On the way back from Boston yesterday, unable to sleep because the small child behind me kept kicking my chair with the enthusiasm of a caffeinated mule, I watched the brilliant Benedict Evans give one of his presentations about where AI is heading. It was supposed to help me relax. Instead it felt like someone had handed me a fire hose filled with charts.
Somewhere between the turbulence and the periodic thump against my spine, a thought landed. We are about to repeat a story we have lived through at least three times already. And WordPress.com is right in the middle of it, even if nobody thinks to mention it.
Here is what I saw, once the kicking reached a rhythm I could predict.
The World Loves a New Panic
Every fifteen years or so, the tech industry discovers something new and immediately declares that everything we know is over. We did it with PCs. We did it with the Web. We did it with mobile. Each time, someone predicts that the world is going to collapse into a glowing orb of doom. And then, somehow, it does not.
AI is following the same script. Big models. Big hype. Big spending. Enough capital expenditure to heat a medium sized country.
But look a little closer, and something familiar appears. The shiny new thing starts to blend into the background, becomes ordinary, and eventually turns into regular software.
It becomes part of the furniture. Like that toddler kicking my seat. Always present. Impossible to ignore. But also something you eventually get used to.
The Great Model Stampede
Right now the frontier labs are sprinting at each other with giant models the way medieval knights sprinted at each other with pointy sticks. It looks dramatic. It sounds expensive. And according to Benedict, it is already commoditizing.
There are so many strong models now that the competition is no longer about the model itself. It is about what you do with it.
Think about that for a moment. If the foundation layer is crowded, the real opportunity goes upward. That is where platforms like WordPress.com live. The place where normal humans actually do things. The place where daily life happens.
When the dust settles, the winners will not be the ones with the biggest model. They will be the ones who thread these models into the moments where people write, design and publish.
Which brings us to the slightly surprising part.
The Platform Everyone Underestimates
WordPress is twenty years old, which in software years puts it somewhere between middle aged and immortal vampire. Yet here it is rolling out a new wave of AI features during a moment when the industry acts like only newborn startups get to innovate.
The pattern Benedict described was simple. New tech arrives. Incumbents absorb it as features. Startups experiment around the edges. Eventually a new category emerges.
Right now WordPress.com is deep inside step one. And the pace is picking up.
AI Writer polishing text.
Telex building WordPress blocks.
AI Assistant showing up everywhere in wp admin.
AI Website builder already running for thousands of users.
This is the quiet part of the revolution. The stage that slips under the radar because it shows up as simple feature releases. But this is exactly how platform shifts begin. Small tools that seem helpful at first, then normal, then completely essential.
The Secret Power of Familiarity
Here is something Benedict said that stuck with me. Only a tiny slice of the world uses AI every day. Most people freeze when faced with an empty prompt box. They stare at it like it is a suspicious sandwich.
People need guardrails. Not in a limiting way, but in a way that lets them act without confusion. They need AI to be threaded into the spaces they already understand.
This is why WordPress.com matters. It is not a blank prompt. It is a familiar playground. People already know where the menus are. They know how a post works. They know what a theme is supposed to do.
AI stitched into that world gives ordinary people a way to use this enormous breakthrough without feeling like they have just been asked to land a helicopter.
The Elephant Named Time
Enterprises adopt new tech slowly. Painfully slowly. Cloud adoption is still not complete. That tells you everything about how AI will unfold.
WordPress.com has two gifts in this slow motion race.
It is trusted.
It already holds a huge amount of the world’s content.
And it knows how to change without panicking its users.
This makes it one of the few platforms capable of absorbing an entirely new computing paradigm without melting down.
The Open Web Has a Quiet Advantage
While the large labs chase scale, the open web sits in its corner, quietly being useful. It is messy, chaotic and stubborn. It also happens to be exactly where creators, publishers and small businesses operate.
AI inside closed systems is powerful. AI inside an open ecosystem becomes generative in the older, truer sense of the word. It multiplies possibilities rather than narrowing them.
This is why WordPress.com sits in such an interesting place. It is open enough to adapt. Stable enough to matter. Large enough to steer the next chapter.
Where This All Leads
AI becomes normal. AI becomes boring. AI becomes something you expect to find inside the tools you already use.
When that happens, the question will not be who built the biggest model. It will be who helped the most people create.
WordPress.com is already walking toward that future with a bundle of new AI features that make writing easier, design smoother, and publishing faster.
If Benedict is right, and history suggests he might be, the next decade will belong to the platforms that turn AI into a creative multiplier rather than a spectacle.
Which means the most important AI story might not be the labs at all.
It might be the open web.
And it might be happening in front of us right now.
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