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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's interview with Hosting.com's Cory Miller. Cory stopped by to fill us in on Hosting.com's new agency partner program and discuss the evolving role of agencies in the age of AI. Hosting.com is a pillar sponsor of the WP Minute. Now you can catch the entire episode over on our WP Minute Plus channel.
Visit the WP Minute dot com for all the details.
Matt (00:33)
So I started to eat the the the dog food of like AI taking away jobs. And I'll try to frame this as quickly as possible. but you know, I I built that snowplow app for my local community, won all kinds of awards, got all these things from like local politicians, which you know was a lot of grandstanding on their part, but whatever I was like televising the mayoral's State of the Union speech, all this stuff.
And you know, as the entrepreneur in me as like, well, let's not stop there. Let's see what I can do next. One to serve my community and and two, like let's exercise that entrepreneur brain, part of my brain. So we, you know, I I transferred it over to a three one one reporting system, right? Potholes, down trees, flooding, illegal dumping, like all this stuff. And really started to try to work this into the local government, like, hey.
Hey guys, you all know who I am now. You saw me build this thing. You awarded me this thing. And I've now built this, which we don't have for the city. And people want. They want to report the potholes. They want to report the damages throughout the city. And that's quickly got me to learn how slow local government moves. but that's not the end of the tale. The end of the tale is I've been going back and forth with the new DCM director and
He messaged me the other day and he's like, hey Matt, he's like, the IT team wants to build their own. And they're building their own now. They're building their own app. And this is through, of course, AI. Much like I am using AI to assist me to build this software. I mean, having a background of software, of course, and understanding what consumers need from a product. But now staring down that barrel of, my customer, they're going to build it themselves now.
Because of the same tool that I used to build it. And now they are going, you know what? We're savvy enough now to do this. And that's that's that's something I always knew was coming with AI. And it sort of deflated a little bit. But I'm curious, like as you talk to agencies, have you had them sort of state the same thing where they were gonna go sell a WordPress website to somebody and that client said, you know what, just gonna do it myself.
And we can unpack what the challenge really is moving forward, but I'm just curious, like, have you heard like Boots on the Ground, agencies go, Hey man, we're afraid of AI. It's it's we're losing jobs because of it. Have you started to hear anything like that?
Cory Miller (03:10)
Not so far. And I think because of one thing we both know really well, which is you need that expertise. you and I have product expertise. We've built and shipped products. We've built and shipped communities. We've done those types of things. And I think there are always going to be the do-it-yourselfers, and that's awesome. But I think at the end of the day, they want to major in what they do best and hand off to the experts, at least for this season of time that I think is is bigger.
Because as we both know, we can have AI do all these things, but there's certain things that you still need some you you need to know to say, put in some security, you know, redo this through security protocols, best practices that we have like in WordPress and on the internet and different things that I I don't think and and also at the end of the day, it's like this will help this technology will help me get there faster and maybe cheaper, but I still need someone to hold my hand right now. Now the technology is gonna evolve on that.
all that but I think we still need guides. We need people that know what they're doing to help us, even with the proposition we can save time and money doing these type of things. So like the team you're talking about with city government, you know, I put most WordPress agency teams against virtually any of those, especially the smaller governments and things, but they can do things. They know things. They have a a a wider area to operate in, but they're embedded in
the thing that they're doing, not a team tacked on to a bigger company that really or a government or whatever that doesn't really know what the ins and outs are. And I think that's where the opportunity becomes for our agencies or freelancers or consultants to be those guides. I mean, if you really base down what we do, we're technologists. We understand how to use technology. We're the ones bleeding edge, testing, breaking, using things. And I think there's
gonna be a place is a place, gonna be a place for those experts to come alongside and help guide.
Matt (05:10)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I could sit here in Grandstand all day that the IT team and local city government should not be building the app.
Cory Miller (05:18)
Yeah.
Matt (05:18)
you know, there's plenty of other things that they have to maintain and at and at what point do they stop? Right. And I don't know, it's it's interesting. I I it I'm not heartbroken over it or anything like that. The deal the deal isn't done yet anyway. but it was sort of nice to exercise like, you know, the place that I live, I can use it as a case study.
But at like what point does it stop for internal IT teams? because this is actually interesting, like to think, like put aside local government and tax spending and and stuff like that. Should they be doing this? Should they not? But just like, where does the IT team stop with them going, we have a vendor to build an app? we'll do it. we have a vendor for an email server, we'll make our own email server. Like, at what point does an IT team armed with AI go
there's gotta be clear division here. Like I can't we can't be building an app, we can't be building a web server, we can't be building the website because we just have so much what what about our other duties in the company that we have to maintain? so
Cory Miller (06:21)
Exactly.
Matt (06:22)
that so it's just a it's an interesting point, and I think it's an exercise to see how AI how people balance AI, I guess, as as time moves on. I think if the agency is afraid of losing the business because of AI.
On the other side, AI augments their own team to do more. So it's like, where does that balance come in? And and we don't know until we live through it over the next five years. I see how all this stuff settles.