As AI increasingly generates content, is it creating a better internet—or is it quietly eroding the authenticity we value online?
Today, we’re excited to welcome Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, the enterprise CMS behind some of the biggest media and enterprise websites. With extensive experience overseeing a platform that powers millions of websites, we’ll explore how AI is transforming the digital landscape and where human creativity fits in this new paradigm.
About Nick Gernert
For over 20 years, Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, has been a key evangelist of open source technology, working across the open web to build the next generation of enterprise digital experiences. In his role as CEO of WordPress VIP at Automattic, Nick leads the company’s overall business strategy, working with partners to expand the business and drive the commercial growth and executive adoption of WordPress as they disrupt and lead the enterprise content management market.
Before joining Automattic, Nick was an advisor to Transform’s executive team up until their acquisition by Dbt Labs, and held the title of Senior Vice President of Digital at Voce Communications. Nick holds a Bachelor of Science in Finance from the University of Central Florida’s College of Business Administration and is an Innovation Fellow at the Eugene M. Lang Entrepreneurship Center at Columbia Business School.
Resources
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Transcript
Note: This was AI-generated and only lightly edited
Greg Kihlstrom:
As AI increasingly generates content, is it creating a better internet or is it quietly eroding the authenticity we value online? Today, we’re excited to welcome Nick Gernert, CEO of WordPress VIP, the enterprise CMS behind some of the biggest media and enterprise websites. With extensive experience overseeing a platform that powers millions of websites, we’re gonna explore how AI is transforming the digital landscape and where human creativity fits in this new paradigm. Welcome to the show, Nick. Thank you, Greg. Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here. Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Before we dive in, though, why don’t you start by telling us a little bit about your background and your current role at WordPress VIP?
Nick Gernert: Sure. Thanks. So look, my background is, you know, you go far enough back. I am a I’m a web enthusiast at heart. Got to the fortunate timing of growing up in the nineties when the web was a very nascent concept and got to sort of grow with and explore and fall in love with a lot of the potential of the web, which led me into a career prior to what I’m doing now in really digital agencies. So largely focused on the application of the web and sort of how things evolved through social and platforms, et cetera. So, um, so prior to joining automatic, I was in WordPress VIP. I was part of Omnicom group, uh, that the large holding company behind a lot of marketing and communications organizations that, and we were deploying digital standards across some of the biggest brands in the world. And that, that led me into automatic and ultimately now this role at WordPress VIP, where we’re taking, uh, WordPress. you know, the technology, uh, open source software that is ubiquitous on the web, you know, 43 plus percent of websites that you encounter are going to be powered by WordPress and really taking that and saying, how do we, how do we take everything that’s wonderful about WordPress and this technology that’s become ubiquitous and web and digital, and then, uh, open that up, uh, to some of the most demanding use cases and organizations in the world. And so that’s, That’s really what we’re doing here at VIP. And I’m the CEO of that. And so I get to focus on that every day.
Greg Kihlstrom: Great, great. Love it. Well, yeah, let’s dive in here. And we’re going to talk about a few things. But the first thing I want to talk about is lots of talk about AI these days in a number of different ways. Certainly when it comes to marketers, content creation is something that’s top of mind. So, you know, a stat out there over 50% of the Internet’s content is now generated by AI. That’s 50%. That’s quite astounding for for a relatively short timeframe, but 70% of AI generated headlines are outperforming human written ones as well. So not only is there a lot of it, but it’s doing well. What are these statistics tell us about the future of content creation?
Nick Gernert: Yeah, gosh, we probably don’t have enough time to maybe go through everything that it’s telling us about the future of content creation here. But, you know, I think it’s, you know, it’s another amazing sort of technological advancement that we’re all getting to experience right now, no different than you know, mobile maybe was 15 years ago or whatever, where we were seeing an entirely new entire shift in how we think about something. And so I think the statistic you cited on 70% of headlines generated, you know, by AI or outperforming those by the human, that’s the kind of thing that’s really exciting for us, because that’s where our business is really focused in, like, how do you think of AI as a superpower? And I think the reality is a lot of what we do, we have, you know, some of our products include an analytics platform that, that collects analytics across, you know, several hundred million users every single day. And we can take. that and say, okay, what, you know, what is driving interaction? And then we can apply that to a human curated process. So I think the reality that 70% of those headlines are being, are outperforming is just a, it’s a recognition that look, if you’re able to synthesize a data set that is impossible as a human to synthesize and you apply that the statistical, you know, a result of that is like, you’re going to outperform. So this is one of those things where we look at this and say, Hey, there’s a, this is something that is going to unlock more potential for us as individuals. Now that other half of content that’s written by AI You know, there’s probably, there’s lots of pluses and minuses to this. Um, I think where we look at the largest brands in the world and the biggest organizations. It’s not so much, how do I outsource all content generation to the machines now? It is like, look, we know our customers and but we only have so much capacity. And so what’s the right balance of, you know, AI support, things like high performing headlines, potentially, along with human curated and driven connections that we make through content. That’s a, you know, I think the best work out there is where those things come together, not where we’re just shipping it all off to AI, as we’re saying to accomplish it.
Greg Kihlstrom: Right, because I mean, you know, just because you can doesn’t mean you should, you know, it’s super easy to generate a lot of content, but it’s the value of it, you know, in the in the headline case, there seems to be a lot of value in doing that. And some other cases that may not. So, you know, this this is where that that human judgment is still needed. What does all this mean for content strategy? You know, when AI is playing potentially a pretty big role, but not the sole role, you know, how, how do content strategies evolve in this case?
Nick Gernert: Yeah. I mean, I still think, I mean, I look at this and say, our content strategies can become more ambitious because I’ve never, I’ve never heard or interacted with a customer or any organization where They’ve said, um, I have so many people. And, and so little things to do that, like I’ve, I’ve got, you know, excess capacity. I think the reality is there’s a lot of things that folks want to be doing and there’s things there’s just capacity constraints. And so I think some of the best things that are happening here and in thinking about content strategy is, you know, what does the world look like if we’re no longer spending a lot of time. in the editorial process or in the creation process, thinking about how we’re going to categorize and categorize things consistently in our organization so that we can make better use of this content today and into the future. AI is really helping us do this a lot more intentionally and faster, better, and not having to involve humans. How do I think about excerpting? How do I think about engaging with international audiences? These are all things that have been quite challenging and time-consuming over the years. How do I make things more accessible from a disability’s perspective? These are things that are time-consuming and tend to come later in the creation process and will ultimately limit capacity. I think as you’re thinking about content strategy, there’s both a, we, we reasonably can do more because we’ll have more capacity because we’re focusing on the creative work, not necessarily the routine and mundane work. And then there’s the aspect of, you know, how can I jumpstart and kickstart the editorial process from a, like the worst things are sometimes starting from blank. canvas. And so we’re looking at like, how can, how can technology help you not start from that point? Uh, and how can AI help do that? So anyway, I think as you’re thinking about editorial strategy, it’s just, you will have more capacity ideally. Um, and ideally you’ll be able to accomplish more in this, uh, in this paradigm.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. And I think the, another often concern cited with AI generated content is just maintaining that authenticity and as well as general quality levels. I mean, you know, we talked about how AI content can perform well and help us scale, but can you talk a little bit about how do brands, there’s some brands with very specific requirements, there’s some with perhaps a little bit looser, but they all want to maintain that authentic voice and part of a strong content strategy, I would assume would dictate that as well. So what are some of these challenges and how are marketers gonna solve this with all this AI generated content?
Nick Gernert: Yeah, I think part of this gets back to, I think there’s a few things here. Sure. The authenticity aspect gets back to how well does an organization know itself and know its customer? So I do think part of this exposes the best organizations have the richest understanding of their audience or their constituents or their customers or whoever they’re looking to engage with and have a clear perspective on how they’re going to add value to them and add value into a conversation. Again, if this is like, look, I’m a B2B product and I’m going to just pump out fairly generic business content and hope that that drives lead capture by way of search engine relevancy, you’re going to be fighting in a very crowded space and you’re going to be in this crowded space of like, that’s the 50% that’s AI generated and no one’s thinking about. what’s really going to be emphasized here in this is, is a deep understanding of your customer and, and what’s driving value. And I think of this note, you know, you can oversimplify this, but look at something like stock photography as this thing that like proliferated in content and in web and digital over years and, and, and was used in ways that almost became like a meme in looking at this. And you’re like, Oh yeah, great. Another, smiling person holding a phone or sitting at a keyboard or whatever else. This is like the AI equivalent of that where it or the text equivalent or content equivalent of that where it’s like, oh, great, another person telling me, you know, five things to do to drive lead capture. And so we can all see that we can all as as consumers, we see this, and we immediately tune it out. And so I think The emphasis is on marketers to say, how are you going to connect authentically and put your authentic perspective in there and actually drive additional knowledge and insight on top of this? We think of this in ourselves as like, well, we sit on a massive data set and an interesting purview of what’s happening across a very influential customer base. How do we bring kind of our synthesis of that to the story rather than just sort of saying the same things that everyone else is doing and getting drowned out in that?
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, so two things come to mind here. So one, the stock photo image definitely resonates with me. It’s the garbage in, garbage out thing, right? So it’s like whether a human chose that generic stock image or AI did, it’s still a generic stock image, right? So in other words, like humans can be, you know, if we want to talk good, bad, like humans could be kind of as good or bad as AI in that case. But it all points to me to, I think what you’re saying here, and correct me if I’m wrong, but we need to quantify what a brand is all about and do that for humans as much as we need to quantify that for AI, right? I mean, quantifying it for humans would help the humans write better content and make better brand messaging and all that, but it also becomes incredibly important for AI. Otherwise, what is it going off of other than some generic messaging or something like that? Would you say that’s true? Yeah.
Nick Gernert: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You said it much better than I did, Greg. Know your customer, know your audience, and know what they need, and speak to that. And instead of, again, using this generic prompt or generic hope, that will drive engagement or outcomes.
Greg Kihlstrom: Another thing here is now there’s increased talk about AI agents, and already one of the big things we’ve already touched on is just the efficiency play here of, okay, wow, I can feed a prompt in and get something. Let’s say we have fed it the right data to to quantify the brand message and voice and all those things. There’s still an element where marketers having some kind of role in the middle of the process, so not just feed something in and get AI out. It seems like humans still need to play a role as almost gatekeeper or human judgment or something like that, just to ensure that storytelling is done well. How does that happen in an AI workflow? And how should the humans be thinking about being able to have those touch points kind of in the middle to course correct if needed?
Nick Gernert: Yeah. Um, I, you know, if I, when we think about it through like the lens of our own, um, our own platform, you know, we, we, we want to bring, uh, sort of the interfaces and the tools you’re already using together with that, you know, with the, that additional capability. So it’s not like. okay, I start here and I’ll get a bunch of generated, you know, content here. Now I’ll move that into this or so, you know, we’re thinking of this from a place of like, look, our, as a CMS, um, at our core through CMS kind of lives at the center of a lot of content creation. So how do we think about just incorporating that this, this additional capacity and capability that you have through AI into where you’re already creating content? So, yeah. That that starts from a place of, I mean, that could be everything from having very clear prompts that give you, uh, outlines or things generated as a default starting point, which is something we’re doing to, uh, using it as more than fit and finish at the end. Like we’re saying, I think a lot of where we’re seeing it come together from the human and then. machine standpoint is upfront. You’ve got outlining and other things, scaffolding that helps you in the content creation process that is then based off of maybe some guidelines that the organization has put in place. Um, so again, this is where having strong fundamentals and what is your voice? Who are your ideal customers? What audiences are you speaking to? What are the objectives that you’re trying to accomplish? Like, having that as a rich foundation that allows you better scaffolding and the creativity and creation process. Most organizations we’re working with, though, there’s still a human in there that’s like actually building this out. And we expect that. And I don’t see that being something where it’s like, look, here’s 80 to 90% of this is then pumped out by the machine. One per, you know, a human gives it a final read and then hits publish. I still think there’s a lot of, especially in the largest organizations and those really attempting to stand out. There really is then the human creativity and creation process in the middle of that. And then at the end it’s, you know, how do I, how do I improve that headline? What can I learn from past performance on this topic and how can I incorporate that? What are other trends that we’re seeing out in the, you know, uh, out across our, either our own traffic or, um, sort of as a benchmark in our industry, how can I incorporate that into how we want to categorize or cross link or cross reference, et cetera. Yeah. So we’re seeing that all the way through to one of the things we’re doing right now, um, in this is building a capability, you know, in large brands, we have this massive index of content that we have amassed over time. Typically you’re talking thousands and thousands of assets that become somewhat difficult to. Tap into consistently because of the size of it just continues to grow. But what we’re doing now through AI at the end of like the creation process is saying like, Hey, here are some of your top performing pieces of content that you have previously published that you should go back to and actually reference this new thing that you’ve created in that. So create, taking essentially high authority content that might exist in a network of sites that you run or in a, in a massive site that you run or anything else like this catalog of content. And then using your high performing content to then create new high performing content. And how do we identify this and do this? This is kind of like Holy grail of, uh, some of the search engine optimization and things like this, but you know, this is the, these are the superpowers we’re unlocking at the end, but in the middle of that still really is, you know, the best marketers, the best. Content creators are sitting in the middle of this and still adding their value as I understand our market, our audience, what we represent as a brand. I am tailoring to that, but now I can do that in a much more comprehensive way than ever previously.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And I love that example of the, you know, being able to generate stuff based on most popular. I mean, that is that’s such a great use of, of AI, because the time it takes and the just the number crunching that it would take to do all that and do it consistently, particularly, you know, some of the some of the big brands that you work with, Like it just that that makes a ton of sense. So and it also I think it where you where your platform sits in the in the process also, you know, I think that also matters of there needs to be easy ways to create a lot of content built on obviously built on the foundations of brand and understanding customer and all that but Part of the point, I think, in the long term is to be able to create a lot of, whether it’s personalized, whether it’s just things that are going to perform better. So that makes a ton of sense. Along those lines, looking ahead a little bit further down the road, maybe the flip side to this, but just to kind of take this a little bit further, content and variations of content becomes easier and easier to create. Is there a risk of, you know, we’re creating too much content or, you know, is there a risk of oversaturation or maybe loss of value in this content ecosystem?
Nick Gernert: Yes. So I do think there, like anything, you know, we risk devaluing things by, you know, it’s quantity over quality sort of thing. And so, you know, the biggest thing to stay grounded in is how do you maintain a sense of quality in this and not fall into the quantity trap? Because I do think that like overall, you know, the amount of knowledge that we are able to create as a species, is truly amazing. And it’s a wonderful thing that we can capture all of this knowledge. But we want that to be new and novel in some way. And we want that to be something that is pushing us in terms of how we are thinking about whatever it is that we’re trying to learn about or hoping to learn about. When it’s just sameness all around, but it’s just sameness through like a different domain name or a different channel, we risk folks tuning all of that out. So I think being aware that, look, there’s a risk here, we just oversaturate things and then we lose, it’s diminishing returns, should push us then in the direction of saying like, well, how do we maintain high quality. And so that’s one of the things because one of the elements of when we’re trying to think about like, how do we take something like WordPress and make it really exciting for large brands? You know, one of our superpowers is just WordPress and our core technology. And then WordPress VIP, we’re, we’re just faster than what typical enterprises are used to in the creation process. It’s like, wow, you know, we have, we spend 95% less time training people because they’ve just used this software or it’s intuitive, et cetera. So now we’re spending less time in training and development, and now we’re just spending more time creating. That’s awesome. And I, and so we love that, but we’re building analytics directly into the platform on our side, because. I have this fear that it’s like, look, just because we want to incentivize folks to create more. That’s great. We also need to really help them understand. Is it working? How do we create tight feedback loops? How do we ensure that their audiences are actually benefiting from what they’re doing? And because no one’s going to want to continue to use our platform a year from now, if they’re like, yeah, we created 10 X the content, but we got one 10th the results. And so. You know, being aware that this oversaturation can potentially have a diminishing return should only drive us to just keeping the level of quality really high. And I think we can do it. I think it’s exciting to not focus on mundane, repetitive tasks that machines should be doing and really unlock human potential and creativity.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. And I think this is a good segue to my next question. And, you know, certainly on this show, I talk with a lot of different types of platform, I talk with people from brands, too, but talk with people from a lot of different types of platforms, you know, whether they may not like being called this, but the the monoliths, the, you know, the composables, the proprietories, some open source as well, you know, how do you look at WordPress’s position in the broader world of MarTech as things continue to evolve?
Nick Gernert: Yeah, I look at our position as a highly resilient one. And it’s exciting from the standpoint, there’s, there’s been a lot of trends over the time. You mentioned a lot of these words, you’ve got composable and monoliths and digital experience platforms versus CMS. And I think there’s a lot of terms we try to put on these things. And in reality, I think CMS, this, this idea of, I have this piece of technology where content creation lives and then content storing, you know, also is, exists the storing of that content. means that something like what we represent as a CMS is actually so critical to the MarTech stack. It’s sort of the center of that universe because, okay, this is the creation and store layer. Now presentation or other things that need to live around content and plug into that, be that your, you know, what your knowledge of your customers or commerce or these other elements that will live around that all need to plug in and interact with that. And so I think the. The beauty of the open standards of something like WordPress means, Hey, you’re using technology and you fully understand how it, how it works. You’re not locked into these proprietary platforms or proprietary software where now you’re even in that risk of vendor lock. You can tap into a massive ecosystem with. you know, tens of thousands of integrations now. Um, and so whatever needs to plug into this, you’re not starting from scratch. And also you’re not having to buy into like a suite of solutions that you may not love. And so we’re, we’re trying to come at this and think like, Hey, there’s a, um, there is a suite of solutions and you have to use that. It’s like, look, we recognize you’re going to be using potentially things for personalization, customer data, product information. How do we just make sure that the ideals of WordPress, which is work well with others is then applied to the enterprise when we talk about WordPress VIP. So we take this and then these ideas of composable, I mean, the beauty of WordPress is that, and as a starting point for us is WordPress was created in a, in a web centric way. And it’s always funny to me that people will use that to try to deposition WordPress. But the reality is, is like 70 to 80%. of your audience is going to be visiting you through a web view. And so that means all that work’s already been done for you in an opinionated way, a tested way, a true way. And then when we think about other display, or it’d be that apps, or maybe you want to run more of a headless application, there’s incredibly rich APIs and all these other things here that exist that allow you to then expose that content. Like we’ve got one of our customers is like using us to be that display when you walk into a hotel room and it’s like, welcome, Greg, you know, here’s all the stuff you can do on property. Like that’s WordPress. And so it’s, uh, and that’s WordPress VIP. So we think about, you know, all that stuff’s happening natively in the platform. So whether it’s composable, we call it composable today or DXPs or any of these other things, it’s more about these, these open principles and these open standards. that are highly resilient. So that when you and I do another chat here in 10 years and whatever the new AI trend is, it’s not AI. We’ll be talking about whatever it is. WordPress will be resilient through that because it’s open by default. It’s integrated by default. It like, it lives in this open standards world. That’s highly resilient for brands and you can make long-term bets on it. That’s why many of our customers have been with us for more than a decade because we’re very adaptable and sort of as the web changes, so does WordPress. And, um, and there’s a lot of strength in that.
Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Yeah. Love it. Well, thank you so much for all your insights, Nick. One last question before we wrap up here, something I like to ask everybody, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Nick Gernert: I take my own fear of becoming irrelevant and just try to channel that into something productive. So no, I think to stay agile, you know, I think trying to keep things simple is sort of at the heart of anything for me. Overly complex solutions tend to become heavy over time. And so I think by staying simple, pragmatic, not necessarily trying to think trends or very present, but actually more what what do we just know to be true? And how does that? How do we think about that over the long term actually helps us be really adaptive in the near term without being reactive or agile in the short term? And then I find myself being able to be agile because I’ve, I’ve had the benefit of being surrounded with really amazing people. Got wonderful colleagues and teammates that really helped support me and push me and keep me agile. So I think surround yourself with great people will allow you to focus on what you’re great at and be more adaptive in time. So. Wonderful. Great.
