August 20, 2026 — Hook: Every dev on your team has their own pile of AI prompts and one-off scripts — which means every hard-won lesson stays trapped with the person who learned it, and the rest of the team keeps paying to learn it again. What if your team’s AI tooling lived in a versioned, reviewed, CI-enforced repo — the same way your plugins do? Take-away: a concrete starter pattern for a team-skills repo + the three policies that make it stick.

August 20, 2026 — Earlier this year I was the sole developer on a new WordPress site build. AI tools moved the work along, but only because I spent the project teaching them how to work in my way – correcting mistakes, capturing what I learned, and feeding it back so they wouldn’t repeat them over and over again. This talk is about that practice: teaching your AI tools your process as you go, so they get better instead of just faster. Two actual instances from the project as examples: A mega-menu nav with a dead click zone where the AI’s first move was a complicated JavaScript event handler – the actual fix was a few CSS utility classes on the link. A tangled Tailwind class string that smelled wrong before I could name why – four AI agents running in parallel helped me diagnose it, clean it, and codify a rule that’s held up since. What I’ve learned and my process improvements go beyond just writing code: Asking for HTML output instead of markdown when richer visualizations are helpful. Dispatching multiple models to get different viewpoints for comparison and brainstorming solutions. Keeping the lessons I’ve taught the tools portable so I don’t lose the learning when I migrate to a new model. My processes are still evolving and improving. This talk gives a snapshot of where I’m at now and attendees will leave with a new set of tools and perspectives to improve their own AI interactions, grounded in actual project work on a shipped site.

August 20, 2026 — AI is now embedded in plugins, themes, content pipelines, and client sites across the WordPress ecosystem. Most WordPress professionals have focused on what AI can do. Almost nobody has focused on what it requires of you legally This talk covers the compliance gap that agencies, freelancers, and product builders are about to run into: GDPR and data residency implications of AI tools processing user content, consent requirements when AI is involved in personalization or communication, the EU AI Act and what it means for WordPress businesses serving European clients, and disclosure obligations that are already in effect in some jurisdictions. These are not hypothetical future risks. They are current, and the WordPress ecosystem is largely unprepared for them. Attendees will leave with a practical checklist for auditing their own sites and client sites, an understanding of which AI use cases carry the most legal exposure, and clarity on what questions to bring to their legal counsel.

August 20, 2026 — Join Waymo’s Amanda Ventura and host David Levine for a fireside chat about earning public trust in AI that moves beyond screens and into the physical world.

Amanda works on Waymo’s public affairs team at the intersection of artificial intelligence and community engagement. By working directly with road safety and accessibility advocates, her team is helping shape a future of safer, more inclusive travel powered by autonomous driving.

David Levine is a member of the WordPress Core AI Team and Director of Growth Engineering at rtCamp. He brings more than a decade of experience working with nonprofits, NGOs, local governments, and organizations building technology people can rely on.

Together, Amanda and David explore questions relevant to anyone building with emerging technology:

How do you earn trust from people who did not ask for the technology?
How should communities help shape the products affecting their lives?
What does it take to maintain trust when safety and accessibility are at stake?