Where the essays go to be argued with.

Panel with Rob Lamplugh, Brad Williams, Brock Anderson, and Jason Siegel on what agency work looks like after traditional SEO loses ground — AI share of voice, brand-citation tracking, and reading LLM perception as a signal worth selling against.

90% of B2B buyers use integration capability to set their vendor shortlist; customers with active integrations are up to 58% less likely to churn. The pitch to a room of technology leaders: integration quality is a legible signal of platform maturity, and integration strategy is an audience-expansion mechanism that scales — not a checkbox on a procurement form.

Panel with leaders from WordPress VIP and The Independent on how publishing teams are sorting signal from noise across AI, monetization, and platform strategy — and how the better teams are turning industry whiplash into a short list of things actually worth doing.

On what it actually takes to put AI inside an open-source stack and ship it — the architectures and frameworks that hold up under real load, and the trade-offs nobody puts in the demo: performance, API limits, ethical drag, and model drift.

Panel on what the agency operating model looks like once AI stops being the headline and starts being the floor. With agency leaders from MRM, Verndale, and Barbarian.

Short video interview. The thesis: AI isn't coming for the engineering job — it's coming for the part of the job that was already a candidate for replacement. The interesting work is what's left.

Panel with Gabriel Koen (SVP Technology, Penske Media) and Doyle Irvin (WordPress VIP). PMC on their test-and-learn approach across their properties, 10up on what ClassifAI was actually doing inside editorial workflows, and WordPress VIP on Content Intelligence — what publishers were shipping, as distinct from what vendors were pitching.

Internal talk to the 10up team. The argument: you don't get to grade your own service — the market does, in the gap between the work you think you did and the work the client felt. My spin on Unreasonable Hospitality, for a premium professional-services audience.

Wide-ranging conversation with practicing attorneys on how technology was reshaping the practice and marketing of law — attracting talent, web presence, meeting clients where they actually are. I was there as the outside-the-industry voice, which turned out to be most of the value.

Panel with Brian Gardner, Sam Munoz, and other agency leads. When block-centric WordPress actually pays off — and when it just rebuilds Gutenberg, badly, on top of itself.

With Helen Hou-Sandí. Editorial UX is product UX. If your block editor makes a journalist's day worse, no amount of theme polish saves the site.

Conversation with Brian Alvey (CTO, WordPress VIP). Why to go decoupled, why not to, the architectures people actually end up with, and lessons from clients who'd already taken the swing — including the ones who shouldn't have.

With Kellen and Will. Whether 10up was going all-in on headless (no), how to tell during discovery if it's the right call, and where Gutenberg actually fits when the front end isn't WordPress.

Panel hosted by Dominic Ponsford (Press Gazette) with Robert Hahn (Guardian News and Media), Federica Cherubini (Reuters Institute), and Martin Ashplant (GlobalData Media). On where audience actually still grows — and on traditional portals like Apple News quietly becoming table-stakes work for diminishing returns.

Panel with Matt Landers and Jason Bahl (WP Engine), moderated by Annan Patel. On how the first wave of headless adopters figured out whether the architecture was theirs to take on.

Interview on martech consolidation, where WordPress fits in a publisher stack, and what personalization looks like in an editorial context as opposed to a retail one.

An early introduction to applied AI for higher-ed publishing teams. What to automate, what to leave alone, and how to read a vendor pitch deck with appropriate skepticism.

Internal cut of the PubTech AI talk, retold for a 10up audience. Same thesis, more candor about what we were betting on internally.

Interview on the evolution of personalization — how brands were actually using it at the time, the business case for it when there is one (and the cases where there genuinely isn't), and where the practice was heading once the easy wins were spent.

Short documentary segment on what open source still does for the modern web, and what it has quietly stopped doing.

Second stop for the AI-in-publishing talk, paired with a Medium essay the same month. Years before generative AI made the topic table stakes for newsrooms.

On applying machine learning and AI to editorial workflows — given in early 2019, well before the generative-AI rush made every newsroom a buyer.

Internal Sanity.io primer for the 10up team. The argument: WordPress is the answer to most editorial problems, but not all of them — and the team that pretends otherwise loses work it should be winning.

On where WordPress was heading as a modular content platform, and what that meant for the agencies building on top of it. Held up better than I expected.

Internal primer on Next.js for content sites, given when most of the team was still asking why anyone would ship a React app to a reader.

In the technical innovation track. On using the WordPress REST API to keep editorial experience consistent across surfaces, with StoryCorps as the case in point.

Internal talk on how headless unlocked multi-channel publishing for the kinds of content businesses 10up worked with — one of the earlier in-house arguments for the architecture.

Panel on the rise of open-source software in the enterprise publisher stack — a few years before that became the unremarkable default.

An early introduction of React.js to nonprofit and publisher technologists at the Nonprofit Technology Conference's WordPress Day. React was still mostly a Facebook thing then, and shipping it to a reader was an argument, not a default.