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Hosted by Toby Cryns and Kurt von Ahnen, the Agency Action Podcast (Part of the WP Minute Podcast Network) dives into the real-world ups and downs of running a WordPress agency. Each week, Toby and Kurt share open, honest conversations about the challenges and victories that come with building client relationships, pricing projects, finding the right tools, and growing a sustainable business.
Whether you’re just launching your agency or refining your systems, you’ll get practical insights from two agency owners who live it every day—along with stories that remind you you’re not alone in this wild WordPress world of global teams, AI disruption, and constant change.
Follow the show and explore more at TheWPMinute.com/podcasts
Matt (00:01)
We're back with another agency. I'm waiting. No, I'm filling in the roles. Two, four very big shoes. Kurt and Toby are on vacation. So I'm covering for them on the agency action podcast. So welcome everyone. it's your lovely host, Matt, with special guest, Brendan O'Connell. We're gonna talk all about AI stuff today.
Brendan and I chatted, we've chatted multiple times on on the WP Minute podcast, but this is going to be probably about a six month hiatus since you and I have officially hit the airwaves. Brendan what do you think?
Brendan (00:40)
Yeah, I think back in January or February. So good to be back.
Matt (00:44)
Lots of things have changed, obviously in the technology of AI and website building and agency life. Brendan has done a bunch in his personal career, professional career. so excited to talk about how he has seen the landscape shift since he and I last chatted. And maybe it resonates with you, the agency owner who's like listening to all this news of
You know, hey, we're gonna lose our jobs. is is WordPress in trouble? This is stuff we were questioning like a year ago, maybe being solidified a little bit more on the product side these days in terms of that, in the headlines, but really interested to dive in. I mean, I'm using AI differently than I was just six months ago. and just want to unpack a lot of that stuff today. So agency action podcast, agencyaction podcast dot com where you can catch up with all of these podcasts episodes.
via a retro arcade machine that I built with AI as a way to play a video game of agency action. if you don't want to listen to the whole episode, it's actually one of the ways that I experience agency action. So check that out, agencyactionpodcast.com. Brandon, I want to frame this question for you. when AI started to really become more mainstream for us prosumers,
And professionals in the space, you were doing this at you were doing a lot with like N8N and automation at that time. Like you were really big into that. And then like AI started coming in. Where have you landed with like the days of Brendan? I'm gonna create these blueprints of N8N to now like, maybe AI is just the mind hive that we need to do all this stuff. Where have you landed in your technology stack these days?
traditional automation versus AI.
Brendan (02:44)
Yeah, I mean that that's a that's a good question 'cause I think for a lot of people a AI is still kind of a black box, right? Because they they put they put a prompt in and it does something and they it spits something out and N8N is still a visual workflow builder and you know, I I actually do still I do s I do still use N8N quite a bit because it is, you know, you own sort of the infrastructure and you can kinda go in and and tweak things a little more easily and
you know, it's not such a black box, right? So I you know, I do still use it quite a bit actually. And I use them in conjunction, right? 'Cause you can get you can get your AI to to build your N8N workflow for you these days, which is pretty nice.
but you know, I also use I use automation within within my AI workflows as well. so I don't know. I mean it's it's an interesting concept, right? That now it's before it was r right, it was just sort of build your build your automation, maybe put a little AI in there and now it's
maybe a little heavier on the AI side. but I think people are probably a little inclined to skip the automation step and not really understand how APIs work and I think that's still a valuable skill.
Matt (04:01)
Yeah. And and I think that's one of the one of the unlocks for l agency owners who might be building stuff alongside of their, you know, client WordPress sites. Because I would say that the benefit to
Yeah, AI right now, there's obviously a lot of people like, hey, I'm just gonna like replace WordPress with Astro or some other like static thing. That's not really the conversation I wanna have. I wanna have the conversation of like who's still building with WordPress, but expanding their value to the customer by building things that sit alongside WordPress, right? Reporting tools, you know, dashboards, bringing in data.
and other content, you know, into WordPress, connecting to other APIs that you otherwise might not be, you might have a plugin for or something like that. I'm really interested to see how this evolves over the next I mean I'm just gonna call it the six months, right? For the all the way throughout the end of the year. And see what people are building as agency owners that ride alongside WordPress instead of just replace WordPress. That's not really the flag I want to fly, if that makes sense. you know
Brendan (05:19)
Yeah. No,
I mean even just today I was in some Facebook group and someone was trying to you know, ask about how do I get a bunch of YouTube videos into my WordPress site or something like that and so you know, th most of the suggestions were well just ask Claude to build a plug in to do it and you know, some of the s that was most of the suggestions and it's like, well, yeah, I mean you I guess you could do that and that's
probably how most of people are gonna approach it these days. but it's like the mo a a lot of the s comments at the bottom were like use N8N or use another automation tool like Flowmatic or some some other WordPress plugin that already exists that that does that for you. so I mean yeah there's you know it's the it's kind of the age old question of like buy verse build. and you know the the the the
The idea of you know, what what it takes to build something is going down and down and down. So, yeah, you could you could just buy build something now for sure, but you know, there's solutions out there that already exist and understanding how stuff works i is still it's still important.
Matt (06:32)
Yeah. How how how have you adjusted to the speed? I'm gonna put that in air quotes, the speed of AI. if you can, you know, reflect maybe even a year or two years ago, how have you adjusted to the speed of waiting? Maybe that's not the maybe speed isn't the right word, but how have you adjusted to waiting for something to finish in AI? Do you feel yourself getting like more antsy, like
Come on now, finish this, you know, like finish this task. When like a year ago you'd be like, I'll wait an hour for this thing to finish because now I could never do it. Do you feel yourself shifting to like, if this thing's not done in five minutes, I need to go find like an another LLM to to deal with? Do you feel like that psychosis or that emotion changing in you as you've become a a more maybe AI forward developer over the last two, three, one to two, three years?
Brendan (07:27)
Yeah, a little bit. I mean I think I think this whole sort of social experiment that they've been running on us has turned us yeah, this is this has turned us all into incredible people that have you know, we've we've been building a lot more, right? But we've also our ADHD is off the charts now.
Matt (07:34)
Yes, that's where I was going, thank you.
Ha ha.
Brendan (07:50)
When I switch to a a a lower a lower tier model, I've been using command code a lot. I don't know if you've checked that out. but it lets you kind of switch between models on command. and you know, so so I'll sometimes switch between some of the open weight models and and try those out. And man, some of those are are really nice, right? 'Cause they're super cheap, but they are a lot slower than Claude. And yeah, like I'll just sit there waiting for a long time and then I'll end up going back to Claude a lot
Matt (07:57)
Okay.
Brendan (08:19)
switch back to codex or whatever. But yeah, you know, and then we open up another terminal and and start working on another task or use the b the slash BTW feature and and open up another chat that way.
Yeah, it's it's hard to resist that, right? Because we feel like our our time is so precious now and we need to always be productive and be working to get our get the most out of that five hour window and and get all of our tokens in and get the most out of our subscription. I try to resist it the most I can though because it's it's not good for our brains.
Matt (08:56)
Yeah. I mean, I I I can definitely feel that I wonder if it's just because we are whether we realize it or not, like we are creative. I mean, just speaking, I guess, for myself, but I I imagine seeing what you do, what you post online and stuff, we're we're kind of similar is we're creative people. We like to build things and we like we like to have these ideas come to life. Therefore, like this is crack to us. Right. Like this is, my God.
I've had a gazillion ideas, and now I can just open up a tab. One idea is cooking, move to the next, that idea is cooking. Got a third idea, do it over here. And I'll often catch myself is in in any given what I'll call work session, I'll have four tabs. And this is probably I'm probably, you know, not running as much as most people, but like.
Four tabs of four different things being built, and I'm just jumping in between them. Meanwhile, I'll have like a chat GPT window open in my browser asking it questions, going like, hey, I got this other idea. Like, what are you like? Just like I'm just throwing spaghetti against the wall over here while cooking in the kitchen with these four apps. And at the end of the day, like there is a sense of accomplishment, but it's also like, holy shit.
Brendan (10:03)
Yeah.
Matt (10:19)
Now what do I do with all of this stuff? But i I think that's what they unlocked or they hit us in a different way that no other product has before as creative people. And that's like the thing. Like that's where the pressure comes from for me. I don't find myself worrying about the cost or the tokens and stuff like that. It's more about like, wow, I can get all these ideas to life. But I don't know if you feel the same way.
Brendan (10:43)
Yeah. Well and and and honestly, like I never really ever felt like a very creative person to begin with. Like I never felt like an idea person or or someone who was
you know, coming up with the best next thing or whatever and and I probably still am not, obviously. I'm not coming up with the next million dollar thing, right? But yeah, I mean I think you're right that they've they've f figured out how to unlock that in in people that work with code and work with apps and things like that and work with websites. And they've it it's addicting, right? You're absolutely right. And and I and I do kind of worry that when we reach the end of the subsidy era, what that's gonna do because right now
Matt (11:21)
Yeah. Yes.
Brendan (11:23)
Now you know I I I use this thing called Agents View that shows like how how much how much we've spent, right? in terms of our token usage and we're getting a good deal right now because it's subsidized and when that era ends, if it when if and when it ends,
it's gonna it's gonna be hard because we're we're getting used to this feeling of of creative juices flowing all the time and yeah, it's gonna be it's gonna be interesting when that happens.
Matt (11:55)
I'm really concerned about that. And I think you know, I I I think what you see with Claude, or excuse me, I should say anthropic, what you what you see with anthropic is this balance between I I feel like when Opus four point six hit, they did that as like you know, I don't know what the proper phrase would be, but they were like, Hey, we got this awesome thing.
That we have, you know, internally. Let's let it loose in in Opus four point six. Get people to be like, my God, this is like this is the like coding model, at least for coding stuff. This is the model. And then they realize, maybe we gave them too much. Maybe four point six. Like we gave them too much with four point six. And ever since four point six, they've been trying to rebalance what that product matrix is gonna look like.
We hear things about Mythos, which they've already started to condition us, like you'll never have that. And if you do, it's going to be like twenty thousand dollars per million tokens. but then they release Fable, and that was like, the government had to step in. And then they've said, okay, we have it for seven days and then 14 days, and it just got re-extended again this weekend at the time of this recording. And I feel like they're trying to balance that product matrix of
How do we get people to sort of softly land in like a middle area that they can that we can charge them a couple hundred bucks with? And that'll be the floor. But then as soon as you start to look to that fable or that mythos, now you're talking thousands of dollars, right? And that's how they're gonna condition us to sort of stair step until eventually you're like, God, do I have can I afford this? One.
And two, like, nah, do I just want to wait more time and use Sonnet five or sonnet seven in the future that's gonna cost like fifty bucks a month but take ten times longer to produce something? I I feel like out of all of them, they're the ones that are trying to really balance that matrix of not rug pull, but I guess condition us to what like future costs are gonna be.
Brendan (14:11)
Well and at at the same
time though, we have these open weight models like GLM f GLM five point two is coming up behind them and is very capable. And so I think they I think you're right that that's their their thinking, but then
Matt (14:19)
Right.
Brendan (14:27)
they're they're seeing these open weight models come from behind thinking that that's changing their their calculus, right? So I think that they're that's why they're they're keep they're they keep having to kind of extend these these these trials for fable. They keep having to release newer newer models. I think it's changing their their economics a lot. and so
you know, I i it who knows what's gonna happen because I think that that was that was probably their thinking, right? That they we'll just we'll just give these, you know, four point six level models and call it a day and then keep these un you know, lock these higher level models behind these paywalls. But I don't think that's gonna be the case anymore because these open weight models are are very competitive now.
Matt (15:09)
Yeah. The
I guess the the the big challenge with that is cause I've tried so I don't use command code, but I've tested things with open router, I believe that's what it's called. Open router. I haven't spent much time, but I've just like experimented with some things. And then I tried another local tool which I bought one night. I was like, I'm gonna run and just see if I can find the app. I always forget the name of it.
I don't use it often. Let me just see if I see it. LM Studio, which allows you to run local models on your desktop. and one night I I bought this high-powered Windows laptop because it has the NVIDIA 4090 graphics card in it. So I was like, I'll
Business expense. Stupid. but anyway, so I I bought it just to run these models. And even with that la even with that graphics card, which has twenty four gigabytes. I mean, obviously it's on a desktop, which has thirty-two for the graphics card, but even that was more powerful than what I'm gonna run on my MacBook in terms of a dedicated graphics card. GPU. And running those models locally is still
Dog slow. And I think where these guys are gonna win is how do you manage this compute power to run these models and and who's gonna win at that? And and I know a lot of people talk about this and like data centers and and all that stuff and Google versus Nvidia, you know, versus OpenAI and Apple, like who's gonna build all this processing? I want open source to win. My my fear is
We're not gonna have enough CPU power to run this stuff until these things get really, really much smaller to run on on local machines. that's my fear anyway.
Brendan (17:14)
Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean for sure. I I mean I tried to run even just like a a base level Google Gemma 4 model and my my apparently powerful gaming laptop can barely handle it too. So you're right on that front. you know, I think give it give it a year and we'll see these we'll see these be able to run on a phone, maybe.
You know, but y at the same time, yeah, I mean like something like command code, I guess, is still like I'm accessing these open weight models not on my local device, right? I'm I'm hitting some server that they that they're running. and so I'm you know, they're probably not using the best compute power that Anthropic's using, but so you know, I don't know how that compute matrix is working there, but yeah, I don't know how that's gonna unfold. So
Matt (17:43)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, the
future is definitely interesting for these for like hosting companies, you know, and and what they do because we think of hosting in the traditional sense, like to pull it back to WordPress, like obviously if you start seeing product companies in WordPress starting to like decline in sales, I mean I guess the question is is like what kind of product do you have? And you know, how are you d you know, if you have just like utility products?
those will probably the be the first to go, right? If you have small little plugins that do things that you can quickly whip up with a codex or a Claude, like, yeah, that's it's should be a tough business. so like what can you do to extend that? folks, like in my career, my thing that puts the the food on the table for me, gravity forms, like we have a little bit more insulation against that because it's a big plug in.
when you start to look at it like am I gonna code a replacement for this? Yeah, maybe I'll code a simple contact form replacement. But if I need something to replicate on all my client sites with all the add ons and connections, do I want to risk that for two hundred bucks a year to buy gravity forms? Probably not. Let me just spend the two hundred bucks. but the hosting companies would obviously be next in line, right? If if
If we all are having this impact in WordPress with WordPress getting pulled away from because of AI, hosting companies are gonna have to change. And I was thinking the other day, hosting companies might be like your mall. Now, I don't know about your mall. if you have a mall in your area in the US anyway. This is places where people used to go to the one big building with a bunch of stores in it, and now nobody goes to one big building.
With a bunch of stores in it anymore. Like I don't know anyone who goes shopping at the mall like it used to. So I see a few malls in my area who are like reinventing themselves. Now they have grocery stores in them. Now they have co working spaces in them. Now they have play centers in them. It's not like twenty five retail outlets anymore. Hosting companies might have to shift to be like, okay, we don't do websites anymore. We do inference. We do all of this like open router.
Brendan (20:14)
Right.
Matt (20:25)
compute like they have to kinda shift their model into, you know, the the the future world.
Brendan (20:29)
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean I think there's a there's a couple that that come I mean like hostinger, I guess is is one that comes off the top of my head. They've kind of embraced, I think, the AI agent
Craze, right? They they were one of the first to really offer open claw hosting and now Hermes hosting. where it's sort of well and and and other ones, right? You can do N eight N hosting, you can do sort of one click deploy, right? They have Docker Docker installs for a lot of different apps that's not just and I don't know what what they what their start was, if they were strictly WordPress to to begin with or or not. but they've they've sort of expanded their product line to keep up with demand and I wouldn't be surprised if
Most of their recent income is from stuff like Open Claw and Hermes.
Matt (21:19)
Yeah. Have you speaking of these these agents, have you gone down the route of open claw and and Hermes? Have you any war stories from trying to set one of those bad boy bad boys up or do you ever use them in your in your day? You are.
Brendan (21:35)
Big Hermes fan. Yeah, big
Hermes fan. yeah, I've been I've been using that a lot. I have several running I do I have it running on a VPS for our company, because you know, we're a distributed team and so we have we have it running on a VPS locked behind tail scale and it's it's been great. It lives in our Slack and it updates us every day. It ingests our meeting notes from granola and
It's it's like one of our employees almost and it's it's been very useful. it updates our notion and updates our task lists and I mean it it's very useful, I gotta say. And then I run it myself also, on my personal computer, talked with it on Discord and Slack and Telegram and I can, you know, chat with it on my phone and stuff like that. And it's getting easier and easier to set up now. Now the the
Team behind it, Noose Research, just launched the cloud version where you can just set it up also. I think it's like under ten bucks a month to host it if you wanna do that. And it's I gotta say, it's very easy to set up now. The the b the barrier to setting that stuff up is pretty low now. so you're not dealing with a ton of environment variables and API keys and stuff like that. It's it's getting easier and easier to set up for non-technical people.
Matt (22:57)
Yeah. You know, I haven't I know I've definitely sound like, you know, old man yells at the sky. I just haven't found an absolute use case where I need to spend the thinking power to set it up. I set up OpenClaw once a few months ago, and I was just like, What am I going to do with this thing now that I'm not already achieving with my other systems in place?
so at like the WP minute, I have what I what what I call the Jeffbot, right? So the Jeffbot just summarizes content articles from other WordPress sites from a collection of like, I don't know, 40 or 50 RSS links that I have, right? And it pings Slack, it summarizes it, pings Slack with the link in the Jeffbot channel. And it's all saved. That's all just like Cloudflare running, crontask, saving to database so that.
At any point I can do more with it, like give me a weekly update or what were the most talked about topics for this year or this quarter. And to me, I'm just like, it just feels cleaner to run it that way versus constantly thinking about managing some kind of like agent infrastructure. But I assume like as this stuff gets easier and better, I'm also of the mindset like Claude or Anthropic and OpenAI will.
come up with a native agent and I'm when they do that, I'm just gonna be like, freaking you I'll just get pay you for it. Like I don't wanna I don't want to go set this up on my own and run another VPS infrastructure. You just run it for me. as my mindset. But it's good to hear that you have some success with that stuff.
Brendan (24:43)
Yeah, I mean I i it's also open source. I think that's that's one of the things that I mean, I I'm not gonna I'm not gonna get I'm not gonna pay anthropic API costs. Like that that that's insane. They they they're and they're gonna want you to. They they they came out with
Matt (24:48)
Yeah.
Yes. Yes, yes.
Yes.
Brendan (25:00)
I don't know what it w what they called it. Like Claude I I can't keep up with all their product releases, but they c they they released some kind of thing where you put it in Slack and it responds to things like that and it was it was like a half baked Hermes. And and and they got a they got a lot of criticism for it 'cause it was just it was half baked and it was just not good. and and Hermes is I don't know. maybe I'm a bit of a fanboy, but I mean it's you can switch models, you can combine models together on it. I mean it's
Matt (25:12)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
Mm.
Brendan (25:28)
It's pretty amazing what you can do. I mean, just as like a test case, I like was able to just just automate just go go in and to with a new business I have, set up a new profile, get everything up and running in under an hour. I mean, you can't beat that.
Matt (25:44)
What's the advantage with like when you think of it as I'll frame how like if I I'm mostly in Claude code and then I use codex when I either hit a limit or I just want to run like documentation tasks, front-end edit tasks on some of these projects. Like I'll use codex for that. And a lot of like the bit the heavy work, I'll use Claude. And then if I ever want to
Put something on on a cron job that you that I want analyzed every, you know, every day, every hour, every week, whatever. That's when I'm just like, okay, I got Wrangler installed, obviously locally on my machine, go and set up a Cloudflare worker, run this cron X amount of times, do the thinking, shoot it over to this either R2 or database layer. Like I have my pockets of things that I turn to. And then when I want to ask questions,
Generally it's in chat GPT when I'm kinda like brainstorming stuff. Where does the Hermes agent fit in for you? Like how do you think of it? Is it coding for you or is it just like contest context tasks with memory that you interface with it?
Brendan (27:00)
Yeah, it's i I mean, it's probably less on the coding side. Yeah. It's more like tasks and and the cron stuff for sure. I mean you can you can use it to to code for sure, but I mean I don't I don't hook up the really expensive models to it. Like I'm running the cheapo models through open router mostly with it and I mean have a couple of fallback models. But I mean I have I think I have codex hooked up to it as well, but
Matt (27:07)
Okay.
Brendan (27:25)
Mostly it's it's yeah, like you said, it's like those cron jobs that need automating and things like that. so it's less less on the coding side and more on like repetitive tasks and you know, I I use something like c there's this really awesome service called Composio that lets you basically connect all your different services without needing to
get actual API keys. Like it's just a one click install and then Hermes has access to your Notion, to your Slack, to your whatever you want to give it access to, and you can fine-grain, tune what it has access to. So basically just one click install what it has access to and you're off to the races.
Matt (28:04)
Mm. That's interesting. I have yeah, like a lot of the we can talk about if you want to talk about some of like the cool projects maybe that you've built that that you can talk about. 'cause I know some cool stuff that you can't talk about. but if you have cool stuff you do want to talk about, we could talk about it. But I I envision using I just haven't got there yet, I I think. And I think for an agency owner, I've seen my friend
Troy Dean from agency Mavericks. He's been all in on this, I guess this app called Viktor V-I-K-T-O-R. I don't know if you've seen it. I guess it's big in the agency space. And it's like I mean, the way that I perceive it, the w w the content that he puts out, it's like a Hermes, but for agency owners. That I mean, again, you'd have to go do your own research on on that. And I've seen him like loving it and he uses it for like
Client proposals and managing clients and and I see a world where like a Hermes or an agent can and maybe should do that. Like here's all the knowledge about my customer, here's their website, here's their analytics. You know, talk to me about what's happening, you know, with their with their site, with their product. follow them on social media and track the social posts that they're putting out so that I know.
They've been happy with their s like they've been pointing to their site. They've been telling people to go check you know sign up to the newsletter. Like I can see that as like a massive value add for an agency owner. I just don't know if it's if it's there yet and how accurate these agents are at this stage in the game to like really replace what I might call a project manager or a customer success person in a typical company. That makes sense.
Brendan (30:03)
Yeah. No, I mean I I mean I'm never in the business of replacing people with with agents.
Matt (30:08)
And I was gonna say that as well.
Brendan (30:10)
Yeah.
No, I mean and and I I've had that conversation with with other business owners where they're like, can I just use this Hermes agent to replace my project manager? I'm like, Well, that's not really that's not really what I'm trying to propose here. it's more like augmenting or trying to, you know, make sure they're not making mistakes and things like that. I mean I think there's a lot of a lot of the the work that project managers do where it's taking taking meeting notes and turning it into tasks.
Matt (30:22)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.
Brendan (30:40)
for your team, I think that that kind of stuff is is definitely there. and you know, making sure that there's not context drift, you know, that that you're not you know, having having stuff threads get lost and th and you know, dates get changed and and there's not, you know, stuff that's you know getting lost in in the in the the hustle and bustle of agency life that we all know about.
that I think that's an important thing that that these agents can really do. And that's something that I've seen in in my day to day life with with this Terme agent that we have in in our company. It's really helped with that kind of stuff for sure. I think that
Yeah, you're right. I mean, it you you're right to not really put your full trust in these things yet. I think that's that's an important thing. You know, th making sure that there's human in the loop thing that you're that you're still like, you know, human is approving what these agents are doing. That's that's good. I there was a there was a good article that the Shopify team put out about their agent called River a couple months ago that that lives in their Slack and it's all about how they've also just moved everything out of Slack DMs into public channel.
channels
and that's really helped the agent just like become more aware and get better context because if everything lives out in public channels and less in DMs, then it just it gets smarter and smarter and has better context about how your company works. And that's I I reckon I I recommend people read that article and and that's that's sort of how I've
you know, kind of built my Hermes agents moving forward for for my clients as well. because that's I think these things are only as good as the context you give and the tools you give right? So
Matt (32:28)
Yeah. I've been running a you know, my own social experiment, which which you know about with like a the civic tooling that I've been working on for a while, right? And it's grown beyond I I haven't really updated you on it, but you know, I had like that three one one non emergency reporting tool, potholes, et cetera, et cetera. That's been running for a while, but over the last month or so, I've had that meetings app.
And the meetings app just ingests the s the transcripts from YouTube and gives place gives people a place to search through all these meetings through the transcripts and I do the timestamp topics and all this stuff and it sort of sheds light on all like these boring long government meetings that no one's ever going to watch and then like hopefully distilling it down to, you know, simple chapters and keyword search for people to find. But over the last month or so I've
built out a pretty aggressive pipeline and now I've been experimenting with taking all of that context and content and having AI sit in the middle. I'm using God, what model am I using for the for the blog posts? I think I am using Claude for the blog posts. I have to go I don't even remember off the top of my head. But anyway, I've put WordPress in the middle.
So my my or not in the middle on the on the on the front end. and what it'll do is through cron and as these all these different apps fire, it will take that information and then post it to WordPress. And that's giving it's allowing me to just experiment, but it's allowing me to say, hey, look, if I want to build a front end for all of this content and eventually get a human in the loop, WordPress is actually a great place
platform for that because now I can generate all of this content through AI, post it on WordPress. And because I simply don't trust all of AI yet, and there are inaccuracies happening, how can I give citizens the ability to go in and like Wikipedia style, say, all right, no, that's that's the wrong name or that's the wrong street, or give people editorial access to kind of like own this AI generated news. Because it is coming.
And it's gonna come at like probably like the national and global level first before it hits like the local markets. And and this has been a very interesting experiment because it's it's interesting to see like what AI chooses as hot topics. And it's doing actually a pretty good job, but clearly getting a lot of like the names and like local vocabulary wrong. because I've been relying strictly on the YouTube transcript.
And that's been really cool to see. I have it generated an automatic podcast. And it is interesting to see every week listening to my my week ahead robot, thanks to Eleven Labs, tell me what's about to happen. And then at the every Friday, a weekly recap and listening to a robot go, Here's what happened throughout the city on Friday. And I have a friend at the local paper. He's the editor for the local paper. And
He's kind of keeping an eye on it. And I'm like, what do you think about this, Dan? And he's just like, You're literally building a thing to replace my job. And I'm like, I'm not trying to. Like, I'm trying to build a system that is going to take all this. This this is the long way of getting to like why these agents are important. There's so much shit, so much content that's happening in a business, in a local government, that you just don't have the manpower or the time to watch all of it.
And this is the major unlock for me anyway that AI can surface for you. Like at an agency, you might have a meeting for your engineering team that's going to impact your client, but your designers don't know about it, your project managers don't know about it. And if no one's paying attention, maybe AI can autonomously say, you know, Brendan said he's going to launch a new plugin for this client. The sales team said this client's leaving. Maybe we should warn everybody that says there's a disconnect here.
And, you know, n no different than in local government. You know, one meeting says this, another meeting says that. No one's paying attention, so nobody knows. So anyway, long way of getting to I definitely see an advantage for these agents.
Brendan (37:07)
Yeah. Well no, that's d I didn't even think about that. That's a very good point. You've you've you've told a very compelling story there. I might have to steal that.
Matt (37:15)
Ha ha ha.
Brendan (37:16)
That was very, very well put there, Matt. Thank you. that's no, that's exactly the that's exactly what we have sort of in our pipeline where all of our meetings get transcribed. We put the original transcript into GitHub and then we put what project it's attached to, what was said, who was there in the meeting, and w you know, basically what was said in the in the meeting and what what projects and tasks touched that meeting, right? And then
Matt (37:20)
Yeah.
Brendan (37:42)
You know, it's it's basically updated every single day at four PM, and you know, it's it's our second brain for a company, right? And that's that's updated every single day and it's it's been crucial moving forward for you know, making sure that our notion stays up to date and making sure everyone is on the same page because you're exactly right. We c not everyone is in in every meeting. So
Matt (37:53)
Yeah.
Yeah.
How how do you feed it? I mean, if you can say, like how do you feed it information to learn from? Is it all just like generated by Slack? Is that the catalyst for your Hermes agent to know everything that's happening? Or are you feeding like from all angles?
Brendan (38:25)
All angles, yeah. So it gets it gets Slack context through the Slack API and then it gets granola meeting notes, which is a meeting note so every meeting that we're in, someone's running granola and so it gets that API access. and then it has notion access through that API. So that trifecta is basically all the company information.
Matt (38:51)
Yeah. Do you give it like, new contract, new customer contracts? Like does that is that how it is customer aware or are you not at that level yet?
Brendan (39:00)
Yeah, I mean c customer customer information. No, so new projects that come in are are put into Notion. So that's what we use for projects. It's basically the CRM. you know, my the agency owner wants to to give it access to his email, but there's a lot of confidential stuff in there and I'm like, well, okay, let's hold off on that. Or let's figure out some some way to not give it everything in your email and then that yeah. So that's that's the next frontier.
Matt (39:17)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, that's stuff that I'm not you know, willing to give up. And you know, another advantage of of these agents, which I've heard a lot about and I know is a lot of promise for agency owners, is like, boy, wouldn't it be great if it would just go do like every when anything ever sounds like too good to be true, it's too good to be true. But I think like a lot of people say, I've got these agents that just like cold email everybody or cold contact people and of course like
As a salesperson in my head, I'm like, that's obviously I want that. Give it to me. And, you know, I just want to start doing that. But I just saw a report today, I think it was like forty percent of like LinkedIn posts, or they just did like a survey or some outlet did a survey where forty percent of AI or LinkedIn posts are just AI, you know, slop that these people are just unleashing on on LinkedIn. And it's just like, man, when like is that the is that the future of communication? Just more.
spam and more bots, you know, hitting your inbox? Or is there a a way that like the future of communication is contact my agent. If if I tell my agent I'm looking for something or my agent knows I have a particular pain point, then the agent lets it through to me and just have these agents talk to each other. Stop hitting my inbox. Just talk to my agent. And if my agent says, yeah, Matt's got that problem
lead generation that he's hoping for you to solve, boom, land on his land on his desk. I don't know. That's that's the hopeful world that I'm that I'm looking for. But I think a lot of folks unleashing unleashing these agents are just like, you know, taking an easy route that's just not gonna pan out for them.
Brendan (41:14)
Yeah. I mean I certainly know my inbox is just full and full of spam and LinkedIn is not only are the posts a bunch of spam, but the comments are just AI generated as well. I mean it's I don't know if there's an end in sight to it. And I I can't I just can't tell what's w I th people assure me that that this is a human post and it's like I don't believe you. So yeah.
Matt (41:26)
Yeah.
man. Yeah, the yeah, I don't know. I mean, that's a whole different conversation is like trust and content and stuff like that. And one of the things that I'm trying to do with my social experiment is to make it the next thing I'm gonna going to do is have a an AI rating. Like there's disclaimers everywhere on the site that this is AI generated content. And then if you feel the need to tell me how well it did, you know, you can hit this, you know, ranker.
you know one out of five, you know, between one to five, like what how did how did this AI bot do to try to like improve that and like feed that back to the machine? But yeah, it's a whole new social experiment. Let's just round out the episode talking about WordPress. Have you is there anything that you're looking ahead to in WordPress world going they need to do this in order to win? Is there something that you're on the sidelines going
It's getting a little bit better in terms of like the AI adoption in WordPress, but if they do this, like this is what I need as somebody who lives in the, you know, WordPress space. Is there something that's got you on the hook?
Brendan (42:55)
I mean that's a good question. I think there you know, there's been there's been quite a lot of improvements, I guess. I I I guess seven point is new since we've since we've last spoke. you know, there's there's quite a lot in there to unpack. I I don't know. I was I was trying to just connect up the the connec the g generic MCP the other day and it took me much longer than I wished. and and I don't know if that was just
Matt (43:19)
Yeah.
Brendan (43:22)
Because I don't do it enough anymore. but I I wish that that was easier to expose the abilities that are available and to get to you know, just to to get the abilities API really just have that easily available to everyone. Because that's super powerful stuff, right? I mean, you know, I don't know, like MetaBox just had a a big release where they have
The abilities API. I know that the I you know, I'm sure Gravity Forms has the abilities API exposed and other form builders have abilities API. The abilities API is great. And I think you still need to have the MCP plug in to to use those. And and I you might need to do other steps to do that, but I just think it's too it's too cumbersome right now, perhaps. I would I would like to see that become easier
Matt (44:14)
Yeah.
Brendan (44:18)
to work with, and to yeah, just in general. And I think that would that would help a lot out in terms of getting agents it working with your your WordPress site easily. So if we're if we're talking about the AI aspect of WordPress, that that that would be yeah.
Matt (44:31)
Yeah, I'm one hundred percent. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean
yeah, right I'm right there with you. That's that's a hundred percent mine. Like that's gonna be the thing that is figured out next to you know, demystify that MCP setup. We have abilities in gravity forms. We're just waiting for it's not publicly available right now, but it'll be by the end of the month. We've been just waiting for this next version of ours to to go out. But yeah, it's it's amazing. And I th I I see a lot of the
The haters, especially like the static site builders talking about like, look how fast I can build things with, you know, XYZ tool and WordPress can't do this. And I sort of chuckle every time I see that because I'm like, Well, as soon as WordPress does this, like I think you like as soon as WordPress unlocks like ease of use of setting up MCP or chipped and core, or even if it's just like a more
What do you call it? recommended plugin where you just click and install the MCP service, or they make it part of the abilities or the API page right now. Once they just like figure that part out, and then it allows all the developers to have their abilities, like Gravity Forms or your favorite plugin or whatever, like we're gonna be able to talk in English to the WordPress site and it'll do what we want it to do.
So, like all of this stuff where everyone's like, Astro does all this. Like you can't, yeah, it's so easy for me to just type in codex and build this thing. WordPress is going to do that. Like on one side, I'm like, when the hell is WordPress gonna do this? But as soon as it does, like we're all gonna be living in a world where you are just talking and building a WordPress site. I don't know why everyone's like jumping ship because of it, or because it's not here yet. It's gonna get here. It's just maybe people can't wait or they just want a new tool.
Brendan (45:55)
Yeah.
Matt (46:23)
but it's gonna be a different world, man, when you can just say, create this site, put in this d dummy content, install gravity forms, put in dummy entry gravity form stuff, create this form for me, install WooCommerce, yada yada yada. And yeah, it's like it's just we're like it feels like we're right there. but we're just haven't pushed forward yet. but I'm I'm excited for it when we do have it.
Brendan (46:48)
Yeah. And and of course
and we can do that in command line or you know, within a terminal locally very easily, I think now. and I think getting that
safely done on a VPS because I think that's probably how the majority of WordPress users are interacting with their sites. so I think that would be the you know the next unlock. I don't think most people are gonna be doing that via SSH. so that would be the next unlock maybe after that. so and and making sure that it's not just in the hands of hosting companies would probably be good because I think that
know, a lot of hosting companies probably r are wanting to monetize that and keep that on you know which is fine, they can do that, you know, fine they can do that. I don't care. But you know, I think it would be good to to have that s as some some feature in core because I think it's important for WordPress to to stay to stay relevant in that front, to keep it somewhat top of mind for people and and easier for for your average person.
Matt (47:52)
Yeah.
Yeah, I just use the app what's it called? Like the app password of course I'm gonna forget the name of it. You can set it up inside your inside your user account and I run that as a local ENV file or in my in local environment file and I can just talk to Claude that way without even like the traditional MCP setup.
And it'll just access the content and the like when I need to make big changes of content or create a page or a set of pages or update a privacy page, like it'll just go and do it. And that's just a one to one relationship, but yeah, it's it's so it's great. I don't know what the hell everyone's complaining about.
Brendan (48:41)
Yeah.
Matt (48:41)
I know what everybody's complaining about. Brennan, we're gonna wrap it up today. We're gonna wrap it up today. thanks for hanging out on the agency action podcast. You've you've hit every every show in the the WP minute stable. You're across all shows. You hold that title. Congratulations. you're I'll put your face above Mark Samansky.
Brendan (48:43)
Yeah.
What do I win?
There we go. That's that's gotta count for something.
Matt (49:09)
It's gotta count for something. Brennan, where do you want folks to go to say thanks?
Brendan (49:14)
You know, you you can find me on YouTube, you can find me on various socials, Brendan O'Connell. Search for that. Slash I don't know, whatever. dash WP. I don't know. You g I I'm not I'm not the Brendan O'Connell artist. That's that's all I know. I'm the Brendan O'Connell developer, WordPress extraordinaire, whatever it is, on on the various platforms. So
Matt (49:24)
Ha ha ha.
Yeah.
Yes. Yes. He's
You've always got some really in-depth video that that we all look forward to. thanks for sharing all the stuff that you do. Everybody else, Agency Action Podcast, part of the WP Minute Network, where every month we have we've been having member meetups for the last three-ish months. You can join as a free member by taking one of our free courses. Go to the WP Minute.com
click on the courses button, pick one of our free courses, join for free. There's a Slack button. You can join the Slack. We want you in there. And then you can meet up with us every month to talk about cool agency stuff. There's always a new topic. editor in chief Eric Karkovac runs that stuff. So join us for free in the membership in Slack. We'll see you in the next episode.