In this conversation, Brian and Brendan O’Connell explore the evolving landscape of WordPress, automation, and AI. They discuss Brendan’s journey into WordPress, the excitement of building and tinkering online, and the integration of AI with automation tools. The conversation delves into practical applications of these technologies, the future of WordPress in an AI-driven world, and the importance of adapting to new trends in digital marketing and SEO. Brendan shares insights on various automation platforms and emphasizes the need for continuous learning in a rapidly changing environment.
Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Automation and AI in WordPress
02:56 The Evolution of WordPress and Personal Journeys
05:30 Understanding Automation and AI Workflows
08:13 Integrating AI with Automation Tools
10:55 Practical Applications of AI in WordPress
13:49 The Future of WordPress in an AI-Driven World
16:22 Navigating the Changing Landscape of Search Engines
19:27 Learning and Adapting to New Technologies
22:14 Conclusion and Resources for Further Learning
Brian (00:00)
So today I got Brendan O’Connell. We’re gonna be talking about automation, AI, what WordPress people are doing to kind of like grow these other skills. I’ve gotten super into it. I know Brendan’s gotten super into it and has done some really cool videos that I think we’ll talk about. But maybe Brendan, you could just like give us a little overview of who you are and your experience getting into WordPress.
Brendan O’Connell (00:20)
Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Brian. Brendan O’Connell here. based in San Diego, California, and I got into WordPress probably about 10 years ago. And really it was because I just needed a job at the time. I was out of grad school where I studied history and I was like really into digital databases and digital archives and data and stuff like that. So it was kind of a natural thing. And I really just started as a marketing person, but really quickly got into sort of
data manipulation and APIs and of course WordPress. So been doing that. And you know, I’m also of the generation of people that like downloaded their own music and tinkered with their own MySpace page and learned a little bit of code that way. So I’m kind of a natural tinkerer and just really into like open source stuff. yeah.
Brian (01:08)
Yeah, I was thinking like all the things we have in common, because we’re both in Southern California and I guess we both like studied humanities at school and had like no, no technical formal education before this and stuff. And like you said, just like building fun, weird things on the internet back when like the internet was for fun, weird people and not for maybe everybody.
Brendan O’Connell (01:30)
Yeah, I know it’s crazy. I do feel kind of old now that it’s so many decades now that I’ve been using the internet. It’s changed a little bit, but it’s also stayed kind of the same at the end of the day. It attracts weirdness and people thinking outside the box a little bit.
Brian (01:46)
Yeah, definitely. And I feel like that’s what drew me to WordPress in the beginning, is it felt like it was for weirdos a little bit. Like people were publishing, you you would make a site like dedicated to, you know, anime or something. Like it would just, it wasn’t like, you know, like now it’s like WordPress, we’re, you know, business and like the New York Times and you know, we all run on WordPress. But like back then it did sort of feel like it was kind of weird and it feels like that’s.
like at its core WordPress really wants to just be like weird, but like everybody around is like, no, actually I’m using you for my career, so don’t be weird, like I need you to be reliable. And it’s like a weird balance, you know?
Brendan O’Connell (02:22)
Yeah, it’s sort of the sassification of the entire internet, it seems, but it is what it is.
Brian (02:28)
Yeah. Do you still get excited to jump on the internet and kind of build things and mess around? Like, is there a place you’re getting like, yeah.
Brendan O’Connell (02:35)
absolutely. I mean, I think
that’s what really keeps me coming back every day is like, I wake up with that like Christmas like energy where I’m like, I get to unwrap my presents and see what, see what else is under the tree today. and, really that, kind of momentum keeps me going day to day. So for sure, that’s, that’s a big part of how I got into this and why I like it. Cause there’s always something new to learn.
Brian (02:56)
Yeah. Speaking of something new to learn, I’ve been trying to get into automation, automation AI, like to me have like kind of glued together in my mind a little bit because you kind of like, you can do, you can have, you can automate things and you can talk to, you know, a chat bot, you know, for like in chat, you’d be here, something like that. But like, I think where people start to see real powers, like the combination of the two of like, I’m going to use AI workflows and I’m going to automate it and stuff like that. And I never.
was a big automator in my life? Like I never really sat down and like did like Apple scripts or like Siri workflows or like anything. Like I just never cared about automating things, but like a lot of developers, that’s like a big deal. Like, I automate everything. How efficient can you get stuff? All that sort of thing. Was automation like a thing you were into before?
Brendan O’Connell (03:43)
Yeah, I think like workflow optimization was something that always was kind of like, I didn’t know what it was, but it was like something I would try to achieve. And so just not wanting to repeat myself, not wanting to make mistakes and not wanting to, you know, like waste that time. What I saw as like wasted time, doing the same thing over and over again. So I think that was definitely part of, you know, the discovery of like APIs and how to, you know, dynamically paginate something. And that kind of stuff was like,
wow, I can save this much time and then go do stuff that I also like to do.
Brian (04:15)
Yeah, so what kind of things are you doing with it now? Where are you starting to see, okay, this is paying off the time investment? Because there’s a huge barrier to entry to learn all this stuff. It’s a whole new language. Where do you even start?
Brendan O’Connell (04:30)
Definitely, yeah. I mean, you can start with just looking around you and looking at, if you have several clients that are asking for the same thing, that might start to put off ideas in your head of like, how can I automate this? But I mean, beyond that, there’s just so many good course, know, on YouTube or various, you know, streaming platforms and stuff like that, that you can just learn this stuff. And once you really get one automation platform under your belt, you kind of get how they all work.
There’s going to be quirks and differences between them all. But at the end of the day, once you get kind of the general visual language of what you’re doing, it’s a pretty low code solution. So I see it as something people can just jump into and learn. A lot of these tools are also free to get started and have pretty generous plans that you can spin up. And you also don’t have to self-host these. mean, that’s one of the benefits, I think, that you can self-host a lot of these. But it makes it pretty easy to get in.
at a cloud level that you can just spin something up and get to work.
Brian (05:30)
Yeah, and there’s the kind of big ones I see is like Zapier is this like automation platform. It’s kind of like, I, you know, if this trigger happens, do this and it integrates with like, I don’t know, everything, like all your Google stuff, all your WordPress stuff, all your, you know, e-commerce or your newsletter stuff or any of sort of stuff. And it’s kind of like, I feel like Zapier was like around in the past, like pre AI, and it was just like an, you know, a cool automation platform. And then like,
in the last like maybe two years, now that AI is like, hey, you can actually automate like harder things, things that require like human thought that you originally didn’t think could be automated now can. And like, I’m seeing like Zapier trying to catch up with that a little bit. And then like other tools that maybe are a little more AI centric like N8n I think is like a big one or Make I guess is kind of somewhere in the middle.
But I agree with you, it’s just a mindset. Once you learn it, you’re kind of like, yeah, I kind of get how to put little nodes together and take this and then make it do this and then make it do this and then make it do this and all that. Do you have a preferred one that you’re leaning into now?
Brendan O’Connell (06:40)
Yeah. I mean, you started this conversation with talking about how you kind of marry AI and automation together. And in my mind, they kind of are now too, just because of what I’ve been using, but you mentioned N8N. It’s a fantastic one to really sink your teeth into. it’s probably more for power users in a way, but I don’t want that to scare people off. But you brought up automation. You can certainly connect, know, literally, you know, a WordPress post happens and then you send an email and then…
It goes out to your newsletter subscribers, that kind of stuff. but when you actually put AI into like an agentic workflow, that’s when it can really interact with multiple tools at once and extract only, know, if you connect, imagine all your Google products, you have Google drive, Google docs, Google sheets, and it can look in all of those at one time in sort of one flow. And that’s when it really starts to kind of put the puzzle pieces together and
Actually, frankly, that requires even less sort technical code setup because a lot of the sort of underlying premises, the actual AI agent is doing it for you.
Brian (07:43)
Yeah, that was the thing I thought about and it’s much more AI first where they have like, it used to be you’d have to build your AI. Cause like, you can’t just be like, hey, send this to AI, get it back and it’s good. Like you have to validate it. You have to usually like really like coax it through things.
it used to be, have to like really like manually string all that stuff together. And with any, I like, have like little nodes that are like AI agent and like AI agent says like, here’s your little AI agent, add a tool to it, add a model to it, add, you know, uh, some memory. Yeah. The chat is all that stuff. And it like kind of is built to build all that together. And it just seems like we’re turning a corner 2024, late 2024 to 2025, like
Brendan O’Connell (08:14)
chat history memory.
Brian (08:25)
we’re starting to turn that corner where it’s like, okay, like we now understand how the systems need to work and then the tools are like doing a lot of that under the hood for you. And if you’re just getting into it now, there’s probably like a huge amount of knowledge you don’t even have to like think about. it’s, you’re not even gonna have to know about it because it’s already been solved for you.
Brendan O’Connell (08:41)
Definitely.
Definitely, definitely. you know, as you said, these user prompts that are fed directly into the AI, you can change them. You can add timestamps to give them the most current date or stuff like that. But yeah, it’s doing a lot of the heavy lifting and I do see it as a bit of a turning point too, because implementing these is gonna be much more of a lower barrier to entry. You know, we also talked briefly before the call about like, I feel sometimes like I’m just a glorified implementer. I’m not necessarily like,
knee deep in the code all the time, which I like actually. And I think a lot of people don’t want to necessarily be in VS code building AI agents, which of course you can do with Python and all that stuff. But the barrier to entry is getting lower. The capability of these tools is getting higher. I mean, it’s great.
Brian (09:24)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, and I’ve been, like a lot of times if I’m trying to figure something out, there’s really two places I go to get information about it. One is YouTube, watching somebody build something is super valuable. I don’t think that’s ever gonna go away. think that’s just, it’s just really helpful to find a personality on YouTube that you kind of get and watch them do stuff and let them explain it. But I think the other one is sometimes I’ll feed stuff into like chat chippy tea and I’ll say like, hey, this is what I’m trying to accomplish.
And it’s pretty good, but it really does want me to write Python way more than I want to.
Brendan O’Connell (10:05)
Yeah, exactly. And you just don’t really need to go down that route. Now, if you’re getting into really high level production stuff, you probably do, but a lot of the stuff I do is very much totally doable with just a visual interface that you drag nodes around.
Brian (10:22)
So do you have practical examples, like tangible things you’ve done recently that you’ve built out?
Brendan O’Connell (10:27)
Yeah, I think, I just released a video on, on creating like a AI chat bot that pings your WooCommerce database and has really access to all the product info when the sales start and end all that good stuff. And it, it’s just, you know, lives, you can embed it directly on your website and it, and it works pretty well. the other thing you can do is like, I use it a lot for scraping websites when I’m rebuilding sites and I don’t want to copy and paste things. I, know, if
Brian (10:54)
Hmm.
Brendan O’Connell (10:55)
I learned if things have an API, that’s like my first question now. It used to be, well, how am going to get this into WordPress? How am I going to build this? I would build, you know, a complex CRM or like, you know, multi-level image galleries and things like that. And, and now instead of thinking, how do I do this in WordPress? I think, how can I get this data that exists somewhere else and use it effectively in WordPress without, you know, doubling my efforts? So, that’s, those are some really.
Simple examples. mean, there’s, there’s really kind of endless things you can do. You can, the other thing for me personally was I would upload a YouTube video and, and forget to send it out to all the various socials and to, put it on my website and to all that stuff. So I just thought, okay, how do I just get a flow when I upload a video, it’s going to go post it on my website and it’s going to post it on Twitter and write a little blurb. And I could put AI into that flow to sort of, you know, differentiate the different social posts and things like that.
Brian (11:34)
Mm-hmm.
Brendan O’Connell (11:53)
And then, you know, another example would be like a lot of clients have stuff in markdown content and I can automatically convert it into WordPress blocks and directly post it without needing to even log into WordPress.
Brian (11:58)
Hmm.
Yeah, that the one that’s been interesting to me is like the way that you connect it to WooCommerce, for example. And in my mind, I assumed that there would need to be some step where it, I don’t know, indexes it, makes some sort of like a vector database of all this information or some sort of thing like that. But then you were doing this video, it’s like, they have just a literal WooCommerce connection where it just searches via the API or how does it get, it’s like.
I still blows my mind, like how do you get all this information and use it practically? It seems crazy to me that you literally just connected that, like a pre-built node and there was nothing else there.
Brendan O’Connell (12:34)
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, I just, I just created the API connection in WooCommerce, got my keys and added them in the node. And I guess it’s just doing API calls directly to it. The one thing that I didn’t really touch on in the video is like, what does that look like at scale? If you have 10,000 products, how long is that chat response going to be? And so then you get into sort of, you know, tweaking and modifying your own automation flows to perhaps, you know, only get
50 pages at a time or something like that. So it gets, it can get complicated kind of quickly in a way, but at the end of the day, it’s, it’s a, it’s a pretty powerful idea.
Brian (13:13)
Hmm
Do you agree? I see this idea a lot that like, because WordPress is like more open source, it’s like in a good position with AI that everything that’s happening now with AI and automation is actually to the benefit of WordPress because it’s been around a long time. It, the code is open source. It’s pretty extensible and all that sort of stuff. Do you think that that is going to be a benefit or do you have a concern that like it’s maybe just going to make.
WordPress like not need to exist.
Brendan O’Connell (13:52)
Yeah, I mean, that’s a good question. I wish I had a crystal ball. I think initially it’s going to be a benefit. I think that first of all, the documentation is all there. It’s all fairly accessible. There’s a rest API built directly into every WordPress site by default. Those are things that are going to make utilizing these things better. And frankly, yeah, like the open source nature. And then there’s also a lot of open source AI models, which I would like to see some kind of
direction with WordPress teaming up with them or some kind of connection there that will see the benefits of open source AI as well. Longer term, it’s a mixed bag. think we’re going to see a lot of website people panic as AI sort of entrenches itself more deeply into our lives. But I also, I don’t see that as, I see that as an opportunity for people to really learn more.
Brian (14:41)
Mm-hmm.
Brendan O’Connell (14:42)
to become more well-versed in the technology, even if it is just surface level. Like you gotta be keeping up on the happenings of AI and automation, I think.
Brian (14:53)
Yeah, it’s like, I remember when it was like, you could just build a WordPress website and sell that. And then it became, you don’t just sell a WordPress website, you’re kind of like a marketing person. sell SEO and you sell maybe some social media strategy to them or some content strategy to them. And you like grow that bubble. And it feels like if you’re in like the WordPress, like freelancer agency space, the next thing people are gonna keep asking for is that. And…
I think there’s been a dip recently in building websites just in the industry because a lot of websites are just.
they’re so resilient now. The first big change was mobile web, everybody needed to go responsive. So WordPress hit right at that moment of everyone needs a responsive website, throw it up quickly in WordPress and we were all making tons of websites for five years, 10 years after that. Nothing’s really happened. We’re all, there’s a lot of websites, there’s still plenty of work, but there’s not that huge boom that there was. Now I feel like this is the next big thing where a lot of people are like, I need my website to have this or that and…
I don’t know, maybe your website should have a chatbot, maybe Siri one day won’t suck and you won’t, and we’ll handle all this for you and stuff, but it’s definitely, there’s definitely places to say like, your website is important to you, there are things you should be doing now to make sure that like you’re not lost when, know, chat should be to you becomes a bigger search engine than Google, which is not an unrealistic idea.
Brendan O’Connell (16:22)
Absolutely, absolutely. And I got really, when I first got into websites in general, I wasn’t building them myself. I was working on the marketing, analytics and data side of it. And so it was never enough to just have a website. You need to make it actually do something. And it’s, know, as search becomes more, well, first of all, search became more competitive and now like Google search is kind of going away potentially in the, in the way. Yeah.
Brian (16:46)
It’s decreasing for the first time, yeah.
Brendan O’Connell (16:49)
It’s really interesting how quickly things can turn. And if that’s any indication, I think, yeah, it’s an important skill to just have in your back pocket to develop. And really, as you say, you’re coming to your clients as not just a builder of websites, but as a sort of an extension of their marketing team. And I think it’s really important to give your clients some kind of value back, not just like, here’s a website that ranks well, but it does other things.
Brian (17:16)
Yeah. I like when I started this podcast and I like was like, I need a name. That’s not WordPress related. I just was the mindset. It was like, we just make things on the internet for people. And that’s like basically it. And WordPress has been like a great tool and I hope it continues to stay a great tool for that. But like, it’s not the only tool. It’s not the ways that you’re, selling analytics, you’re selling SEO. Like there’s other things you’re doing as part of it. And this is just like the next logical step. And it’s been interesting to see that Google.
I mean, I guess it is a kind of, I think they said it’s like under 90 % now for searches. And it’s funny because I search in like a chat GPT, I’ll ask it so many things I used to go to Google for and it would take me to like stack overflow or whatever. And now I go to chat GPT because I’m like, this is a question that I think you.
an AI could easily summarize all the available knowledge and give me a decent answer for it. There’s definitely certain things I’m not gonna go ask it, but it’s weird because then at the same time, people are going to Google and you see these screenshots and the AI results are just like, just ridiculously stupid, you know? it’ll be like, there was one going around, was like, they asked about like a Disney sequel that didn’t exist and it like hallucinated the whole plot line and all this sort of stuff. Yeah, exactly. And you’re like,
Brendan O’Connell (18:28)
or putting glue on your pizza to make the cheese stick.
Brian (18:33)
Why is that? Because I’ve used Google’s Gemini in other situations and it’s really good. And yet when they stick it there and I’m wondering if it’s just the types of questions people are asked. Like we’re trained to ask Google, hey, when does this movie open? And it’ll tell you the factual freaking answer. Like where is this place? And it’ll tell you. And we go to chat, we’re like, come up with some ideas that are, and it’s like, you’re not expecting it. You’re expecting like a different type of information maybe or something. I don’t know. That’s my.
My theory of why Google search is struggling at this moment.
Brendan O’Connell (19:04)
mean, it’s a great question and I wish I had a Google expert to tell me what’s going on there because it does seem a little odd. And you brought up Stack Overflow and that, I think they also announced they had dramatic declines in viewership just or hits on their site just because people are just searching in a chat GPT interface. And then the other thing that’s really cool is like,
And I don’t know if this is in any of the models, but I use a couple tools that let me just use the API keys from open AI or Claude. And I can also use like a search embed and it will actually go get search first before it returns the results. And I find that’s just an even better Google search because it’s actually getting the most up-to-date information first.
Brian (19:48)
Yeah, I mean, it’s like, what is, what is searching? It’s like, I go to Google, I click like the first five things and I hope that what I got out of it was accurate. And it’s like, that’s essentially what it’s doing for you. and theoretically people are saying, and I, that they’re starting to see referral traffic from LLMs. Like they’re seeing that people are seeing the results in the response in the chat and they’re clicking on it and they’re heading to their website. And you know, obviously there’s
all different types of content. Like I don’t make content that’s like meant to show up in a search engine. So I’m not really worried about that. That’s not like, it’s not what like pays me. but it, for clients that do like, I don’t know, I guess like AI chatbot optimization is going to be like the next, you know, you can be the next Yost of WordPress, but it’s AI optimization or something. I don’t know.
Brendan O’Connell (20:35)
Yeah, no, I think that’s, and I see people saying like, make sure you don’t check that, don’t like index me in a chat bot because you do want your clients to be showing up in Google chat, sorry, not Google chat, but know, chat GPT chats. You know, it’s, I was at first a little pessimistic about it. I’m like, this is just gonna destroy SEO. Well, it kind of has, but you know, it opens up other, you know.
other windows, know, when a door closes another window opens, so to speak.
Brian (21:03)
Do you ever use like a code tools like for cells VO, there’s bolts is one, Replet is another, Windsurf, no. I’m gonna write that down.
Brendan O’Connell (21:11)
Wind surf is pretty cool. Have you tried wind surf yet? Yeah, I mean, it’s similar to like bolt. Yeah.
And I have something else I’m trying called pieces and that I think is open source and that is directly in VS code, but it can, you know, read all the files in a repository and kind of give context. I have no idea how good the, I mean, the code quality is okay for what I’m trying to do, but you know, I know some people complain about it.
Brian (21:21)
pieces.
Brendan O’Connell (21:37)
not having enough context or things like that. But yeah, mean, the actual coding aspect of things is getting even easier. I saw a video of like a literal child, like an eight year old or something, just flying through VS code and getting it done. And I thought, yeah, I might be in trouble.
Brian (21:54)
Yeah, that’s kind of scary. I mean, yeah, it’s just a, it’s like a reminder that like, it’s the bargain you get for being somebody who works on the web. Like you said at the beginning, it’s, I’m excited because I get to hope like every day it’s like a new thing and there’s a new Christmas present of like, what’s, can I do on the internet today? But at the same time, like
that’s the job is that every day you’re gonna lock in and there’s gonna be some new thing that you’re gonna have to learn or change or whatever and that’s never gonna go away and it feels like it’s gotten a little bit faster in the last few years.
Brendan O’Connell (22:19)
It’s a new thing.
Yeah. And it can be exhausting. I’m sure you like me, you know, get, there’s just so many, there’s this shiny object syndrome, of course, right. That we just want to, look at everything and just don’t have the time. and then I’ll also say that, you know, th there’s this, we’ve talked a lot about relying on AI and relying on automation. And I do see this tendency to have an over-reliance on AI and
I do think it can, make us dumber in the longterm if we don’t actually understand what we’re doing. you know, I’ll see some people doing N eight N flows and they’re using an AI in there that, um, is doing something simple, like, you know, increasing the one number, one integer each flow or something like that. And I’m like, why would you, first of all, waste any kind of money or, or, you know, compute power on that when you can just.
Brian (23:09)
Mm-hmm.
Brendan O’Connell (23:18)
use either a built-in node or, you know, lot of this stuff can be done with code. So I think that, there’s going to be, there’s going to be a gap that Brit, you know, that grows and grows between people that actually know how to build stuff and people that just rely on AI for everything. So it’s not all doom and gloom. think there’s, there’s hope if you, if you put in some effort to really understand these things too.
Brian (23:22)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, they have in any end, like the model is like, you see every step as like a JSON object. So as you’re going through everything is JSON the whole time, right? And they even have like a little JavaScript code node that you can do and you can just get in there and say like, I have JSON, I have JavaScript. Like the amount of things you can do with that mixed into the workflow.
is I can’t believe yeah the idea of some some of the things people go to AI for you think like this is going to be a whole new like level of literacy it’s sort of like when your or at least my parents like send you Facebook screenshots and you’re like that’s not a real thing like there’s like a whole new level of people who like are going to have to learn how to do these things and hopefully
Brendan O’Connell (24:22)
Yeah. And these
models can hallucinate on, you know, without any kind of prompting or without you trying. So over-reliance on them can be your downfall. And as you said, like some of these, like an N8N node where you just are using a JavaScript node, it’s like, you could do your whole automation there potentially and never even touch an AI tool at all. And so I think that these are going to be good for power users. They’re also good for people that are not well versed in code because they do have some
some great, first all, great documentation on a lot of these tools that really, really teach you how to think about it because it is, it’s really just changing your thinking slightly to thinking. It’s like when you go from building static websites to using something like ACF where you’re, you’re querying, post types. And to me, that was like a huge eye opener when I first discovered that years ago. And automation is a similar thing where it’s like, it sort of,
Brian (25:07)
Mm-hmm.
Brendan O’Connell (25:16)
a layer above and you feel like you’re sort of leveling up each time you learn about something new.
Brian (25:21)
Yeah, and so like speaking of learning something new, you have a couple of videos now, right? Going onto it. Maybe you could tell people like where your videos are, where they can go to kind of track those. Cause I feel like you have a good way of explaining it in a way that I think like word for people that are coming from like the builder extender world can really like understand and feel like get practical lessons from.
Brendan O’Connell (25:43)
Yeah, I mean, I have a small YouTube channel. You can find me just with my name, Brendan O’Connell. If you type in WordPress, it’ll come up to there’s another Brendan O’Connell who’s an artist who’s kind of famous, so I’m not him. But, but yeah, I mean, I look at it from most things from like a like a small agency owner perspective, someone who likes these code tools, but isn’t necessarily deep into JavaScript. So I look at sort of a lot of different tools.
And I really liked doing that and just sharing what I learned. so, you know, my videos are just kind of me doing a thing and explaining it as I go. And people seem to like it just following along and seeing what kind of new tools are out there. So you can also just go to my website, Brendan dash O’Connell.com. And I’ve got links to all my socials and all my videos get posted there because it’s all automated. So.
Brian (26:33)
Awesome. Well, thanks for sharing, man. I look forward to reconnecting on this specific topic in the future and seeing if we do it because I was trying to get a chat bot to talk to my WordPress website and it was good, but then it started hallucinating articles I never wrote and then I got lost a little bit. So I’m gonna come back to you in a few minutes when I finally crack it. But no, thanks again, man, for talking and…
Brendan O’Connell (26:55)
Not perfect yet.
Brian (27:03)
I’ll see you soon.
Brendan O’Connell (27:04)
Yeah, I love what you’re doing here and appreciate your time and having me on. Happy to come back anytime.
Brian (27:09)
thanks man.
So today I got Brendan O’Connell. We’re gonna be talking about automation, AI, what WordPress people are doing to kind of like grow these other skills. I’ve gotten super into it. I know Brendan’s gotten super into it and has done some really cool videos that I think we’ll talk about. But maybe Brendan, you could just like give us a little overview of who you are and your experience getting into WordPress.
Brendan O’Connell (00:20)
Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Brian. Brendan O’Connell here. based in San Diego, California, and I got into WordPress probably about 10 years ago. And really it was because I just needed a job at the time. I was out of grad school where I studied history and I was like really into digital databases and digital archives and data and stuff like that. So it was kind of a natural thing. And I really just started as a marketing person, but really quickly got into sort of
data manipulation and APIs and of course WordPress. So been doing that. And you know, I’m also of the generation of people that like downloaded their own music and tinkered with their own MySpace page and learned a little bit of code that way. So I’m kind of a natural tinkerer and just really into like open source stuff. yeah.
Brian (01:08)
Yeah, I was thinking like all the things we have in common, because we’re both in Southern California and I guess we both like studied humanities at school and had like no, no technical formal education before this and stuff. And like you said, just like building fun, weird things on the internet back when like the internet was for fun, weird people and not for maybe everybody.
Brendan O’Connell (01:30)
Yeah, I know it’s crazy. I do feel kind of old now that it’s so many decades now that I’ve been using the internet. It’s changed a little bit, but it’s also stayed kind of the same at the end of the day. It attracts weirdness and people thinking outside the box a little bit.
Brian (01:46)
Yeah, definitely. And I feel like that’s what drew me to WordPress in the beginning, is it felt like it was for weirdos a little bit. Like people were publishing, you you would make a site like dedicated to, you know, anime or something. Like it would just, it wasn’t like, you know, like now it’s like WordPress, we’re, you know, business and like the New York Times and you know, we all run on WordPress. But like back then it did sort of feel like it was kind of weird and it feels like that’s.
like at its core WordPress really wants to just be like weird, but like everybody around is like, no, actually I’m using you for my career, so don’t be weird, like I need you to be reliable. And it’s like a weird balance, you know?
Brendan O’Connell (02:22)
Yeah, it’s sort of the sassification of the entire internet, it seems, but it is what it is.
Brian (02:28)
Yeah. Do you still get excited to jump on the internet and kind of build things and mess around? Like, is there a place you’re getting like, yeah.
Brendan O’Connell (02:35)
absolutely. I mean, I think
that’s what really keeps me coming back every day is like, I wake up with that like Christmas like energy where I’m like, I get to unwrap my presents and see what, see what else is under the tree today. and, really that, kind of momentum keeps me going day to day. So for sure, that’s, that’s a big part of how I got into this and why I like it. Cause there’s always something new to learn.
Brian (02:56)
Yeah. Speaking of something new to learn, I’ve been trying to get into automation, automation AI, like to me have like kind of glued together in my mind a little bit because you kind of like, you can do, you can have, you can automate things and you can talk to, you know, a chat bot, you know, for like in chat, you’d be here, something like that. But like, I think where people start to see real powers, like the combination of the two of like, I’m going to use AI workflows and I’m going to automate it and stuff like that. And I never.
was a big automator in my life? Like I never really sat down and like did like Apple scripts or like Siri workflows or like anything. Like I just never cared about automating things, but like a lot of developers, that’s like a big deal. Like, I automate everything. How efficient can you get stuff? All that sort of thing. Was automation like a thing you were into before?
Brendan O’Connell (03:43)
Yeah, I think like workflow optimization was something that always was kind of like, I didn’t know what it was, but it was like something I would try to achieve. And so just not wanting to repeat myself, not wanting to make mistakes and not wanting to, you know, like waste that time. What I saw as like wasted time, doing the same thing over and over again. So I think that was definitely part of, you know, the discovery of like APIs and how to, you know, dynamically paginate something. And that kind of stuff was like,
wow, I can save this much time and then go do stuff that I also like to do.
Brian (04:15)
Yeah, so what kind of things are you doing with it now? Where are you starting to see, okay, this is paying off the time investment? Because there’s a huge barrier to entry to learn all this stuff. It’s a whole new language. Where do you even start?
Brendan O’Connell (04:30)
Definitely, yeah. I mean, you can start with just looking around you and looking at, if you have several clients that are asking for the same thing, that might start to put off ideas in your head of like, how can I automate this? But I mean, beyond that, there’s just so many good course, know, on YouTube or various, you know, streaming platforms and stuff like that, that you can just learn this stuff. And once you really get one automation platform under your belt, you kind of get how they all work.
There’s going to be quirks and differences between them all. But at the end of the day, once you get kind of the general visual language of what you’re doing, it’s a pretty low code solution. So I see it as something people can just jump into and learn. A lot of these tools are also free to get started and have pretty generous plans that you can spin up. And you also don’t have to self-host these. mean, that’s one of the benefits, I think, that you can self-host a lot of these. But it makes it pretty easy to get in.
at a cloud level that you can just spin something up and get to work.
Brian (05:30)
Yeah, and there’s the kind of big ones I see is like Zapier is this like automation platform. It’s kind of like, I, you know, if this trigger happens, do this and it integrates with like, I don’t know, everything, like all your Google stuff, all your WordPress stuff, all your, you know, e-commerce or your newsletter stuff or any of sort of stuff. And it’s kind of like, I feel like Zapier was like around in the past, like pre AI, and it was just like an, you know, a cool automation platform. And then like,
in the last like maybe two years, now that AI is like, hey, you can actually automate like harder things, things that require like human thought that you originally didn’t think could be automated now can. And like, I’m seeing like Zapier trying to catch up with that a little bit. And then like other tools that maybe are a little more AI centric like N8n I think is like a big one or Make I guess is kind of somewhere in the middle.
But I agree with you, it’s just a mindset. Once you learn it, you’re kind of like, yeah, I kind of get how to put little nodes together and take this and then make it do this and then make it do this and then make it do this and all that. Do you have a preferred one that you’re leaning into now?
Brendan O’Connell (06:40)
Yeah. I mean, you started this conversation with talking about how you kind of marry AI and automation together. And in my mind, they kind of are now too, just because of what I’ve been using, but you mentioned N8N. It’s a fantastic one to really sink your teeth into. it’s probably more for power users in a way, but I don’t want that to scare people off. But you brought up automation. You can certainly connect, know, literally, you know, a WordPress post happens and then you send an email and then…
It goes out to your newsletter subscribers, that kind of stuff. but when you actually put AI into like an agentic workflow, that’s when it can really interact with multiple tools at once and extract only, know, if you connect, imagine all your Google products, you have Google drive, Google docs, Google sheets, and it can look in all of those at one time in sort of one flow. And that’s when it really starts to kind of put the puzzle pieces together and
Actually, frankly, that requires even less sort technical code setup because a lot of the sort of underlying premises, the actual AI agent is doing it for you.
Brian (07:43)
Yeah, that was the thing I thought about and it’s much more AI first where they have like, it used to be you’d have to build your AI. Cause like, you can’t just be like, hey, send this to AI, get it back and it’s good. Like you have to validate it. You have to usually like really like coax it through things.
it used to be, have to like really like manually string all that stuff together. And with any, I like, have like little nodes that are like AI agent and like AI agent says like, here’s your little AI agent, add a tool to it, add a model to it, add, you know, uh, some memory. Yeah. The chat is all that stuff. And it like kind of is built to build all that together. And it just seems like we’re turning a corner 2024, late 2024 to 2025, like
Brendan O’Connell (08:14)
chat history memory.
Brian (08:25)
we’re starting to turn that corner where it’s like, okay, like we now understand how the systems need to work and then the tools are like doing a lot of that under the hood for you. And if you’re just getting into it now, there’s probably like a huge amount of knowledge you don’t even have to like think about. it’s, you’re not even gonna have to know about it because it’s already been solved for you.
Brendan O’Connell (08:41)
Definitely.
Definitely, definitely. you know, as you said, these user prompts that are fed directly into the AI, you can change them. You can add timestamps to give them the most current date or stuff like that. But yeah, it’s doing a lot of the heavy lifting and I do see it as a bit of a turning point too, because implementing these is gonna be much more of a lower barrier to entry. You know, we also talked briefly before the call about like, I feel sometimes like I’m just a glorified implementer. I’m not necessarily like,
knee deep in the code all the time, which I like actually. And I think a lot of people don’t want to necessarily be in VS code building AI agents, which of course you can do with Python and all that stuff. But the barrier to entry is getting lower. The capability of these tools is getting higher. I mean, it’s great.
Brian (09:24)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, and I’ve been, like a lot of times if I’m trying to figure something out, there’s really two places I go to get information about it. One is YouTube, watching somebody build something is super valuable. I don’t think that’s ever gonna go away. think that’s just, it’s just really helpful to find a personality on YouTube that you kind of get and watch them do stuff and let them explain it. But I think the other one is sometimes I’ll feed stuff into like chat chippy tea and I’ll say like, hey, this is what I’m trying to accomplish.
And it’s pretty good, but it really does want me to write Python way more than I want to.
Brendan O’Connell (10:05)
Yeah, exactly. And you just don’t really need to go down that route. Now, if you’re getting into really high level production stuff, you probably do, but a lot of the stuff I do is very much totally doable with just a visual interface that you drag nodes around.
Brian (10:22)
So do you have practical examples, like tangible things you’ve done recently that you’ve built out?
Brendan O’Connell (10:27)
Yeah, I think, I just released a video on, on creating like a AI chat bot that pings your WooCommerce database and has really access to all the product info when the sales start and end all that good stuff. And it, it’s just, you know, lives, you can embed it directly on your website and it, and it works pretty well. the other thing you can do is like, I use it a lot for scraping websites when I’m rebuilding sites and I don’t want to copy and paste things. I, know, if
Brian (10:54)
Hmm.
Brendan O’Connell (10:55)
I learned if things have an API, that’s like my first question now. It used to be, well, how am going to get this into WordPress? How am I going to build this? I would build, you know, a complex CRM or like, you know, multi-level image galleries and things like that. And, and now instead of thinking, how do I do this in WordPress? I think, how can I get this data that exists somewhere else and use it effectively in WordPress without, you know, doubling my efforts? So, that’s, those are some really.
Simple examples. mean, there’s, there’s really kind of endless things you can do. You can, the other thing for me personally was I would upload a YouTube video and, and forget to send it out to all the various socials and to, put it on my website and to all that stuff. So I just thought, okay, how do I just get a flow when I upload a video, it’s going to go post it on my website and it’s going to post it on Twitter and write a little blurb. And I could put AI into that flow to sort of, you know, differentiate the different social posts and things like that.
Brian (11:34)
Mm-hmm.
Brendan O’Connell (11:53)
And then, you know, another example would be like a lot of clients have stuff in markdown content and I can automatically convert it into WordPress blocks and directly post it without needing to even log into WordPress.
Brian (11:58)
Hmm.
Yeah, that the one that’s been interesting to me is like the way that you connect it to WooCommerce, for example. And in my mind, I assumed that there would need to be some step where it, I don’t know, indexes it, makes some sort of like a vector database of all this information or some sort of thing like that. But then you were doing this video, it’s like, they have just a literal WooCommerce connection where it just searches via the API or how does it get, it’s like.
I still blows my mind, like how do you get all this information and use it practically? It seems crazy to me that you literally just connected that, like a pre-built node and there was nothing else there.
Brendan O’Connell (12:34)
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. I mean, I just, I just created the API connection in WooCommerce, got my keys and added them in the node. And I guess it’s just doing API calls directly to it. The one thing that I didn’t really touch on in the video is like, what does that look like at scale? If you have 10,000 products, how long is that chat response going to be? And so then you get into sort of, you know, tweaking and modifying your own automation flows to perhaps, you know, only get
50 pages at a time or something like that. So it gets, it can get complicated kind of quickly in a way, but at the end of the day, it’s, it’s a, it’s a pretty powerful idea.
Brian (13:13)
Hmm
Do you agree? I see this idea a lot that like, because WordPress is like more open source, it’s like in a good position with AI that everything that’s happening now with AI and automation is actually to the benefit of WordPress because it’s been around a long time. It, the code is open source. It’s pretty extensible and all that sort of stuff. Do you think that that is going to be a benefit or do you have a concern that like it’s maybe just going to make.
WordPress like not need to exist.
Brendan O’Connell (13:52)
Yeah, I mean, that’s a good question. I wish I had a crystal ball. I think initially it’s going to be a benefit. I think that first of all, the documentation is all there. It’s all fairly accessible. There’s a rest API built directly into every WordPress site by default. Those are things that are going to make utilizing these things better. And frankly, yeah, like the open source nature. And then there’s also a lot of open source AI models, which I would like to see some kind of
direction with WordPress teaming up with them or some kind of connection there that will see the benefits of open source AI as well. Longer term, it’s a mixed bag. think we’re going to see a lot of website people panic as AI sort of entrenches itself more deeply into our lives. But I also, I don’t see that as, I see that as an opportunity for people to really learn more.
Brian (14:41)
Mm-hmm.
Brendan O’Connell (14:42)
to become more well-versed in the technology, even if it is just surface level. Like you gotta be keeping up on the happenings of AI and automation, I think.
Brian (14:53)
Yeah, it’s like, I remember when it was like, you could just build a WordPress website and sell that. And then it became, you don’t just sell a WordPress website, you’re kind of like a marketing person. sell SEO and you sell maybe some social media strategy to them or some content strategy to them. And you like grow that bubble. And it feels like if you’re in like the WordPress, like freelancer agency space, the next thing people are gonna keep asking for is that. And…
I think there’s been a dip recently in building websites just in the industry because a lot of websites are just.
they’re so resilient now. The first big change was mobile web, everybody needed to go responsive. So WordPress hit right at that moment of everyone needs a responsive website, throw it up quickly in WordPress and we were all making tons of websites for five years, 10 years after that. Nothing’s really happened. We’re all, there’s a lot of websites, there’s still plenty of work, but there’s not that huge boom that there was. Now I feel like this is the next big thing where a lot of people are like, I need my website to have this or that and…
I don’t know, maybe your website should have a chatbot, maybe Siri one day won’t suck and you won’t, and we’ll handle all this for you and stuff, but it’s definitely, there’s definitely places to say like, your website is important to you, there are things you should be doing now to make sure that like you’re not lost when, know, chat should be to you becomes a bigger search engine than Google, which is not an unrealistic idea.
Brendan O’Connell (16:22)
Absolutely, absolutely. And I got really, when I first got into websites in general, I wasn’t building them myself. I was working on the marketing, analytics and data side of it. And so it was never enough to just have a website. You need to make it actually do something. And it’s, know, as search becomes more, well, first of all, search became more competitive and now like Google search is kind of going away potentially in the, in the way. Yeah.
Brian (16:46)
It’s decreasing for the first time, yeah.
Brendan O’Connell (16:49)
It’s really interesting how quickly things can turn. And if that’s any indication, I think, yeah, it’s an important skill to just have in your back pocket to develop. And really, as you say, you’re coming to your clients as not just a builder of websites, but as a sort of an extension of their marketing team. And I think it’s really important to give your clients some kind of value back, not just like, here’s a website that ranks well, but it does other things.
Brian (17:16)
Yeah. I like when I started this podcast and I like was like, I need a name. That’s not WordPress related. I just was the mindset. It was like, we just make things on the internet for people. And that’s like basically it. And WordPress has been like a great tool and I hope it continues to stay a great tool for that. But like, it’s not the only tool. It’s not the ways that you’re, selling analytics, you’re selling SEO. Like there’s other things you’re doing as part of it. And this is just like the next logical step. And it’s been interesting to see that Google.
I mean, I guess it is a kind of, I think they said it’s like under 90 % now for searches. And it’s funny because I search in like a chat GPT, I’ll ask it so many things I used to go to Google for and it would take me to like stack overflow or whatever. And now I go to chat GPT because I’m like, this is a question that I think you.
an AI could easily summarize all the available knowledge and give me a decent answer for it. There’s definitely certain things I’m not gonna go ask it, but it’s weird because then at the same time, people are going to Google and you see these screenshots and the AI results are just like, just ridiculously stupid, you know? it’ll be like, there was one going around, was like, they asked about like a Disney sequel that didn’t exist and it like hallucinated the whole plot line and all this sort of stuff. Yeah, exactly. And you’re like,
Brendan O’Connell (18:28)
or putting glue on your pizza to make the cheese stick.
Brian (18:33)
Why is that? Because I’ve used Google’s Gemini in other situations and it’s really good. And yet when they stick it there and I’m wondering if it’s just the types of questions people are asked. Like we’re trained to ask Google, hey, when does this movie open? And it’ll tell you the factual freaking answer. Like where is this place? And it’ll tell you. And we go to chat, we’re like, come up with some ideas that are, and it’s like, you’re not expecting it. You’re expecting like a different type of information maybe or something. I don’t know. That’s my.
My theory of why Google search is struggling at this moment.
Brendan O’Connell (19:04)
mean, it’s a great question and I wish I had a Google expert to tell me what’s going on there because it does seem a little odd. And you brought up Stack Overflow and that, I think they also announced they had dramatic declines in viewership just or hits on their site just because people are just searching in a chat GPT interface. And then the other thing that’s really cool is like,
And I don’t know if this is in any of the models, but I use a couple tools that let me just use the API keys from open AI or Claude. And I can also use like a search embed and it will actually go get search first before it returns the results. And I find that’s just an even better Google search because it’s actually getting the most up-to-date information first.
Brian (19:48)
Yeah, I mean, it’s like, what is, what is searching? It’s like, I go to Google, I click like the first five things and I hope that what I got out of it was accurate. And it’s like, that’s essentially what it’s doing for you. and theoretically people are saying, and I, that they’re starting to see referral traffic from LLMs. Like they’re seeing that people are seeing the results in the response in the chat and they’re clicking on it and they’re heading to their website. And you know, obviously there’s
all different types of content. Like I don’t make content that’s like meant to show up in a search engine. So I’m not really worried about that. That’s not like, it’s not what like pays me. but it, for clients that do like, I don’t know, I guess like AI chatbot optimization is going to be like the next, you know, you can be the next Yost of WordPress, but it’s AI optimization or something. I don’t know.
Brendan O’Connell (20:35)
Yeah, no, I think that’s, and I see people saying like, make sure you don’t check that, don’t like index me in a chat bot because you do want your clients to be showing up in Google chat, sorry, not Google chat, but know, chat GPT chats. You know, it’s, I was at first a little pessimistic about it. I’m like, this is just gonna destroy SEO. Well, it kind of has, but you know, it opens up other, you know.
other windows, know, when a door closes another window opens, so to speak.
Brian (21:03)
Do you ever use like a code tools like for cells VO, there’s bolts is one, Replet is another, Windsurf, no. I’m gonna write that down.
Brendan O’Connell (21:11)
Wind surf is pretty cool. Have you tried wind surf yet? Yeah, I mean, it’s similar to like bolt. Yeah.
And I have something else I’m trying called pieces and that I think is open source and that is directly in VS code, but it can, you know, read all the files in a repository and kind of give context. I have no idea how good the, I mean, the code quality is okay for what I’m trying to do, but you know, I know some people complain about it.
Brian (21:21)
pieces.
Brendan O’Connell (21:37)
not having enough context or things like that. But yeah, mean, the actual coding aspect of things is getting even easier. I saw a video of like a literal child, like an eight year old or something, just flying through VS code and getting it done. And I thought, yeah, I might be in trouble.
Brian (21:54)
Yeah, that’s kind of scary. I mean, yeah, it’s just a, it’s like a reminder that like, it’s the bargain you get for being somebody who works on the web. Like you said at the beginning, it’s, I’m excited because I get to hope like every day it’s like a new thing and there’s a new Christmas present of like, what’s, can I do on the internet today? But at the same time, like
that’s the job is that every day you’re gonna lock in and there’s gonna be some new thing that you’re gonna have to learn or change or whatever and that’s never gonna go away and it feels like it’s gotten a little bit faster in the last few years.
Brendan O’Connell (22:19)
It’s a new thing.
Yeah. And it can be exhausting. I’m sure you like me, you know, get, there’s just so many, there’s this shiny object syndrome, of course, right. That we just want to, look at everything and just don’t have the time. and then I’ll also say that, you know, th there’s this, we’ve talked a lot about relying on AI and relying on automation. And I do see this tendency to have an over-reliance on AI and
I do think it can, make us dumber in the longterm if we don’t actually understand what we’re doing. you know, I’ll see some people doing N eight N flows and they’re using an AI in there that, um, is doing something simple, like, you know, increasing the one number, one integer each flow or something like that. And I’m like, why would you, first of all, waste any kind of money or, or, you know, compute power on that when you can just.
Brian (23:09)
Mm-hmm.
Brendan O’Connell (23:18)
use either a built-in node or, you know, lot of this stuff can be done with code. So I think that, there’s going to be, there’s going to be a gap that Brit, you know, that grows and grows between people that actually know how to build stuff and people that just rely on AI for everything. So it’s not all doom and gloom. think there’s, there’s hope if you, if you put in some effort to really understand these things too.
Brian (23:22)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, they have in any end, like the model is like, you see every step as like a JSON object. So as you’re going through everything is JSON the whole time, right? And they even have like a little JavaScript code node that you can do and you can just get in there and say like, I have JSON, I have JavaScript. Like the amount of things you can do with that mixed into the workflow.
is I can’t believe yeah the idea of some some of the things people go to AI for you think like this is going to be a whole new like level of literacy it’s sort of like when your or at least my parents like send you Facebook screenshots and you’re like that’s not a real thing like there’s like a whole new level of people who like are going to have to learn how to do these things and hopefully
Brendan O’Connell (24:22)
Yeah. And these
models can hallucinate on, you know, without any kind of prompting or without you trying. So over-reliance on them can be your downfall. And as you said, like some of these, like an N8N node where you just are using a JavaScript node, it’s like, you could do your whole automation there potentially and never even touch an AI tool at all. And so I think that these are going to be good for power users. They’re also good for people that are not well versed in code because they do have some
some great, first all, great documentation on a lot of these tools that really, really teach you how to think about it because it is, it’s really just changing your thinking slightly to thinking. It’s like when you go from building static websites to using something like ACF where you’re, you’re querying, post types. And to me, that was like a huge eye opener when I first discovered that years ago. And automation is a similar thing where it’s like, it sort of,
Brian (25:07)
Mm-hmm.
Brendan O’Connell (25:16)
a layer above and you feel like you’re sort of leveling up each time you learn about something new.
Brian (25:21)
Yeah, and so like speaking of learning something new, you have a couple of videos now, right? Going onto it. Maybe you could tell people like where your videos are, where they can go to kind of track those. Cause I feel like you have a good way of explaining it in a way that I think like word for people that are coming from like the builder extender world can really like understand and feel like get practical lessons from.
Brendan O’Connell (25:43)
Yeah, I mean, I have a small YouTube channel. You can find me just with my name, Brendan O’Connell. If you type in WordPress, it’ll come up to there’s another Brendan O’Connell who’s an artist who’s kind of famous, so I’m not him. But, but yeah, I mean, I look at it from most things from like a like a small agency owner perspective, someone who likes these code tools, but isn’t necessarily deep into JavaScript. So I look at sort of a lot of different tools.
And I really liked doing that and just sharing what I learned. so, you know, my videos are just kind of me doing a thing and explaining it as I go. And people seem to like it just following along and seeing what kind of new tools are out there. So you can also just go to my website, Brendan dash O’Connell.com. And I’ve got links to all my socials and all my videos get posted there because it’s all automated. So.
Brian (26:33)
Awesome. Well, thanks for sharing, man. I look forward to reconnecting on this specific topic in the future and seeing if we do it because I was trying to get a chat bot to talk to my WordPress website and it was good, but then it started hallucinating articles I never wrote and then I got lost a little bit. So I’m gonna come back to you in a few minutes when I finally crack it. But no, thanks again, man, for talking and…
Brendan O’Connell (26:55)
Not perfect yet.
Brian (27:03)
I’ll see you soon.
Brendan O’Connell (27:04)
Yeah, I love what you’re doing here and appreciate your time and having me on. Happy to come back anytime.
Brian (27:09)
thanks man.