August 20, 2026 — Every WordCamp needs a great send-off, and this year, we’re doing it the way our community actually talks to each other: two chairs, a real conversation, and a room full of people who get it. Think of it less like a keynote and more like the best hallway conversation of the week, just given a mic and a stage. The conversation we’ve all been having comes to the big stage. WordPress is evolving alongside AI, changing user expectations, and a rapidly shifting web. How do we keep open source thriving? What should we hold onto? What needs to change? And where do we go from here? That’s what this conversation is about. Not prepared talking points, but an honest discussion between two people who’ve spent decades helping shape, support, and steward the WordPress ecosystem from different perspectives. Even better, it doesn’t end on stage. The final 30 minutes belong to the community, with live audience Q&A. Two perspectives shaped by decades in open source. Ma.tt Mullenweg has helped guide the project since co-founding WordPress more than twenty years ago, while also leading Automattic and its portfolio of products supporting publishing, commerce, and the open web. Robert Jacobi has spent his career guiding organizations build, secure, and scale open source technologies, contributing across hosting, infrastructure, community leadership, and digital strategy. Together, they bring two distinct perspectives on the opportunities, challenges, and decisions shaping WordPress today. It’s a conversation grounded in years of experience, but one that’s ultimately about where the project goes from here and what that means for everyone building with it. The best conversations don’t end when the session does. By the time Wednesday afternoon arrives, you’ll have spent four days learning new skills, meeting people from across the community, and sharing ideas that continue long after the event ends. This conversation is a chance to zoom out and connect those experiences to the bigger picture. Expect an honest discussion about open source, the evolving web, AI, community, and the future of WordPress. Then, the conversation opens up to you. The final 30 minutes are dedicated to audience Q&A, giving you the opportunity to ask questions, share perspectives, and be part of the discussion that closes out WordCamp US 2026.

August 20, 2026 — AI is quickly becoming part of everyday work for WordPress teams, but in many cases we are still using it in a very limited way: asking isolated questions, retrying prompts, and manually feeding context into every conversation. Whats next is not simply using better prompts. It is learning how to delegate. In this session I will check how agentic development, is a new way of structuring repositories, workflows, and AI tooling so coding agents can operate with memory, reusable processes, and external awareness instead of acting like one-time chat assistants. I will look at why this changes the way modern WordPress teams think about development, delivery, documentation, and internal knowledge sharing, and why the competitive advantage in the near future will not come from access to AI itself, but from how well teams learn to organize AI execution.

August 20, 2026 — Two clients showed up with the same UX problem: visitors land on a complex site and can’t find the right path forward. One project ended up shipping a GPT-powered search block. The other shipped a deterministic, persona-driven block on rails, no AI at all. Both worked. Neither was wrong. This talk walks through both production engagements side by side. The AI search block, built for a community college’s 643-course catalog, comes with the production-hardening list nobody mentions in the demos: rate limits, kill switches, prompt-injection mitigations, token ceilings, and cost predictability. The persona-by-goal Mosaic block, built for an industrial services company after their legal team rejected an AI chatbot SOW, comes with a different lesson: deterministic UX, full editorial control, zero model cost. Attendees leave with a framework for when an AI block belongs in a project and when a deterministic block does the same job better, plus a reusable persona-by-goal pattern they can adapt on their next engagement.

August 20, 2026 — Plugins are how most WordPress users solve problems, and for good reason. But there’s a point where adding another one starts to hurt. Performance gets shaky, updates break things, and your site ends up depending on a chain of small tools nobody fully understands. This talk is about recognizing that point. How do you tell when a workflow has outgrown its plugin? How do you move that logic somewhere else without losing what made WordPress easy in the first place? We’ll work through real examples, like a membership flow that started as three plugins and became one automation, and a CRM sync that stopped breaking once it left the plugin world. Most WordPress talks assume the right answer is always to find the right plugin. This one is honest about when the right answer is to stop adding plugins.

August 20, 2026 — Product builds. Partnerships open doors. Most companies treat these as separate functions that meet quarterly to align. Deals close on promises the roadmap doesn’t reflect, integrations ship that no partner actually asked for, customer feedback dies in notes that nobody on the product side ever sees, and the next big partnership opportunity fades away because nobody connected the dots in time. The presenters have been working this loop together for years. They’ve seen what happens when the loop holds and what happens when it breaks, and they’re shaping how a business operates around that hard-won pattern. In this talk, they’ll walk through partnership decisions made without product context and what they cost, product decisions made without partnership context and what those cost, and key moments where the loop worked and value compounded. They’ll talk candidly about AI as a tool running the loop with them: surfacing patterns across partner conversations and product signals, drafting the first version of things humans then sharpen, and making it possible for a small team to hold more of the big picture at once. The argument isn’t that AI replaces either role. It’s that AI, used well, makes the loop between them faster, sharper, and harder to drop. Expect concrete examples, honest failure stories, and a working model you can take back to your own team whether you sit on the product side, the business side, or somewhere in between.

August 20, 2026 — AI agents don’t browse the web the way humans do. They need to read it, query it, take actions on it. A new layer of the web is being built right now – one where sites aren’t just destinations for human visitors but interfaces that AI systems can interact with directly. WordPress, which already powers 43% of the web, has a real structural role to play here. But it requires the ecosystem to think differently about what a WordPress site actually is. In this talk I’ll dig into what the agentic web actually means in practice – what agents need from a site, how MCP and the WordPress AI infrastructure being built in core (WP AI Client, MCP Adapter, Abilities API) fit in, and what developers, agencies, and site owners should be thinking about now before this shift accelerates..

August 20, 2026 — Most agencies still update WordPress sites the same way regardless of risk: backup, update, then click through some pages hoping nothing broke. That approach burns hours, scales badly, and still misses the layout break a client catches first. This session presents a rock-solid maintenance workflow.

August 20, 2026 — Block themes give WordPress an opportunity to become more than a publishing tool or a place where finished designs are implemented. With the right theme structure, patterns, templates, and brand guidelines, a WordPress site can become the source of truth for how new pages and layouts should be built. That matters even more as agencies begin using AI in their build process. AI is useful when it can work from existing pieces: approved patterns, real content, design tokens, reusable blocks, and known template structures. It is much less useful when it starts every landing page from scratch. In this session, we’ll look at how agencies can treat WordPress as a practical design system for real client work. We’ll cover how block themes, patterns, `theme.json`, reusable layouts, and clear content structure can give both humans and AI better building blocks. WooCommerce will be used as a case study because store pages make the stakes obvious: product, cart, and checkout experiences need brand consistency, editing flexibility, and reliable structure. Attendees will leave with a clearer model for using block themes as a foundation for agency workflows, client handoff, and AI-assisted page building without losing control of the design system.

August 20, 2026 — The creator economy is rapidly evolving beyond sponsored posts and display ads. Today’s most successful creators are building diversified, community-driven businesses powered by owned platforms, strategic partnerships, and commerce-first content. As both the COO of Tastemaker Conference — a leading conference for food creators and digital entrepreneurs — and a longtime creator myself, I’ve had a front-row seat to how the industry is changing. In this session, I’ll share what brands, creators, and audiences are prioritizing in 2026 and how WordPress creators can position themselves for long-term growth. Attendees will learn: Why creator commerce is becoming more valuable than traditional influencer marketing How creators are building sustainable income beyond ad revenue The role WordPress plays in audience ownership and long-term business stability What brands are actually looking for in creator partnerships today How community and trust are becoming a creator’s greatest competitive advantage in the AI era Practical ways creators can future-proof their businesses Whether you’re a blogger, content creator, entrepreneur, marketer, or WordPress professional, this session will provide actionable insights into the next era of digital business and creator-led commerce. Audience Takeaways Understand where the creator economy is heading Learn how to diversify revenue streams Discover why owned platforms matter more than ever Gain practical strategies for building trust-driven creator businesses Learn how creators can stand out in an increasingly AI-saturated internet”

August 20, 2026 — Accessibility in WordPress is often misunderstood as something that can be solved by simply installing a plugin. While plugins can be helpful, true accessibility requires understanding how themes, content, design choices, navigation, forms, images, headings, and interactive elements affect real users. In this session, I will explain what real WordPress accessibility looks like beyond automated tools and quick fixes. Attendees will learn common accessibility issues found on WordPress websites, how to identify them, and practical steps they can take to make their sites more usable and compliant with WCAG and Section 508 standards. This presentation is designed for WordPress site owners, designers, developers, content creators, and anyone who wants to build websites that work better for everyone.