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The WP Minute brings you news about WordPress in under 5 minutes -- every week! Follow The WP Minute for the WordPress headlines before you get lost in the headlines. Hosted by Matt Medeiros, host of The Matt Report podcast.
Eric Karkovack (00:00)
Hi everyone and welcome to the WP Minute. I'm Eric Karkovack Today's episode features a segment from Matt Maderos' conversation with Elementor's Miriam Schwab. Be sure to catch the entire discussion over on our WP Minute Plus podcast. Visit thewpminute.com for all the details.
Matt Medeiros (00:21)
When it first came out, there was just a lot of criticism like, my God, like because it was early, like Elementor was ahead of the, you know, AI building space. And it's just like, how do I turn this thing off? But AI has gotten arguably much better and I'm sure the experience has gotten much better. ⁓ Is there a core guiding principle at Elementor on integrating AI and how you approach it in an open way? So it's not just.
We're not just getting AI taxed, guess is my best phrase for it.
Miriam Schwab (00:53)
So from the start, I think it was something like ChatGPT launched and within a very short amount of time, Elementor's product development kind of stopped. Not exactly stopped, but there was like a kind of, on, what does this mean for us? And an AI team was like very quickly set up in Elementor. There was like an understanding that whatever AI means for us and for the industry, we have to be part of it now and we can't wait another second.
So that's why we launched the first approach or version of AI in Elementor slash WordPress, which was kind of straightforward, ⁓ which is like here, create an image, create some HTML, create CSS, write a blog post, whatever, that kind of stuff. There were some interesting pieces of functionality that were part of the AI then, which was like this, ⁓ if you were like,
building a page, then it would suggest to you the next section of the page and then like kind of lay it out for you. It didn't do a great job of that, but it was like, the thinking behind that was, okay, let's also be proactive for our users and try to like hold their hand while they're building. And because it's also new, our team and all of us were just like trying to figure it out as we go along and try to find the best and most valuable application. So we started with that.
And basically, because we started early, even if the first application wasn't amazing and people were like, turn it off. A lot of people want to turn it off because of that suggestion thing, because they're like, stop it. Why are you building this next section of my page? But since then, we've been learning a ton. we have a lot of data around the usage, so we can then improve the application.
Since then, we've launched a few more AI products. We have this one called Site Planner, which is an external tool, which is free to use, planner.elementor.com. And people can go and chat their way to a website brief, site map, and what we call the wireframe of a site. But the wireframe is like, the way I see it, it's like 80 % of the way there to a website. And then the professionals can come in and tweak it and polish it and wrap it up in.
and bring their vision to the final leg of the project. So there's that. And then you can launch directly into hosting or download or zip or whatever. And then we also launched a product which is still in beta, which is called Angie, which is an agentic AI assistant for WordPress. So it sits there next to you in the dashboard, and it can do all sorts of things. In many ways, with that, the sky's the limit. But also because the sky's the limit, it can
still do weird things. And so that's why it's still in beta. So on the one hand, you can do things with it you're like, my gosh, that's amazing. And then on the other hand, you'll try to do things with it and still like a bit wonky. But we hope to like fine tune that pretty soon and bring it out of beta. But people can test it. It's in the WordPress repo and it's free to use. There's no limitations. Because AI costs, right?
not because of us, but because AI just costs. So at some point, there's credits involved in this stuff. But at the moment, like Angie and Site Planner, although there's obviously cost to us for use, we are not charging anyone. So feel free to test it out.