WordPress Just Became an AI Operating System and Nobody's Paying Attention

WordPress 7.0 Beta 1 dropped on February 19.

Most people yawned. "Another WordPress update." Cool. Moving on.

Bad move.

Buried in the release notes is something that changes the entire game for anyone running an online business: a native MCP adapter baked into WordPress core. Not a plugin. Not a third-party hack. Core.

Let me translate that. MCP — Model Context Protocol — is the standard that lets AI tools talk to software. Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code, whatever AI tool you're using — they can now plug directly into your WordPress site. Read your data. Discover what your site can do. Execute actions. Natively.

This isn't "AI-assisted blogging." This is WordPress becoming a layer that AI agents operate on.

And WooCommerce is getting the same treatment.

Here's where Zecheng's brain starts doing math. WooCommerce powers somewhere between 33% and 39% of all e-commerce sites globally. Over the past 90 days alone, it pulled 15,311 merchants away from competitors — 4,195 of those from Shopify. Now imagine every one of those stores becoming AI-agent-compatible by default when they update to WordPress 7.

Shopify has been building AI features aggressively. Sidekick, Magic, the whole suite. Impressive stuff. But it's proprietary. It works inside Shopify's walls. You get what Shopify decides to give you, when they decide to give it.

WordPress just took the opposite approach: here's an open protocol, plug in whatever AI you want, build whatever agent you need. Your store, your rules, your AI stack.

The stable release is targeted for April 9 at WordCamp Asia. That gives the ecosystem roughly six weeks to start building.

Think about what this actually enables. An AI agent that monitors your WooCommerce inventory, adjusts pricing based on competitor data, generates product descriptions in your brand voice, and handles customer service tickets — all through a standardized protocol, all running on infrastructure you own. No monthly per-seat AI fee. No vendor lock-in.

"But wait," you're thinking. "Can't I already do most of that with APIs and plugins?"

You can. The way you could build a website in 2004 by hand-coding HTML.

The difference is friction. MCP makes the connection between AI tools and WordPress zero-config. A developer building an AI agent doesn't need to learn the WordPress REST API, figure out authentication flows, or write custom integration code. They point their AI tool at a WordPress site, and it discovers what's possible automatically.

Friction reduction sounds boring until you realize it's the thing that makes ecosystems explode. The App Store didn't invent mobile apps — it removed the friction of finding and installing them. MCP in WordPress core doesn't invent AI agents — it removes the friction of connecting them to the world's most popular CMS.

Now zoom out.

On the same day WordPress dropped this news, Bloomberg reported that Stripe — valued at $159 billion — is weighing an acquisition of PayPal. The payment layer is consolidating. Fewer providers, more power concentrated at the top.

The platform layer is doing the opposite. It's opening up.

This is the tension that defines 2026 for indie builders. Your payment options might narrow. Your platform options are exploding. The smart play is obvious: own your platform layer, stay flexible on everything else.

Here's what I think happens next. The first wave of MCP-native WordPress plugins will be underwhelming — basic chatbots, simple automations, nothing you couldn't do before. Give it six months. By Q4 2026, someone will build an AI agent framework specifically for WooCommerce stores that makes Shopify's proprietary AI look like a toy. It'll be open source. It'll spread fast. And it'll happen because WordPress made the connection layer free and frictionless.

Shopify's response will be interesting to watch. They can't adopt MCP without opening up their walled garden. They can't ignore it without falling behind on AI capabilities. Classic innovator's dilemma — except the innovator is a 20-year-old open-source project that everyone keeps writing obituaries for.

WordPress has been declared dead more times than I can count. And yet here it is, quietly becoming the first major platform to make AI agents a first-class citizen.

Zecheng's one-line take: the most consequential tech moves don't come with fireworks — they come disguised as boring infrastructure updates that nobody reads past the headline.