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WordPress Launches AI Team Chaired by Google, Automattic, and Fueled’s 10up Practice Leaders

This post has been cross-posted on the Fueled website.

I’m excited to share that I’ve joined the newly formed WordPress AI Team, working alongside Felix Arntz and Pascal Birchler from Google, and James LePage from Automattic. Together, as the launch team, we aim to shape how artificial intelligence is integrated into the WordPress ecosystem—not just abstractly, but through practical tools and features that help WordPress evolve and remain competitive.

My participation follows more than 6 years of investment into open source AI integrations for WordPress at Fueled (in case you missed it, 10up is now the WordPress practice of Fueled), in addition to a decade of varied contributions to WordPress. As the Director of our Open Source Practice, I’ve collaborated with engineering to advance our open source Artificial Intelligence plugin for WordPress, ClassifAI, and project managed client engagements using it as the foundation for custom AI integrations. I’m honored to bring that experience into this next chapter for WordPress.

Read the full story on the Fueled blog.

Making Google Site Kit: A 7-Year Open Source Collaboration

Emily Clarke on May 27

In 2018, Google came to us with a big question: what would it take to bring essential tools like Analytics, Search Console, and AdSense directly inside WordPress, the CMS powering more than 40% of the web?

The answer became Google Site Kit: a secure, first-party plugin built natively for WordPress, offering website owners trusted access to vital Google’s services, without the friction of third-party setups or unclear integrations.

Over the past seven years, Site Kit has grown into one of the most widely adopted plugins in the WordPress ecosystem. Today, it boasts more than 5 million active installs, and recently broke into the top 10 most popular WordPress plugins on the official directory. From the very beginning, we’ve been partnered with Google driving Site Kit, across engineering, design, QA, support, product strategy, and platform evolution.

AI Meets Emotion: Helping Microsoft Research Build Mosaic

Thomas King on May 22

We often talk about building tools and platforms that empower expression—whether that’s helping storytellers reach audiences at scale or supporting open source contributors that empower developers. But sometimes, digital expression takes a more literal shape.

When Microsoft Research set out to explore how people feel about AI, not through charts or surveys, but through art, they imagined Mosaic: an interactive, AI-powered mural that translated individual sentiment into stylized portraits using ChatGPT and DALL·E.

Our team was brought in to help bring that vision to life: an emotionally resonant, cinematic experience designed for reflection, not just interaction.

Working closely with Microsoft’s internal team, we helped shape Mosaic as a fluid, immersive canvas—not a traditional web interface. Built with React, Three.js, and Azure-hosted OpenAI models, the platform interpreted thousands of text responses, mapped them to emotional categories, and rendered unique visual portraits in real time.

Rebuilding Fueled.com: A New Brand, Powered by WordPress and AI

Fabian Kaegy on May 20

The unification of our two agencies under the Fueled name called for a major brand refresh, capturing how a fully integrated Fueled and 10up had forged something materially different and stronger together. The new website would be the first public expression of that identity, showcasing our integrated capabilities and revitalized vision.

From the outset, we knew the new site would run on WordPress. It was a chance to dogfood the modern, efficient stack we’ve been refining over years of client work—bringing together our flexible block based theme, AI-accelerated development workflows, and a more collaborative, in-browser approach to content and design.

The result? A performant, scalable, visually engaging site—engineered in just eight weeks by the 10up WordPress practice inside Fueled. It’s a showcase of the product-minded thinking, reusable systems, and modern tooling we bring to every engagement.

Meet the new Fueled brand; 10up becomes the brand of our WordPress practice

Jake Goldman on May 13

When Fueled and 10up joined in 2023, we aligned two leading agencies, each renowned for innovation, craftsmanship, and excellence. This week, we take a big step forward in our journey: the unveiling of our refreshed and unified company brand as Fueled.

The name may be familiar, but our revitalized identity encapsulates our collective achievements and boldly speaks to a time of transformation. It tells a more complete story about who we are together, what we’re building, and how we’re evolving in a fast-changing digital world.

Using AI and WordPress to Raise the Bar for Civic Technology with CalMatters and Cal Poly

Steve Meyers on April 29

At Fueled+10up, we believe technology can—and should—make the world more understandable, accessible, and transparent. That’s why we were proud to partner with CalMatters, a leading nonprofit newsroom focused on California policy and politics, and California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly) to create DigitalDemocracy.org: a first-of-its-kind, AI-powered platform that makes government data easier for everyday citizens and journalists to explore, understand, and act on.

Working together, we helped bring massive, often fragmented public datasets—legislation, campaign donations, committee transcripts, hearing videos, and more—into a single, intuitive experience powered by a modern, headless WordPress architecture, Elasticsearch, and AI-enhanced content aggregation.

The result is an unprecedented public resource that brings new life to civic transparency—and sets a new standard for making government data truly accessible.

You can read the full case study to dive deeper into how we combined cutting-edge technology with thoughtful user experience and design.

If you’re ready to build a platform that moves the needle—whether it’s in civic tech, media, or beyond—we’d love to start the conversation.

Bringing AI to the Publisher Behind Rolling Stone and Variety

Jake Goldman on April 24

When Penske Media Corporation (PMC), the publisher behind iconic brands like Rolling Stone, Variety, and Billboard, wanted to incorporate generative AI into their stack in 2023, they came to us seeking a close knit collaboration that would use our existing open source AI toolkit for WordPress, ClassifAI, as the starting point. Working hand-in-hand, we iteratively and rapidly tested, integrated, and deployed AI features with a focus on improving editorial workflow productivity, improving visitor engagement, and driving SEO.

ClassifAI and its existing architecture gave us a huge head start. A project that started with Machine Learning applications in 2018, it already had AI-powered capabilities like smart content tagging, SEO-optimized title recommendations, image generation and automatic image descriptions. ClassifAI’s service-agnostic architecture gave PMC the ability to immediately integrate their existing and trusted cloud services provider, Microsoft, using Azure’s OpenAI service.
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Fueled+10up Leads the Way in the Making of WordPress 6.8

Jeff Paul on April 17

Earlier this week, WordPress 6.8 was released, with a major focus on refinement and polish, including iterative improvements to block editing, website performance, and accessibility.

Once again, our team led the way in contributing to one of the internet’s largest open source projects, estimated to power 40% of websites. Twenty-four 10uppers contributed to WordPress 6.8 “Cecil”, with Jeff Paul as Release Coordinator, Joe McGill as Tech Lead, and Fabian Kaegy, Peter Wilson, and Mukesh Panchal as Noteworthy Contributors.

Other Fueled+10up contributors included Ajay Maurya, Ankit Gade, Ankit Gupta, Darin Kotter, Dharmesh Patel, Faisal Alvi, Harshal Kadu, Karthik Thayyil, Konstantinos Galanakis, Mohit Dadhich, Navneet Kaur, Rahul Prajapati, Severine Pozzo, Siddharth Thevaril, Sourabh Jain, Sumit Bagthariya, Thrijith Thankachan, Tyler Bailey, and Vikram Moparthy. We’d also like to recognize our partners at Google and Elementor for sponsoring some of our contributions during parts of this release cycle.

2025 ElasticPress Updates Deliver New & Improved WordPress Search Capabilities

Thorsten Ott on April 15

ElasticPress, our speedy and intelligent website search solution that brings Elasticsearch to WordPress, continues to evolve to support new use cases and improve usability for site owners and developers. With the release of ElasticPress 5.2, and the companion ElasticPress Labs 2.4 update, we’ve added highly sought after enhancements that make our WordPress search solution even more versatile for professional site developers, including enhanced support for a popular WordPress field management plugin, location based searching, and improvements for headless applications of WordPress.
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Ignite: A Sanity CMS Starter Kit for Content-Driven Marketing Sites

Taylor Lovett on April 11

In the fast-paced world of digital marketing, the most effective websites aren’t just online brochures—they are dynamic hubs for storytelling, engagement, and lead generation. Forward-thinking online marketers need websites and tools optimized for strategic audience growth and engagement.

At Fueled+10up, high-performing storytelling hubs for the enterprise are one of our most common engagement types, as we’ve helped clients like Salesforce build award-winning dedicated news and blog centers that drive results.

This led us to create Ignite for Sanity, a powerful website starter kit and template for enterprises that have adopted Sanity as a content management system (CMS). Ignite for Sanity is specifically engineered to support businesses whose digital marketing strategies include regularly publishing articles, news, blogs, and resources. Ignite is carefully designed from the ground up to enhance content visibility, audience interaction, and search engine performance.