By the end of this session, you will have built a WordPress site on your own laptop, connected an AI assistant to it, and watched that assistant publish a post, change a setting, and install a plugin, all from instructions typed in plain English.
Then you will switch one of those capabilities off, ask again, and watch it refuse.
AI is quickly becoming part of how people work. It writes emails, answers questions, and helps make decisions. But what if AI could also run your WordPress site for you?
Imagine asking your site in plain English:
“Which posts are missing a featured image?”
“Update the price of my top 10 products.”
“Show me all draft posts from the last month.”
And it just… does it. No opening the dashboard, no clicking through menus.
Most site owners have no idea this is already possible, and almost nobody has decided what they would allow.
In this hands-on session, we’ll start with what a WordPress site actually needs to run, a web server, PHP, and a database, and why that used to be the wall most people never got past. Then a local site in about a minute, and a look at something most site owners have never seen: the complete list of everything their site is willing to let a machine do.
Along the way, the two ideas that make this work:
- The Abilities API, added in WordPress 6.9, which lets plugins publish what they can do in a format machines can read.
- MCP, the open standard that lets AI tools discover and call those abilities.
Then we’ll get our hands dirty. You’ll register your own custom abilities in code, expose them through MCP, connect them to an AI client like Claude, and watch Claude call the abilities you just wrote to perform real operations on your site. We’ll end with the moment that matters most: you switch an ability off, ask again, and watch the AI refuse.
Whether you run client sites, manage an online store, maintain a content-heavy blog, or build plugins, you’ll leave having written the code that makes your WordPress site AI-ready, so you can manage its operations without ever hitting the dashboard.
Key Takeaways
- See what your site already exposes. Find the complete list of what your own site permits. Most attendees have never looked.
- Write your own custom abilities in code. Learn how to register abilities that expose exactly the operations you want AI to perform on your site.
- Be able to revoke access in under a minute. You’ll do it during the session, so you know where the button is before you need it.
- Leave with a working setup and a clear roadmap. A local WordPress site connected to an AI client, custom abilities you’ve written yourself, plus a checklist you can apply to a live client site the same week.