Agentic pipeline driven development with WordPress & AI with Stéphane Boisvert

About 91% of companies have adopted AI. About 6% of them can point at a benefit to the bottom line. Stéphane Boisvert thinks the gap comes from treating AI as a tool for individual engineers instead of a pipeline the whole organisation runs on. Stéphane has spent 15 years inside enterprise WordPress, at WordPress VIP and as CTO of XWP, and now consults with media and engineering teams on AI deployment as Principal WP. We get into what happens when you hand an agent your hardest ticket rather than your easiest one, why engineers idle for half the day in teams where only engineering got faster, where WordPress sits now that vibe-coded sites have taken the bottom of the market, why open source will have to ship context and reviewers alongside the code, and what change management looks like when it turns into a one-on-one conversation about somebody's job. Episode 3 of Not Just Faster Horses, conversations about deploying AI in media companies. Chapters 0:00 Cold open 0:25 Intro 1:17 Everyone thinks they are doing AI right, and it is wildly inconsistent 1:52 91% adoption, 6% seeing a result 2:21 Most people are building a faster horse 3:31 The SEO team never replied and production broke anyway 4:58 Letting revenue, ad ops and design prototype their own work 7:36 Give it your hardest ticket 8:51 Nobody hired him to cut headcount 10:29 Measuring it, "a lot more" or "night and day" 12:19 Vibe coded sites and the rising bar of open source 13:42 WordPress in the middle, and why the training data works against you 15:39 AI finding bugs in 25-year-old software 18:39 Two weeks to rebuild HubSpot 20:14 Paying enterprise pricing for 5% of a product 22:46 Build the system, not the feature 25:29 Where the junior engineer of 2030 comes from 28:21 Change management is a one-on-one job 31:32 Half the day, idle 33:11 The human in the loop fixes the AI, not the code 35:07 Open source has to ship the context too 37:14 The most eventful thing since AJAX The Code Company builds and runs WordPress platforms for publishers and media businesses. https://thecode.co/ Principal WP: https://principalwp.com/