WordCamp Europe Takeaways: Community Vibes, Tech Advancements and Smarter Tools

Dave Lockie:
Hello again, Mr. Jacobi. We find ourselves face to face at the WordCamp Europe Conference Center. It’s Saturday. It’s been many days of travel for you and it’s been a few days of conferencing for me. So thought it’d be fun to reflect on what we’ve heard and seen. What’s changed, what’s new at this year’s work?

Robert Jacobi:
Hum, thanks Dave. Yeah, it’s the end of, well, almost the end. We have like probably two or three more hours here at WordCamp Europe in Krakow, Poland 2026 and it’s so much more exciting than last year. That’s really the comparison I’m just making and I’m so glad to see numbers I saw was 2,400 people in attendance.

Dave Lockie:
Wow.

Robert Jacobi:
Tons of sponsors. The location is great, the venue is great and in fact the weather has been for the most part pretty amazing. I know these are the trivial things, but it’s wonderful when you’re at a conference when all the things come together and work. Camp Europe 26 as everything seems to have really come together, it’s been a good one.

Dave Lockie:
I skipped, I skipped last year and I’ve got to say this year feels very vibrant. There’s a lot of companies, there’s a bunch of people I have never heard of who have got pretty good looking stands and interesting products. It certainly feels like the economy is thriving. The vibes are good, really good. To see lots of friendly faces kind of shocks me to think how long I’ve been coming to work camps.

Robert Jacobi:
No need to go there.

Dave Lockie:
No, let’s not do that.

Robert Jacobi:
People actually see our pictures, they’ll know how old we are.

Dave Lockie:
Yeah, don’t get it. Don’t get.

Robert Jacobi:
You don’t need to, you know, let them know.

Dave Lockie:
Don’t scare yourselves, folks.

Robert Jacobi:
But it is. I like that you chose vibrant as a word because I think last year was just in general an off year for just a million sorts of reasons and everyone seems really excited. I didn’t make it to Asia this year, so I don’t know how that was.

Dave Lockie:
I didn’t make it either, sadly.

Robert Jacobi:
But this work camp here really brings me back to the days of new companies, entrepreneurs, freelancers and to your point, a lot of new faces. Which is exciting to see the WordPress community in general, but it’s great for the ecosystem that we also care about. And of course, AI, blah, blah, blah,

Dave Lockie:
AI, blah blah blah AI for sure. And there are lots of younger faces as well. Like I feel quite old.

Robert Jacobi:
Good point.

Dave Lockie:
Well, no, as well as looking old. Well, I not feel old.

Robert Jacobi:
You’re actually going to bed on time, not, you know, pulling 24 hour party duty. Eating clean, you know, eating cleanly, drinking cleanly. No, this is really great. So I guess since we’re actually in the venue on the second floor for us folks, that’d be the third floor. That if it’s fantastic. So it’s, you know, four solid floors of action. We have sponsors on every floor. Huge stages for the most part. Pack too. So I, that’s also, I like to see it’s not just people roaming around doing the hallway track. The sessions have been really, really good and I’ve seen some fantastic lines in track one around SEO and you know, community as a whole. Lot of the technical and engineering ones, they’ve been very exciting and interesting.

Dave Lockie:
Yeah, Maybe we can just set the scene for people a little bit. So we’re kind of sitting in the corner from where I am. I can see Patchstack stand, I can see Hostinger stand, Bluehost. You can see a bunch of automatic badges walking around.

Robert Jacobi:
I think Pressable was downstairs.

Dave Lockie:
Yeah, yeah. And there’s just a bunch of folks like hanging out, chatting. The stores are nice and busy and it’s, you know, this is the closing stages of the conference and there’s no drop off. No, no people are here, people are like hanging outside. It’s a lovely sunny day. Yesterday it was pretty windy and cold, but today is I suspect the people who aren’t in the conference center are sitting down by the river having a beer.

Robert Jacobi:
They are. I just got a message about that.

Dave Lockie:
That may be where we’re going after. After this. This podcast readers.

Robert Jacobi:
No, this is really a standout word camp Europe. I’m, I’m super excited that it happened here and how well it’ organize and plan. I mean, super huge kudos to the organizing team.

Dave Lockie:
Yeah. And so look, you’ve done a better job of watching sessions and talk to me a little about the content and then let’s go on and reflect on some of the conversations we’ve had and some of the products we’ve seen and what’s moving.

Robert Jacobi:
So last year, again, it was sort of this weird year and a lot of people were freaking out about AI and I’m making generic, but there’s less freak out about AI. It’s not going to eat everyone’s lunch. And agencies, freelancers are figuring out ways and tools to embrace AI while still being on an open source platform, taking advantage of sort of the best of both the growth and that’s been really exciting to see. That’s, you know, conferences like this really, what’s the word I’m looking for? I kind of compress all the excitement around what can be done as opposed to woe is me. Everyone’s very, really, for the most part, I think, very positive about what the possibilities are over the next year, next three years with WordPress open source.

Dave Lockie:
Yeah.

Robert Jacobi:
And AI too.

Dave Lockie:
Yeah. And a lot of. I find a lot of the conversation has been about AI, but more in terms of like a kind of informed and nuanced conversation about here’s how we use it or here’s how it’s part of the product rather than just like running around like headless chickens. There is a lot of talk about it and I definitely don’t think we’re anywhere near the end of the disruption,

Robert Jacobi:
but

Dave Lockie:
it feels like to some extent it feels a little bit like Red Queen. Everyone can use it now. Everyone’s learning how to use it, everyone’s doing more, being more ambitious, delivering higher quality stuff. And that is ultimately great for the users of WordPress and WooCommerce. Right.

Robert Jacobi:
Like more better services and like around the AI discussions. It’s more of the not AI is going to get our lunch. It’s how do we use this in initial way, how do we use it for our workflow or, you know, application deployment or website deployment or with SEO, how are we taking advantage of what AI can do to not eliminate content creators, but augment their abilities and speed up processes. And I don’t mean process of creating content, but actually deploying that content out there. And with WordPress 7 and it’s now new API integrations for AI, people are thinking about, you know, what does it mean? Can I use WordPress now to automatically deploy things to agents or directly to other platforms? And it’s cool. These are exciting tech conversations for me to have. Now the woe is me that, you know, this community is. Or all open source is dead, or all CMSs are dead. And I don’t get that feeling from anyone that that’s the negative case. It’s. It’s kind of safe. People are. You can, I don’t know if you can pick that up on the microphone, but you can hear people clapping and having a great time.

Dave Lockie:
Lots of swag, lots of competitions, lots of. Yeah, like people are walking around with bags full of Lego and MacBooks and you know, it feels, it feels upwards. Like I would say the momentum feels upwards in the community.

Robert Jacobi:
Yeah, I got, you know, it last year was for me like a down WordPress year. And it feels very much revitalized this year. So I’m very happy to see that. I’ve really been on a good high.

Dave Lockie:
Well, I’m going to talk to an interesting conversation I had and then I’ll ask you the same thing. So give you a chance to kind of reflect. I was talking to the Gravity Forms folks and asking what they’re up to and they were talking about how they are exposing more of their product to like adding abilities through the Abilities API. And back in my like freelance and early agency days, I mean I probably have spent months configuring Gravity Forms settings and fields and everything else. And the idea that I could now just talk to my computer and have it set up complex conditional workflows and automations with Gravity Forms. I mean that’s such a quality of life and efficiency improvement. Yeah, it makes me actually a little sad how much time I spend clicking buttons. We had to, but we had to, right? Without doing that, we wouldn’t have got here, but. And now we can go here. Like, you know, others can stand on the shoulders of those who press the buttons.

Robert Jacobi:
That’s exactly it. And I’ve had very great point about Gravity Forms. I’ve had the same conversations with like Atarim and WP Umbrella on how they’re augmenting their maintenance and agency solutions with AI. So again, just a simple thing, your end user can be like the best example I heard is, you know, instead of having to go through hurdles and loops and logging into WP admin, changing posts so you can just type into your little chat bot. Please update my opening times for the holidays from you know, 9pm to 5pm instead of 9pm or 9am to 9pm and it’ll go into your, you know, it’ll find. This is the coolest part. It’ll find that you know about us page. You don’t have to tell it which page. It’ll go in, change the content. Hey, does this look good? You say, okay, you’re done. That’s amazing. I mean, so yes, for the traditional maintenance folks, that may be a job that doesn’t exist for them anymore, but it’s also a crappy job.

Dave Lockie:
It’s a really tough job.

Robert Jacobi:
You know, as a, as an agency who has do maintenance, why not have these tools in place to automate that and you can focus on the more higher value services that you can offer. Again, AI coming in to solve some of these repetitive rudimentary problems, which is great.

Dave Lockie:
And it reduces the cost of ownership, which is, you know, a key thing to help us defend market share. Right? Correct. One of the. Another conversation I had was quite interesting. It was about how Woo is hard to use if you’re a merchant and you’ve got like 200 products and you want to like update some data across all of those different products. And my, my first reaction was like, surely there’s a plugin for that. And you know, there are various plugins that do that. But my sort of, my second thought was, huh, if that was me, I would just point Claude code at the API and have it like pull all the products and make the update and then like check it afterwards. So we are starting to see how you don’t need necessarily like as many utility and workflow plugins. Correct. Because you can simply leverage like a more general purpose, just tell it what to do.

Robert Jacobi:
Right, right, right, right, right.

Dave Lockie:
And that like making sure it does the right thing in the right way is like a separate problem set. But I think it would be great to see Woo merchants being able to uninstall five plugins from their stores because their point solutions that no longer need to be done by like software that’s installed on the thing. Right. Like now we can run stuff from our computers via CLI, via APIs and actually get the same result. And I think that’s, that’s cool. From your telegram, like just chatting. Right.

Robert Jacobi:
And that’s chat. Yeah. A lot of people are so I’ve, I haven’t seen it demo, but I’ve been told a lot of people are trying to just integrate WhatsApp.

Dave Lockie:
Yeah, yeah.

Robert Jacobi:
Like so you can just call, you know, or text message your website and tell it what to do. And coming from a security company perspective, yes, it sucks for those, you know, very niche, tiny, very specific operational plugin developers, but those are all expanding the surface area for cyber attacks. So it is better to also reduce, you know, the need for having all these different plugins that get upgraded, updated at different times and intervals. And you have to, you know, as a site owner or an agency, manage when that gets happened, when that happens, you know, the whole process did break. Anything else if I updated all that stuff. So I do like having more solid, for lack of a better term, core on these products that AI can facilitate.

Dave Lockie:
Yeah. And I mean, I think if you work in tech and building products in tech and you’re not expecting that landscape to change and for your products to like become end of life to some point, then like, it’s a very naive way to be thinking about like the, like the very nature of the industry you work in. Like technology is itself changed. Like that’s the whole point of it.

Robert Jacobi:
Yeah. No one’s using a 300 Baht modem on AOL anymore.

Dave Lockie:
No, no, no, no, no. You know, sad for the people who made modems back in the day, but they probably now make fiber optic switches or something else, whatever.

Robert Jacobi:
Yeah, it’s tech and it’s why I like being in tech, because it is constantly evolving and you have, you know, and I’m curious, I want to see what’s coming up next and if. Yeah, but in any industry, if you just sort of sit there at some point, someone’s going to eat your lunch.

Dave Lockie:
Yeah, yeah. I hate it when people eat my lunch.

Robert Jacobi:
Or

Dave Lockie:
one thing that I’ve been thinking about for a while and it’s come up in a few conversations, it might be me that’s brought out, but it has come up is this idea that when I watch people use their phones, you know, and you do like, I find that a fascinating kind of guilty pleasure to be somewhere in public and like watching people what they do with their phones. Like, you know, what’s, what apps are they using, what’s on their feed. Like, oh, well, that’s an interesting background on your WhatsApp chat. Like, whatever it is. Like, you know, people have such weird and different kind of communications, but I mainly notice apart from games, people either are scrolling like Infinite Feed, scroll or they’re using messaging. Those are the ways that people use.

Robert Jacobi:
I think that’s a phone.

Dave Lockie:
And that like I think there are two opportunities around that for WordPress and Woo. One is how do we make content from sites and stores that are self hosted appear in those algorithmic feeds. So that’s one. I think that’s quite a hard problem, but an interesting one. And the second one is then if we are now at a point where you can use natural language to talk to your store, to your WordPress site, to get it to do stuff, to get it to like do the things you want it to do, then what does that look like in a messaging interface?

Robert Jacobi:
It’s really easy. Automatic’s already solved its problem, except for WordPress. And I am not even paid for this. I should be because I’m the number one advocate of this product. I love Beeper. So why is there not a way for Beeper or hey, if anyone’s listening, Automatic, yeah, Beeper should have like native integrations with Rupert. How about instead of RSS, I’m getting WhatsApp messages every time my favorite site updates a content and maybe I get a synopsis, a summary of that or maybe I get the full content and I’m just like getting a call from, you know, Robert Jacoby.com that you know there’s new content and vice versa. Again, that’s my site and I own it. Why not just send a message? Oh, by the way, take that article down. That was, there was a huge typo. I’ll fix the typo. Don’t take the article down. And having that sort of interesting, direct, human based conversation with content out there

Dave Lockie:
or even, you know, Robert’s content agent has reviewed your latest blog post and fixed a couple of typos and just let you know about it. Right? And we asked to see signs of that. And this idea of talking to your side, to your store through messaging, I think is one of the most exciting parts about what intelligence can offer is like the same context across different interfaces. So if you’re in app, if you are on WhatsApp, if you are in your email, that doesn’t matter, right? Like wherever is best for you to pick up the message and respond. It all gets fed back into that same context and you’re having conversation with the same thing. So that I think is inevitably where WordPress and Woo and general, like general tool use is going, right? Because now AIs have tools. I think like our mindset needs to shift from. I think we have an opportunity to shift our mindset from, like, I need to use this tool to use the task to how do I build a system so that my intelligence can use the tool to help me achieve my goals? And I think there’s some rhyme there with the. This idea of point plugins getting superseded. Like, the. The point of the plugin was to solve a problem, not to build the plugin. Correct, Right?

Robert Jacobi:
Yes, correct.

Dave Lockie:
And so now we can be a bit more direct and a bit more powerful in solving a whole class of problems. I think that’s a good thing. And the last thing I want to say on that is like a shout out to Bryce and the Matoro team, because I saw a demo from them on Twitter where you could like, phone your Woo store or it would phone you and it would talk to you about, like, your sales day or like alert you if there’s a problem. So I think those guys have always done a great job of like, pushing user experience with woo. And I thought that was a, you know, it’s. It’s an inspiring and I think illustrative example of what our relationship with technology more broadly starts to look like. And I love the fact that it’s, you know, it’s a woo example.

Robert Jacobi:
And to really leave it on a positive note, it’s. WordPress is not going anywhere. The sites are not disappearing. WooCommerce is not going anywhere. It’s not disappearing, it’s just being used differently. And we still need the. Those kinds of platforms to enable the viewer to get contact. We can call the viewer whatever we want. These days. It’s an agent or the phone call via an agent or directly. But yeah, content management, shop management, E commerce, that’s certainly not going anywhere.

Dave Lockie:
No.

Robert Jacobi:
Exciting to see it being amped up to the next level here.

Dave Lockie:
Me too. Well, I think that’s probably a wrap for me because I’ve done two days of conferencing and that’s. It’s about one and a half days more than I’m used to at this stage. Robert.

Robert Jacobi:
Oh, no, there’s the after party sponsored by Blackwall. P.S.

Dave Lockie:
okay. Okay. Well, I need to save some energy for that.

Robert Jacobi:
Save some energy. You got a couple hours.

Dave Lockie:
Okay. Go lie in a dark space. Think happy thoughts.

Robert Jacobi:
Thanks so much, Dave.

Dave Lockie:
Always good to connect in person. Yeah, I know. We’ll do it again at the next WordCamp Europe, if not before.

Robert Jacobi:
Oh, yeah, all right, Absolutely. Done.

Dave Lockie:
See you at the after party.

Robert Jacobi:
Cheers.