Lauri Saarni

Lauri Saarni

Lauri Saarni is a Senior Developer at Valu Digital, where he works on product development, AI solutions, as a Findkit specialist and is involved in project work as well. He is a WordPress core contributor on the AI Team, contributing to the PHP AI Client and WordPress’s canonical AI plugins. His CMS career spans back to the early 2000s, covering WordPress, TYPO3, Neos CMS, and custom systems, with work in both Finland and Cambodia (fair trade software). His background also includes pastoral and missionary work, which grounds his human-centric vision for an AI-driven web.

Session

Under the Hood: How Agentic WordPress Works

Workshop

11:15 – 12:15

Complexity: Medium

Intended Audience: WordPress developers and technical leads interested in AI integration. Familiarity with PHP and WordPress core APIs is helpful; no prior experience with AI tooling or MCP is required.

WordPress core is getting its AI building blocks: the PHP AI Client, the Abilities API, and the MCP Adapter. Together they let you turn site functionality into tools that agents can call. Agents can run from inside wp-admin, on the frontend, or from external AI clients via MCP. This talk introduces each building block, shows a simple agentic loop in action, and compares the architectural options (shared keys vs. per-user costs, controlled vs. open connections) so you can choose the right AI solution for the task at hand.

Goal:
Build one real ability and connect an agent with it.

Prerequisites:
Local WordPress environment running and verified before arriving (wp-env / Studio / Local or similar that has WP CLI in use)

Plugin skeleton repo cloned. I will provide a git repo with git tags per checkpoint so anyone can jump ahead.

Optional, for following the demo half on their own later: an MCP-capable client (Claude Desktop, Codex, OSLT) and an AI provider API key(or Ollama running locally)