August 19, 2026 — AI is improving every day, giving us tools that surface security vulnerabilities in our software faster than ever before. But there’s a catch. Those same tools are available to everyone, including attackers. It feels like every day a new supply chain attack rolls across your feed. Bad actors are using AI to discover vulnerabilities, steal credentials, and inject malware into packages consumed by millions. After years of skating by on suboptimal dependency hygiene, many projects are now paying the price. So how do we protect ourselves from becoming the next headline? What does this shift mean for a massive open source project like WordPress, with its sprawling ecosystem of plugins, themes, and contributors? And what’s now non-negotiable on our security checklist in an age where AI finds the vulnerabilities first?

August 19, 2026 — In a lot of organizations, there’s one person who owns WordPress. They didn’t necessarily choose the job, they just became the person who knows the most. That means fielding every request, managing vendors, and fighting for every budget dollar while translating technical decisions for people who don’t speak your language. This session is for that person. We’ll cover how to communicate the value of your work to stakeholders who don’t understand it, how to manage agency and freelance relationships so you stay in control, and how to make a case for resources when leadership sees the website as a cost center. You’ll leave with practical frameworks, real language you can use with your team, and the reassurance that you’re not alone.

August 19, 2026 — [Joint presentation by the Agency Project Manager and Tech Lead, and the Client.] What happens when you hand a global industrial manufacturer’s website over to an AI and ask it to speak fluent German, Japanese, and beyond, all within WordPress? This session is a candid, data-driven deep dive into a real-world project for Standex Electronics, a precision engineering company operating across multiple international markets. We focus on integrating OpenAI’s translation capabilities into a multilingual WordPress multisite. We’ll walk you through exactly why the team chose to explore AI translation as a serious contender alongside well-known tools, and what the architecture of that decision actually looked like in production. We put the tools head-to-head, and we’ll share accuracy benchmarks comparing OpenAI against well-known translation platforms. The things that surprised us, the ones that didn’t, and the meaningful gaps that only revealed themselves when native speaking colleagues, not developers, were the target audience. Industrial and technical language is its own dialect, and machine learning doesn’t always get the memo. We’ll share a collection of our favourite “technically correct, and completely wrong” translations – the moments where a direct translation produced something that ranged from mildly confusing to a genuinely hilarious problem, and what each tool revealed about the difference between translating words and translating intent. Beyond the laughs, we’ll get into the operational reality: how long it actually takes to push translation updates, run human review cycles, and maintain consistency across a multisite at scale. We’ll share honest timings from the Standex project, from content change to live translated page, you’ll also hear how OpenAI was woven directly into a leading multilingual WordPress content management workflow, the integration decisions made along the way, and what the team would do differently if starting from scratch today. This session is presented by three people who lived it together: the Project Manager, the Developer who built the integration, and the client from Standex Electronics who commissioned it and trusted the output. They have the kind of candid working relationship that makes for an honest conversation – the kind you don’t usually get at a conference. Whether you’re a developer scoping a multilingual build, a project manager navigating client expectations around AI, or a digital leader wondering whether machine translation is ready for your audience, this session will give you the real picture, stats, stumbles, and all.

August 19, 2026 — Every WordPress agency lives or dies by the next contract. Outreach, follow-ups, qualification, proposals. They sit on the founder’s desk and have done so for as long as agencies have existed. That part is changing first. AI agents now run entire pieces of the sales process on their own, without supervision. In this session, I share examples from my own work and how I automate my processes and standards with AI agents. What runs reliably in production and what fails, with a path you can follow without losing your voice.

August 19, 2026 — AI Search isn’t just SEO’s problem anymore – it’s everyone’s. From content teams to developers, PPC to partnerships, the shift to AI-native discovery affects your entire business. This session is your wake-up call: why you’re probably already behind, what’s changed, and the quick wins you can implement now to catch up.

August 19, 2026 — Every few years, something new shows up at your WordPress site that isn’t a person. Search engines, mobile browsers, social platforms — each time, the ecosystem adapted. But those were one-way streets: your site pushed content out to be indexed or previewed, and that was the end of the conversation. Agentic commerce flips the script. The buyer’s AI agent never opens a browser, never sees a checkout page, never clicks “Pay” — yet the transactional plumbing still has to work. For the first time at real scale, your store isn’t just sending data out, it’s taking instructions back. An AI agent submits a cart, requests a price calculation, initiates a payment — and your store has to accept, validate, and follow through, with real money on the line. That raises the same trust question that comes up every time a new commerce channel emerges: when there’s no UI, where does trust live? The answer, as it’s always been, is infrastructure — trusted payment providers, buyer protection, and fraud detection doing the heavy lifting, just as they did when people were first nervous about typing a credit card into a website. This talk explores what it looks like to build for that reality — walking through real implementations using custom REST endpoints in WooCommerce payment plugins, as a first step toward open agentic commerce, where any AI agent can walk up to any WooCommerce store and complete a transaction.

August 19, 2026 — Whether we’re modernizing an old personal blog or migrating hundreds of thousands of existing posts from another CMS, using WordPress in 2026 means converting our content to Blocks. The “Convert to Blocks” button in the editor works well enough for one post, but if we have dozens or hundreds, what can we do to make the process less manual and more powerful? How can we migrate a site’s content directly into full block patterns, without losing the columns and structure it had before? In this talk I will share my experience leading a Sitecore-to-WordPress migration for a global nonprofit, and how full-site editing and AI are reshaping site migrations. We’ll show how we leverage AI to analyze and understand the structure of an existing site, the decisions and process we use to map that content into WordPress data structures, the strengths and limitations of agents and WordPress MCP for restructuring content, and how we build in-editor tools to let humans customize and enhance bulk-migrated content where it matters most. We’re excited to share practical lessons from bringing an entire project directly into block patterns and templates, along with takeaways about block transforms, block bindings, and balancing automation with editorial oversight… lessons that can apply to WordPress projects of any scale!

August 19, 2026 — Are you struggling to grow a loyal community because building engagement funnels feels too technical or complex? In this session, we will share an accessible, no-code blueprint that empowers anyone to seamlessly connect with readers and understand how different types of visitors interact with your content. By exploring simple ways to reduce friction and gather actionable insights, you’ll learn how to turn casual readers into a dedicated community.

August 19, 2026 — Every web agency has been there: a client’s site goes down at the worst possible moment, support is unreachable, or a security incident turns into a client-relationship crisis, and the root cause is a hosting provider that was never up to the job. Picking the right host matters, but in a market where every provider claims to be reliable, secure, and agency-friendly, how do agencies sort signal from noise? This session talks about two things: the Secure Hosting Alliance (SHA) and its trust seal program, a practical, standards-based framework designed to help WordPress agencies identify hosting partners that meet a clear, defensible bar for quality, transparency, and security; and how agencies can leverage this trust to better market to their clients and earn a premium on their services. We’ll walk through the real-world concerns agencies have: from control panel access and PHP version control to abuse response and terms of service clarity. We’ll show how to address each one. We’ll also discuss how hosting providers that earn the SHA trust seal benefit from the association, and how that alignment of incentives creates a better ecosystem for everyone in the WordPress community.

August 19, 2026 — We used to think the hard part of digital work was consistency: building reusable components, scalable systems, and reliable patterns that teams could ship quickly and safely. Today, modern tooling has made production almost too easy, generating interfaces, layouts, and variations almost as fast as we can think of them. The harder problem is what we optimized away in the process: intent. As systems scale and tooling matures, it becomes easier to move fast without asking whether we’re still solving the right problem. Our components and tokens may remain visually coherent, but drift emerges at the level of meaning, purpose, and direction. In this talk, we’ll discuss how design systems must evolve from static libraries into living feedback systems, shaped as much by governance, communication, and organizational learning as by tokens or components. We’ll look at how intent gets lost at scale, why “doing the thing right” is not the same as “doing the right thing” and what it means to build stewardship practices that help teams notice and correct drift over time. Attendees will leave with a different way of thinking about design systems: not just as tools for consistency, but as infrastructure for ongoing decision-making in complex, changing environments.