Issue #199 Loop WP

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #199 of Loop WP!

Last time, we looked at the next steps for Merchants and Developers in light of James’s, Beau Lebens's, and Matt Mullenweg’s interviews to better prepare for Agentic Commerce.

This week is about something big coming on April 9th, WordPress 7.0! The foundations for the future of WooCommerce and AI will be laid.

Let’s go! 👇

WordPress 7.0 launches Phase 3 of Gutenberg, and with it ships the foundational AI infrastructure layer, specifically the building blocks of:

Some of these features have been in development for a while, and some have already been implemented (we discussed these in Issue 167).

🚨 There are also some hosting requirements worth flagging before April 9th:

WordPress 7.0 is infrastructure, not a finished product.

James LePage (Automattic AI lead, WordPress Core AI co-lead) was clear about this in his Do The Woo interview, which we covered in Issues 197 and 198.

A Shopify Sidekick-style AI assistant for WooCommerce is extension territory for now (those of you who read Loop WP know I’m a big Sidekick fan).

The reasoning makes sense: a shallow core version would be underwhelming.

The great version needs deep integrations:

What WordPress 7.0 does is lay the foundations so those extensions created for WooCommerce can exist and actually work well.

If you've been following the last few issues, you know we've been tracking three competing standards for how AI agents buy things on the internet:

By shipping the MCP Adapter on April 9th, WordPress are betting on the open standard, but support for the others will be provided via adapters as they mature.

🚨 WooCommerce has confirmed plans to support both ACP and UCP so merchants can benefit as those markets shift. Although OpenAI have already changed plans for ACP, more on that later.

I covered UCP back in Issue #190 and ACP in Issue #192 if you want to go deeper on either.

🤔 Honestly? Not quite, but the door is opening.

When WooCommerce 10.7 launches on April 14th, it doesn't deliver a polished AI assistant that merchants can use on day one (in fact, it won’t ship one of those at all).

What it delivers is something arguably more important: a stable, open foundation that the ecosystem can build on because it is built on WordPress core.

The Abilities API. The MCP Adapter. The WP AI Client. These are the primitives that make everything else possible.

👀 Watch out for the WooCommerce extension releases in the weeks after April 14th.

That's when things start to get really interesting for WooCommerce and AI.

I'd love to hear your thoughts {{first_name|friend}}.

That’s it for this week. 👋

Paul Charlton of WPTuts has released a video called: “Web Design Isn’t Dead—You’re Just Watching Surface-Level AI Demos“.

In the video, Paul calls out the massive gap in reality between what we are being shown by AI bros and influencers and the important implementation, infrastructure steps, and more that are being missed.

You should watch the video below. 👇

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be digging into Miles and the new release of Ollie Pro’s WooCommerce elements, so stay tuned!

🚨 Next week is a very special issue of Loop WP as we reach Issue 200. 🎉

That’s about 4 years of writing, and for Loop WP, it’s actually longer.

Next week’s issue will be a little bit more self-indulgent as I look back on Loop WP.

This week's excellent and insightful WordPress News & Tips:

If you have a question about this email or WordPress, please reply, and I will respond as soon as possible.

👋 Until next time,