AI isn’t just agents: my talk at WordPress Day for AI 2026

On October 24, 2026, Portugal hosted its first WordPress event dedicated entirely to AI. I was one of six featured speakers and had a 15-minute slot on the technical track to argue a quiet point: agents are not the only shape AI takes in WordPress — and vector embeddings deserve a lot more airtime than they get. Here’s the talk, the slides, the recording, and why I think this is where most WordPress site owners should start.

The event

WordPress Day for AI Faro 2026 ran on Saturday, October 24, 2026 at the AP Eva Senses hotel in Faro, Portugal. It was organised by Ruben Martins, Alvaro Gois, Marco Almeida, Fellyph Cintra and Jose Freitas — and, as The Repository reported, it was the first WordPress event in Portugal built entirely around artificial intelligence. Two parallel tracks, around a hundred attendees, one day.

I was one of six featured speakers on the WPFolks lineup, alongside Sofia Correia, Lucas Catao de Moraes, Marcel Schmitz, Filipa Freitas and Jamie Marsland — a mix of WordPress agency perspective, developer tooling, and the broader “what does AI actually mean for publishing” conversation.

My talk: AI isn’t just agents

My session ran from 12:30 to 12:45 on the technical track. Fifteen minutes is tight, but it was enough to make one argument: the “AI in WordPress” conversation has become dominated by chatbots and agents, and that’s leaving a huge, boring, extremely useful piece of the stack out of the picture.

Vector embeddings are the opposite of a chatbot. There’s no persona, no streaming reply, no “please wait while I think”. You take a piece of text, turn it into a 1,536-number vector that encodes its meaning, and from then on you can compare meanings mathematically. That’s it. From that one primitive, you unlock a lot:

• Semantic search on your WordPress site. A visitor types “cheap trainers for the gym” and finds your “Nike Pegasus running shoes under 90€” page — not just posts that happen to contain the exact word trainers.
• Content discovery that actually works. “Related posts” that are related by meaning, not just by category.
• Smarter product recommendations. Suggestions that follow intent instead of SKU codes.
• Multilingual retrieval for free. The same vector space understands “running shoes” and “sapatilhas de corrida” are the same thing.

None of this needs an agent. None of it streams. It costs a fraction of a cent per piece of content indexed, and it runs sub-30 milliseconds once it’s wired up.

Why I keep coming back to this

Agents are impressive. They’re also hard to make reliable, expensive to run at scale, and overkill for most of the places WordPress site owners actually want “a bit of AI”. A vector-embeddings pipeline sits quietly in that 90%: a one-time index of your content, and from then on it just answers queries fast.

I spent the last year building AI Search — the plugin I demoed on stage — to make this accessible to WordPress site owners without needing to touch an embedding API or a vector database. If you’re curious about the engineering behind it, I’ve written about it in depth at AI Search: WordPress Search with AI Embeddings.

If you’re a WordPress developer or a shop owner reading this: this is where I’d point your attention first, before you build an agent.

Resources

• Session page: events.wordpress.org — AI isn’t just agents
• Recording on WordPress.tv: wordpress.tv — AI isn’t just agents (Oct 2026)
• Slides (PDF): WordPress Day for AI 2026 — slides
• Event: WordPress Day for AI Faro 2026 — official site
• The plugin: AI Search on WordPress.org