Meet My New Hires (They’re Not Human)

Well…. happy Tuesday?! 😇 I know this issue usually comes out on Mondays. But, yesterday was Labor Day here in the U.S. Usually, that means nothing to me and all I do is labor. 🤪 But, my whole family was home and…. well, it felt just wrong to be sitting in my office. So… I decided to (mostly) take the day.

But, getting off to a quick start this morning – and holding no punches on this week’s issue. Even if it is a day later than usual.

Coming up:

• A new kind of hiring process (this is really the most fascinating thing to me)
• Some big changes to Concierge coming up
• And… where does WordPress fall in today’s AI age? Is it… outdated?
• And of course, the news from the world of WordPress.

So, let’s light this candle. ⬇️

A New Kind Of Hiring Process

You may remember in past issues and a big feature article where I discussed the 7 Functions Every Business Has. The idea is that every business – whether a large organization or a small one-person business – has the same 7 functions. In my own business, these functions are Divisions and my business is literally organized around this idea.

The quickie recap is:

• Executive (strategy, direction, etc.)
• Communications (both external and internal communication)
• Marketing (turning people into customers and signing them up for service)
• Treasury (Payments, expenses, handling assets)
• Production (where the work happens and products/services get delivered)
• Quality (testing and ensuring things are going out at high quality)
• Public (Reaching new people, outbound promotion)

Now, the thing about MOST of us (including me) is that…. we’re doing it all ourselves. Or… some of it just doesn’t get done very well. 🤣 It is kind of the curse of being a solo business owner.

But, things are changing. And I think it is perhaps the biggest advancement to happen for solopreneurs in a very long time. And yes… it has to do with AI. 🤷‍♂️ 😇

Because, tools are coming out that enable us to build a team. A team of AI agents. And therefore staff a business where those 7 functions are being done (fully or partially) by AI employees and you remain the sole human operator.

I’m currently working with two tools on this at the same time – trying to decide which I prefer. Those are Hermes and GrokBot. And I have no doubt that other tools will emerge that have this same AI-agent approach. This is NOT an article about specific tools, though. I’m simply talking about the approach.

When you watch videos about GrokBot, for instance, you’ll see a lot of them talk about starting with a “Chief of Staff”. So, I have a Chief of Staff. I call him “Chief”. 🤪 He is my executive assistant and my hiring manager, so to speak. He falls firmly within Division 7 and Division 1 in my business. The job is to be my bridge between me (as the founder) and the rest of the business functions. And, he sets up other bots to wear roles where I decide (with his help) to place them. That means…. he’s kind of my HR department, too.

Funny how I call it “he”. 🤪

I don’t have a full team here yet, but I’m working on building it. So far, a few of my AI employees are:

• Tally. Tally is in Division 3, so he’s my accountant. Automatically handles failed payments, does followups, takes care of managing Anytime Credit debits and caring for the time log. And I’m setting him up to automatically do the books for me, using SimpleFIN as a read-only portal into my business banking. He also has a connection to Stripe.
• Fleet. Fleet is in Division 4, so this is a client operations agent. Also helps keep the Concierge fleet of sites tracked and alert me to any issues, hence why I call it “Fleet”.
• Postmark. This one is specifically named after my outgoing email provider for myself and Concierge – Postmark. As you might guess, this agent’s responsibility is email deliverability. Helps track down any issues and sends me reports.
• Reed. Reed is in Division 6 (promo) and basically helps me manage my Founder’s Memo videos for Youtube. Tracks the analytics for me, plus does the full end-to-end publishing. I drop a video file into a folder, tell Reed… and he handles the rest.

You get the idea. And I actually organize these AI agents into sections in my interface based around these 7 functions. The whole thing is designed around my business structure and each agent knows exactly where it lies within that structure.

Each agent has tool permissions to the specific things it needs. Specific instructions. Specific routines that happen on automatic. When it needs to report up the chain of command, it reports back to Chief. Who then tells me. I make all decisions.

Again, I’m testing out GrokBot and Hermes. Two very different tools. GrokBot is fully hosted, very user-friendly. It truly makes building an AI team a very easy experience even if you’re not technically savvy at all. Hermes is more work because you can self-host it. Hermes is WAY more powerful, but also way more… persnickety. 🤪 But, the reason I am using Hermes is so I have control over my infrastructure. As simple and polished as GrokBot feels, it would put a large chunk of your business infrastructure onto “rented land”. You’d literally be renting your AI agents from x.ai and they could change things as they please. That’s not very digitally sovereign. 😇 So, what I’m doing is building my team in BOTH tools. Each bot (in both tools) documents itself in my Vault (which I control), and it makes pretty much everything portable.

This whole thing is a work in progress, of course. But, it is FASCINATING to me. Super powerful. And a total game changer. Today, a solopreneur can have a team of AI employees. All it takes is a willingness to experiment with the tools, do some learning, and think through what you do from a systematic perspective. The whole thing kinda forces you to think of your business as a true organization and not just something you do.

WordPress News & Updates

Quick update on the RankMath admin-password story from last issue. Under the backlash, RankMath pulled the whole “support agent” feature in version 1.0.277.2… it now deletes any of those Application Passwords it already created instead of just leaving them sitting there. Matt Mullenweg used the incident to publicly call for security audits on any plugin that “phones home” to its own company’s servers. Good outcome, but worth remembering it only happened because someone with a public platform (a competing plugin’s founder, no less) made noise about it. Full story here.

Skip the 7.1 chatter, here’s what actually matters this week: WordPress 7.1.1 lands September 17th. It’s a bug-fix-only maintenance release addressing issues that surfaced after 7.1 shipped… nothing dramatic, just the normal “let the early adopters find the rough edges first” cycle. Worth having on your radar if you’ve been holding off updating. Release schedule here.

Andy Peatling, the guy who built BuddyPress, just launched an AI design agent called Miles. After 17 years at Automattic, he spent over a year building something that designs and builds full WordPress sites from natural language… using native WordPress blocks, not some proprietary page-builder lock-in. Early users, including WP Engine’s Brian Gardner, are calling it a step up from the usual AI-slop site builders. Worth a look.

Divi 5.12 shipped with over 220 built-in AI Agent skills. Elegant Themes is calling it their biggest update of the year… agents that can build layouts, edit modules, and even design from a reference screenshot, right inside the builder. Details here.

Elementor’s 4.3 beta adds official MCP support, so you can connect Claude, Cursor, or other AI coding tools directly into your Elementor site and have them build or edit pages inside its native structure, scoped to whatever permissions your WordPress user has. Another builder betting on “let AI work inside WordPress” instead of around it. More on the rollout here.

FluentCommunity 2.9 added web push notifications, so replies land as an actual notification on desktop or phone within seconds, even with the tab closed, instead of waiting on email. Runs on their free FluentNotify plugin, one-click connect from the FluentCommunity settings screen. If you’re running a community and wondering why engagement drops the moment people close the tab… this is probably why, and now there’s a fix. What’s new here.

MemberPress added a shared Question Bank for course quizzes. Instead of questions being trapped inside whatever quiz you first wrote them for, they now live in one central, taggable library… write a question once, reuse it across a beginner and advanced version of the same course, or pull a randomized sample for every cohort instead of rebuilding quizzes by hand. If you run courses with quizzes, this is the kind of “why wasn’t it always like this” update. Details here.

Remember when I mentioned FluentCRM was working on WhatsApp messaging a few issues back? It’s here. FluentCRM 3.2 (with FluentCampaign Pro) adds WhatsApp as a full messaging channel… campaigns, automation steps, and one-to-one conversations, all tracked against the same contact record as everything else. One catch worth knowing: email consent doesn’t carry over, contacts have to separately opt in to WhatsApp. Full rundown here.

Not every AI story is good news, though. Barn2 Plugins’ CEO reported entry-page traffic down almost 28% year over year, and new plugin sales down nearly 18% in 2025… their first real decline ever… as Google’s AI Overviews swallow searches that used to click through to their site. Her response is diversifying off organic search entirely rather than waiting it out. Worth thinking about if your business leans hard on Google traffic. Her full writeup here.

WordPress Isn’t A Dinosaur. It’s A Harness.

So, there’s been a running theme in some circles. Some people like to harp on WordPress. Especially with some of the annoyances coming out of its founder. Some opinionated people out there seem to get their jollies off by ripping on WordPress and acting like it is just an aging platform going the way of the dodo.

It often starts when some builder wires together AI to spit out a custom site from scratch, no WordPress in sight, then throws in a line like “why would anyone still use WordPress in 2026?” Like it’s a genuinely quaint thing to still be doing. An aging dinosaur, best left in the tar pit.

I get where it comes from. I really do. If all you’ve ever done is fight WordPress… slow themes, plugin conflicts, some page builder holding your content hostage… then sure, “just have AI build it from nothing” sounds like freedom.

But, these people are missing the point.

WordPress isn’t the thing you’re trying to replace with AI. WordPress is the harness AI should be plugging into.

You’ve heard the term “harness” if you’ve spent any time around AI tools. Claude Desktop, Grokbot, whatever you’re running… that’s your harness. It’s not the brain. The model is the brain. The harness is everything around it… where your skills live, how it connects to your other tools, what it’s actually allowed to touch. Swap the model out, and the harness stays. Swap the harness, and you keep the same brain but change how it operates in the world.

WordPress is the exact same idea, just for your website instead of your AI assistant.

Think about what WordPress actually gives you. You can plug it into pretty much any host on earth. You can hand it to a different developer next year without starting over. You, or somebody you hire, or nobody at all if you’d rather leave it alone… any of those work. None of it requires rebuilding the thing from scratch. That’s a harness. The structure stays yours. What plugs into it is up to you.

And here’s the part I think a lot of the “just build it with AI” crowd is missing… WordPress being open source and absurdly well-documented is exactly why AI is good at working with it. Every AI model out there has read more WordPress code, more WordPress documentation, more forum threads about WordPress, than about basically anything else in web development. You’re not fighting the AI to use WordPress. You’re handing it the one platform it already knows cold.

Trying to have an AI tool build you a fully custom site from zero, instead of just using WordPress? That’s like hiring a robot to help you build your own car from raw parts, when you could just… go buy a car. A really good, endlessly customizable car that a hundred million other people also drive, so parts and mechanics are everywhere.

And it’s only getting more true, not less. Themes, plugins, API connections, and now MCP servers letting AI tools reach directly into WordPress and work inside it natively… all of that plug-and-play flexibility is what makes WordPress such a good harness for AI to operate through. Not a relic AI is going to replace. The actual infrastructure AI is increasingly plugging into.

Now, I’ll be straight with you, because I’m not selling WordPress as a religion here. There is one kind of site where I’d tell you to skip it entirely. If somebody books a Roadmap Call with me and tells me all they want is a handful of pages, basically a brochure, that almost never changes… I’m probably going to tell them they don’t need WordPress. In fact, for sites like that, WordPress would just be a hassle.

But the moment your site is actually doing work for your business… generating leads, running real functionality behind the scenes, something you want to fully own and control instead of renting from whatever platform is trendy this year… there’s still nothing better than WordPress.

Not because it’s old. Because it’s the harness that’s had twenty years to get good at holding whatever you plug into it.

WordPress isn’t perfect. There are still some things that I shake my head at, wondering why they can’t manage to improve it after all these years. But, even with all that…. it is pretty much the best harness for a truly powerful website that you fully own. And that’s why I remain such a fan of it and base my business around it. Even if I do find Matt to be kinda annoying. 🤪