Why I'm Glad WordPress Just Got AI

WordPress 7.0 shipped this week. The headline most people are running with is "WordPress has AI now." Fair, but slightly off. The thing I've been thinking about all week isn't the AI. It's the Abilities API underneath it.

Stay with me.

What actually shipped

Three new pieces in core. The Connectors API and the WP AI Client are mostly plumbing. They let plugins talk to OpenAI or Anthropic or Gemini without each one inventing its own settings page. Useful, but not what I want to write about.

The Abilities API is the one. It's a registry where any plugin can describe what it can do (woocommerce/fetch-orders, your-shipping-plugin/quote-rates, whatever) in a structured, permissioned format that other software can read. Including AI agents. Including us.

I've been doing eCommerce integrations for years. Every time we wire Storita into a new plugin, we spend half a day figuring out the conventions of whoever built it, what fields they return, how their permissions work, whether their docs match reality. (They rarely do.) Multiply that across the WooCommerce ecosystem and you start to see the problem.

Abilities collapses that. One contract. Every plugin that adopts it gets read the same way.

What this means for our customers

Storita's job is to answer the questions that actually keep store owners up at night. Where did the revenue go last month. Which SKU is bleeding margin. What needs restocking before Friday. Those answers depend on us seeing into the store, and right now we see what WooCommerce's REST API hands us, plus what we've manually integrated beyond that.

With Abilities, the ceiling moves. As plugins in the Woo ecosystem adopt the spec, we get a clean lane into shipping, fulfilment, inventory, subscriptions, loyalty. The long tail of stuff that lives outside Woo core but matters a lot to operators. The copilot gets smarter not because we wrote more code, but because more of your store became legible.

That's the part I'm excited about. Not "Storita uses AI." Storita already uses AI. The fact that the data underneath the AI is about to get richer and more uniform, that's the real win.

Two things we're working on

First, we're treating Abilities as a real data source. Not a side project. As Woo plugins start exposing them, we'll consume them. You shouldn't have to ask us to support a new plugin; if it speaks the standard, Storita reads it.

Second, we're looking at the other direction too. The new WP-side AI can hand off questions to external systems, and Storita is exactly the kind of system you'd want to hand a real operational question to. Picture this: you're already in WP-admin, you ask "why is conversion down this week," and the answer comes back from the copilot that actually knows. That one's worth building.

The honest bit

WordPress made AI a first-class citizen of the CMS. That's a big deal for the platform. The bigger deal for us, and for the store owners we work with, is the standardised data layer that came with it. The AI is the marketing story. The Abilities API is the engineering story. We care about the engineering story.

More soon.

— Arik