WordPress 7 shipped with a native AI framework. It’s a step forward for the platform, but the defaults leave a lot on the floor. The good news: AI Engine can slide underneath the whole thing in one click, and you keep using WordPress the way you already do 🙂

New to the WP 7 AI Client? Check the official announcement. It introduces wp_ai_client_prompt() and a shared connector registry that any plugin can call through.

What’s in WordPress 7?

The WP 7 AI Client is a real step forward on paper: one shared layer any plugin can call through, a provider registry, and a UI under Tools → Connectors to plug in keys. That means less duplicated client code all over the ecosystem.

The thing is, it’s young. The base support is pretty minimal, and once you start using it for real features you quickly bump into its limits. Let’s look at what those are.

The Default Setup Is Messy

One Plugin Per Provider

Out of the box, you get three providers (Anthropic, Google, OpenAI), and each needs its own plugin installed and maintained separately. Different release cycles, different authors, different security records. Add a couple more and you’re suddenly tracking four or five plugins just to run the basics.

The list is also narrow: no Mistral, no OpenRouter, no Ollama, no Azure, no Perplexity, no Replicate. If you want any of those, you’re back to hunting extra plugins or writing your own connector.

No Defaults Per Feature

There’s also no way to say “use this provider and model for text, this one for vision, this cheaper one for quick tasks”. The WP AI framework leaves model choice entirely to the code that’s calling, and often you have no way to know what it picked. Fine for experiments, but awkward once you actually care about cost, quality, or consistency.

On top of that, there’s no streaming, no logging, no cost tracking, and no rate limits. Usable, but very bare.

One Click: AI Engine Takes Over

When AI Engine is active, the Connectors page shows a small banner: “AI Engine can manage your connectors.” One click on Enable and the layout changes. Every provider you’ve configured in AI Engine appears as Connected, using its corresponding AI Engine environment. No more per-provider plugins to install 🙂

From that moment on, every wp_ai_client_prompt() call on the site, whether it comes from core, a theme, or another plugin, runs through AI Engine.

What You Get

• Insights & cost tracking: every call is logged with model, tokens, cost, and scope. Filter by wp-ai-client to see framework traffic only.
• Six extra providers out of the box: Mistral, OpenRouter, Ollama, Azure OpenAI, Perplexity, Replicate, plus any OpenAI-compatible endpoint.
• Defaults per feature type: a chosen provider and model for text, vision and image generation, with optional “fast/cheap” variants for lighter tasks. We use this at Meow Apps ourselves, some features need the big model, others are happier (and cheaper) on the fast one.
• Rate limiting & credits: per user, per role, per guest, in queries, tokens or dollars, over any timeframe.
• Environments: prod, staging, local Ollama, client-specific OpenRouter. Each independently configured, each independently rotatable.
• MCP tools for WordPress itself (posts, media, users, taxonomies) and many add-ons (WooCommerce, Polylang, database).
• One plugin to keep up to date: AI Engine has shipped continuously for four years and absorbs breaking changes in the WP AI framework so your site doesn’t notice.

No code changes, no plugin rewrites, no new APIs to learn. The WordPress AI Client stays on top as the public interface. AI Engine becomes the reliable layer underneath.

What About Automattic’s “AI Plugin”?

Alongside the WP 7 framework, Automattic released an AI plugin that adds an “Editor Experiments” panel: taxonomy suggestions, excerpt and title generation, alt text, meta descriptions, review notes, content summarization, image generation, and more. It’s a bag of experiments, literally labelled as such 😉

Feel free to play with it if you’re curious. We wouldn’t recommend leaning on it though. The features are early, not very cohesive, and overlap heavily with what AI Engine (and other mature AI plugins) already do much better. The whole direction of AI inside WordPress is still settling, so expect things to shift.

The Automattic AI plugin is explicitly experimental. Don’t rely on it for production workflows yet. For the same capabilities on a real site, AI Engine is the safer bet.

For Developers

If you’re writing a plugin or theme that needs to call an AI model, you have two clean options, and both work together once AI Engine is managing the connectors.

Two APIs, Both Fine

• wp_ai_client_prompt(): the new WordPress way. Provider-agnostic, documented in the WordPress 7.0 AI Client announcement. Routes through AI Engine automatically once the gateway is enabled.
• AI Engine’s PHP functions: simpler, faster to reach for, and you always know which provider is being hit thanks to AI Engine’s default environments for each operation type (text, vision, image). Reference: ai.thehiddendocs.com/php-functions.

There’s no wrong choice, pick whichever fits your code. The framework is barely used by other plugins yet, so the practical ecosystem is still built around AI Engine, but either API is a safe bet.

Jordy’s Take

After years of building AI features into WordPress and watching how people actually use them, it’s understandable that the WordPress AI Team wanted to ship something. The push itself makes total sense. What’s less clear is why they picked this particular shape: fragmented connector plugins, no feature-level defaults, a minimal base configuration, and a pile of experimental toggles layered on through the Automattic plugin. It’s easy to imagine users ending up a bit disoriented, or heading in directions that won’t really hold up.

My advice for now: be careful. Don’t embrace the whole thing while it’s still settling. Let AI Engine manage the connectors, keep using the mature path for real features, and poke at the experimental bits on the side to watch them grow. AI inside WordPress is going to change a lot over the next few releases, and that’s fine 🙂

Want to discuss AI in WordPress with other people who actually care about it? Come join us on Discord: discord.gg/bHDGh38. We talk about what works, what doesn’t, and where all this should go. The more voices in there, the better the direction gets shaped.

In Short

• Install AI Engine.
• On Tools → Connectors, click Enable on the AI Engine banner.
• Skip the experimental Automattic AI plugin unless you enjoy kicking tires 😛
• Use AI Engine normally; keep calling wp_ai_client_prompt() if you like it, everything goes through one clean layer.

The WordPress AI Client is a good interface. AI Engine is a good system. Putting the second behind the first is the shortest path from “we have AI features” to “we have AI features we can actually run”.