WordPress 7.0 shipped in May with AI features managed from a central hub in the admin, alongside the first serious admin redesign in over a decade. Plenty of teams are now asking whether to turn it on.
Our position on AI has not changed with this release. We use it heavily for the repetitive parts of building and testing, and not at all for deciding what something should say.
Where it genuinely helps
- The unglamorous metadata. Alt text, meta descriptions, internal link suggestions across a few thousand posts. Work nobody has ever had time to do properly.
- Editorial drudgery. Summaries, tagging, tidying formatting on imported content.
- First drafts of structure. An outline someone then rewrites.
Where it costs more than it saves
- Anything that carries your voice. Generated copy reads as generated, and your customers have now seen enough of it to recognise it instantly.
- Anything factual about your business. Prices, availability, specifications. Confidently wrong is worse than absent.
- Volume for its own sake. Forty generated posts will not outperform four good ones, and they make the site worse to maintain.
Use it on the work nobody wanted to do. Not on the work that makes you sound like you.
The practical question: turn it on now?
If your site is already on 7.0 and you have a clear use, yes, with a rule about what gets published without a human rewriting it. If you are still on 6.9, updating is the priority and AI is a later decision. And if nobody has agreed what it may be used for, agree that first. The technology is not the risk. Unreviewed output going live is.
The short version
Genuinely useful for metadata and drudgery at scale. Not a content strategy. Decide the rules before you switch it on.