in the world of AI.

James LePage: It’s the most, it’s the most beneficial selling point that you could possibly have because specific to WordPress, it’s been open source for over 20 years at this point, I think. So the models themselves already know how WordPress works and that’s great in, in isolation, but for us who build systems that make WordPress more accessible to applied systems, that means that we already have.

A starting point that is miles ahead of things like Webflow the models already know. So when we build pipelines. When we fine tune these things, when we create these systems. They can be awesome. And they can be really impactful. I think you’ll see really helpful, impactful systems coming out of us and other people in the future because of it.

Then also like open source the mentality of open source. The ability to self host, the ability to own your own data, the ability to look through a code base, the ability to have say in where a project goes, so not making this API change that maybe a closed source company would just hit a button and now it’s version three, putting thought into how does this play into my needs?

That’s what WordPress is all about, and I think that idea going into AI and how AI impacts the open web and WordPress running 42 percent plus of the open web that’s the most impactful, most powerful thing ever. I could be building AI at any company doing anything, and I think that WordPress is really powerful, and that’s why I choose to build in WordPress.

That’s why I started the AI startup in WordPress. That’s why I’m at Automatic now. I think that’s everything. So I think that’s a good closer because I love WordPress. I think it being open source is incredibly beneficial in the AI sense. And there’s a lot of opportunity in terms of the human element of content creation, putting it into this open source CMS, adapting with the changes that AI will bring and moving into a glass half full and an exciting future as opposed to something

Chris Badgett: else.

That’s James LePage. You can find him on Twitter and X over at James W. LePage. Look for him there. Give him a follow. Thanks for coming on the show. This has been a really fun conversation about AI. I know you out there watching and listening have learned a few things and hopefully you’re excited as I am about the future.

Thanks so much, James. I really appreciate it. I can’t wait to do this again in two years and see where we’re at.

James LePage: It’s fun to be on an exponential curve. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. And with that Twitter address, my DMS are always open. So if anybody has questions and wants to bounce ideas around and try to see where we’re going with AI we’re all in this together and I love answering these questions.

So feel free to get me on X James W the page. Thanks James.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMSCast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Go to lifterlms. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.