AGENCY inTELL Episode 11: WordCamp US 2026 recap, agency hosting choices, and why AI policies matter

Hey Robbie.

Hey Roger.

How you

been really good. Really busy,

but really good. How about yourself?

I've been very good as well. ~ we've been at WordCamp US this week.

And

Yes indeed.

here is the agency intel episode.

We're gonna recap it. ~

But the amazing thing is we came to Phoenix for WordCamp US twenty twenty six.

Okay, I was in another conference last week in Orlando.

It was like nine hundred degrees and high humidity.

And now this week I'm in ~ nine hundred degrees and low humidity.

is it warm? ~ yeah. ~ yeah. Slightly warm out there.

Literally my phone almost overheats every time I walk outside.

It it's a unique perspective. I mean I lived in Phoenix for fifteen years.

Wow, gosh. we left like twelve years ago and yeah,

this has been a nice reminder of of why we've moved on to to other places.

But you know, I still get reminiscent when I come back here.

~ this is where I met my wife.

We spent a lot of time going around.

So I've had a lot of fun re exploring downtown.

I took you to Cornish Pasty a couple of times.

That was fair.

Good.

I've been a few times myself, so

~ yeah, I've been I've been enjoying the the local ~ area a bit.

~ but you know, getting topical,

how has WordCamp US been for you this year?

So yeah, let's talk about WordCamp US because I'm gonna say different.

That's gonna be my my biggest description,

I will say, different than the other.

I've been to a lot of WordCamps,

WordCamp US, I mean the smaller camps,

but WordCamp US flagship event,

I think this is probably my fifth or sixth one,

~ second one to speak at. and it does feel different.

Now, we also just maybe delirious from the heat,

not sure. But no, I do feel it's

one our venue here is v is large,

very large. And so it's very spread out.

So one, there's a lot of walking involved with wherever you're going between your

sessions and everything. So there's a lot of walking going on.

And it also is kind of I feel like scattered everywhere,

which does mean you never feel too crowded.

Sure. But you also kind of feel like,

where is everybody a lot of the time,

you know?

Indeed. The n good news is we're getting our steps in.

That's true, we are. We're we're getting our exercise.

I will say, from a speaker standpoint,

I was a little worried when I saw,

like I said, it felt f kind of sparse.

And so I was like, We're not gonna have anyone in our session at all.

and I was just really worried about that.

We actually did have more than I thought of.

I think we probably had yes, you were there.

Yes, you had a very good question at the end.

But yeah, I think we probably I mean,

kind of a rough estimate, I would say maybe thirty people in the session.

Maybe more than that, maybe forty.

It's kind of hard to tell on the stage because it's they're blinding

you with the lies to record, you know.

So it was a little hard to tell.

We did have some good questions at the end.

~

What was your talk about?

so I was talking with David Sneed.

~ he had asked me to come and kind of represent agency life as it were,

of how we choose host. ~

And because he works for the Secure Hosting Alliance and they have

a certification program that they're offering to hosting companies that kind

of they have to go through certain pillars and validate their expertise

or their claims, we should say,

their claims that they have out there.

And ~ so he spoke about that certification.

I talked more from an agency standpoint of,

you know, how important a good host is for us.

Okay. ~ because it really does

it matters to our clients because our clients typically they may or

may not even know what a host is for starters,

but where they're hosted or anything.

We're handling all of that for them.

And so if we put them on a bad host and things go down,

I mean it's us they call. They don't call the host,

right? So as an agency, it is very important to have that,

you know, I call my little back pocket trusted host.

And and there's different ones for different applications.

You had an interesting point with my the question I had was about AI policy.

Yes. You're starting to run into clients asking about AI policy.

Tell me a little bit about your experience with that and what you think

it means going forward for agencies,

for hosts, ~ and also for the client.

Yeah, so i interesting and I was glad that you actually did ask more about that

because that was my my biggest reason.

I told David, I was like I was like,

Do are you guys asking in this certification anything about their

AI policies and their transparency about AI usage and how it touches client data?

And he was like, Well not yet,

but that does sound like a good one and they reevaluate every year.

So he's like he was literally he was like,

We're gonna look at this and I was like,

You're probably gonna have to look at this anyway because

so I just was going through a big client onboarding,

so to become a vendor for a client.

And they're highly regulated industry anyway,

but it was a pretty big onboarding.

And I've done like government state onboardings,

and this one was like almost equal to that.

But what was interesting was it was the very first time I've ever been asked

for what is your AI policy, what are your AI tools that you use,

how do you use them? It was actually two different in-depth documents about

our AI usage and our AI policy internal.

And I just finished the certification,

you know, and so I was like, I was already thinking about an AI policy

for my agency. And that kind of pushed me like,

okay, now you really have to get something together.

And so I have, and so digging into that subject was where I started seeing

I'm not the only agency out there that is starting to be asked these questions.

And so I think we're gonna see that more and more as w as we start

working with clients, they're going to start questioning our AI policy.

And so we have to be very transparent because,

you know, depending on what project we're doing for a client,

we could be touching some very sensitive data.

Sure. And so it is important for them to know this.

~ I also ~ someone else asked a question about insurance.

He was really more geared to David because he was the lawyer.

~ but I had just gone through for that same onboarding to I had to increase some

of my insurance to match what they were asking for.

And there were also there when you started getting into cybersecurity insurance

for your agency, they're starting to ask questions about AI usage as well.

So we're going to see this.

And I I do think that you must be transparent.

Okay. That's my biggest thing is you can't and 'cause an agency

can really get themselves in trouble if they say we're not using AI and then they

leak some client data through through a bad use of AI.

In your experience of working with the client on this,

was there any pushback to your initial draft of your AI policy or

did they just kinda ~ yeah, that that looks good.

Yeah, th right now it was kind of a okay,

probably they were more surprised I sent one that I had one.

They were probably like, Wow, you do and I was only because I'd just been thinking

about it in that course. So you know,

and so and I'm still actually kind of honing it because I I mean if

you look out there right now, there is information that you're starting

to find about what you should and shouldn't include in an AI policy.

But I kind of feel like it's everything else that's wrapped around AI.

We have a lot of question marks and a lot of

you know, blanks that no one knows the answer to just yet.

Yeah. Because we just don't know,

you know, it it here's the bigger problem.

We don't know what all laws are going to be passed,

right? But more importantly, we don't know how much change there's gonna

be in this technology by the time a law does come out.

And so how do you how do you prep for that in a privacy policy or AI policy?

Yeah. You know, when you kinda don't know.

Are you running this by your lawyers at all for review?

I am going to after I have finished molding it a little more because lawyers

are expensive and so I always try to have my ducks in a row before

I send something over because I want them to have the shortest time to view it,

you know, like, this looks pretty good,

but here here. I don't want them to have to write it for me.

You know what I'm saying? I I I think it's more no broad claims.

That's what I think you need to be careful of in these type of policies.

and

And maybe not too restricted either.

So it's kind of a hard balance,

right?

You watch your guarantees and things like that.

Exactly. This takes me back to at the very beginning of my career.

I was a webmaster for a recruiter and we're building this website.

And I read somewhere, Yeah, you need a privacy policy or something like that.

And I ran it by the boss. I said,

Hey, we need to have a privacy policy.

And he's like, Okay, well, here's the lawyer.

Contact the lawyer. And I don't know if I sent something to them or I just was like,

Hey, we need a privacy thing. And the next thing I know,

my boss is like, hey.

You can't just email the lawyer with a general question like that because they bill

by the fifteen minutes. By the fifteen minutes.

And it was a pretty good size bill.

Yeah. ~ so yeah, lesson learned there.

~ be careful. The lawyers love to have questions.

Yes. They love to answer questions.

Yes they do 'cause they're making money when they answer questions.

~ yeah.

Yeah. So I thought it was a very interesting talk and I I love always hearing

the agency owner's point of view when it comes to the hosting relationship.

Obviously I'm very invested in hosting relationships.

~ and I feel like part of my job as partnership manager is understanding what

the agency owner's needs are ~ to make that as easy as possible.

Just a quick like run through what do you think are like the top

Two or three things that an agency should keep in mind when they start engaging with

a host.

and and and I kind of I even showed my checklist that I kind of go through

for host ~ in in the talk. But obviously I'm looking for,

you know, what kind of hardware and performance do they really offer?

I mean, everyone everyone, if you look at the ads,

actually David had a slide that had,

you know, kind of like your Google resorts and results and everyone's like

We're the best. We have the most this.

We have the most that, we have this,

you know, and you're like, okay,

we're fastest. Yeah, we're the fastest.

Well, whatever. And it's so as an agency,

you're like, okay, let's look through all the marketing there and let's

see what they really say about their hardware.

What do they really ~ say about their uptime?

And then, you know, what else do they have that could be important?

Like I know Kensda sought two compliance,

which was a big thing for one of my clients.

~ and so looking at w what kind of certifications does a host have,

you know, what have they what what are they what do they have actually hardware

wise? but to me the most important thing that I look for is how

do you communicate for support because I know nine times out of

ten with our clients, we're actually the ones that will be communicating with

the host about support. It's very rare that our client actually does that

themselves.

This is why they're paying you.

Exactly. And so I need to make sure for me it's easy to get that support.

~ you know, and so and it doesn't have to be like I've had some where

we have a Slack channel and I've got support people in that Slack channel

and that's very nice. I love that.

~ it doesn't have to be that it could be,

you know, a s a chat ~ a live chat kind of support bot,

~ much like Kensta has. ~ it it as long as I have very quick access to

the s the level of support you need,

right? Not just the I mean everybody's gonna have their AI bots first now,

I know, but can I quickly get past that if I really need a human on that other end?

And that's what I look for when I'm looking at these hosts.

And when you find a host like that,

you know, agencies will be very loyal to those hosts for a long time.

Then you may have, you know, change in ownership or things like that that change

the dynamic there. But overall

I do find ~ not just myself but other agency owners I know,

once we find a host that we're like,

Yes, th they've got me, they understand us,

they they're quick to respond,

then we keep hold of them as long as they're still doing that same level of support.

Absolutely. Yeah, it's funny, the the support thing always comes up.

I can remember when I had my agency,

that was always what I was looking for.

my gosh. I just need to be able reach somebody.

~ Hopefully they can just calm me down more than anything.

Exactly. Right? Because, you know,

I'm not a super technical person.

Like compared to like friends and family,

pretty technical. Compared to the people in these hallways right now,

no.

Like I I like I don't want to get into your Nginx.

I don't want to get into your MySQL.

Like I just want it to work. Yes.

~ and so like having that instant communication and being able to talk to somebody.

I'm curious to hear kind of your thoughts from the Slack angle versus

a ticketing system type chat thing.

Mm-hmm from your from I can tell you that from our end,

having a a ~ ticketing system is so much more beneficial.

Slack is great, but Slack is

Disorganized. And being able to reference specific conversations

and find them can be very tricky when you're having a lot

of conversations across customers.

So from our end, we you know,

we we tend to try and like push people.

Hey, look, the chat is where support happens.

But I'm always curious to hear from the customer side:

like, how's that experience?

Wha how is one better than the other and and how can we try and get one

to be a better situation or a better experience for you?

~ and I will say ticket systems are always like like the bane of our existence,

usually mainly because most ticketing systems out there when you work with people,

you put in a ticket and then it's very long wait for a response,

right? Now some I've had and they had very fast response to those tickets,

like they're happening very quickly.

~ I typically like in in Kensda,

I use the support, but we also do a lot of work on AWS.

Well, you're not gonna get instant support there,

let me tell you.

You you're you're gonna you're gonna be real happy if you get an answer

on a ticket in three days. I mean,

you know what that kind of Yes,

exactly. And so it's you know with some that you're going to have

to use those ticketing systems and you just hope that they are quick to respond,

even though everyone has their own definition of what quick is,

right? So ~ but I I prefer to have that instant chat.

And you are right, I can see the value of not doing it in Slack channels.

versus doing it in a more centralized place where you are able to keep your customer

history there too and and be able to better serve the customer.

~ which by the way also comes into that AI policy is customers will

now start questioning you on where are these,

you know, are these being fed into a model somewhere.

You know, because that the at Atlatsian who has ~ Jira and con ~ Confluence,

yeah. Yeah, they just ~

they just announced and it was like two days ago I guess they went live with what

they said they were going to do,

which was train their internal,

I think they call it rovo or something.

Okay. Their internal model on all of their customers' data,

which is really their customers' customers data,

if you think about it. It's getting very deep in how far that data needs

to the transparency level of what's happening to data needs to happen,

right? So yeah. So yeah,

it's

people are gonna start asking that question.

Absolutely. I think this is an interesting thread to maybe pull on a little bit.

Because the way I look at it is if I'm having a conversation with a company,

my hope is that they're using that conversation

to help train other people that work there.

They're looking at the specific issue that I'm having and hopefully seeing,

hey, 40 people are having this issue.

We have a problem.

And now we're now they're getting fed into ~ AI systems.

The hope I mean I guess the hope is that they're keeping all of that internal.

Right. But that's really where the big question goes is where is that data going to?

And we know that data likes to leak.

It does, it does. Cause I mean,

again, with that you know, with with those type of businesses that

are using their customer data to train an internal model,

which I understand there's a lot of value in it.

Like you said, there's a way to find patterns and to find bugs that

you didn't even know existed in your system because you can see the patterns

of the reports from customers.

And so it's very valuable information.

~ we also saw, you know, at Vistara where we saw that they are also using

the sentiment models that are out there to be able to decide

are these customers getting ready to churn because they can see they're angry,

that it's just the words they're using and things like that.

~ and so there's a lot of value in that data to be able to serve your customers

better. But yes, can you control every employee that none of them copy

any of that and just paste it over to Chat GPT to do something with it

and now all of a sudden you've got a breach?

~ and that's where an AI policy should say,

now mind you that again is that your employees read it and are actually doing what

the policy says, but those kind of things should be covered in your pool policy

on how employees can interact with your data internal too.

Interesting. I'm curious to know and I wonder if it's already there,

if ~ SOC two or no, I think there's even SOC three now.

~ I can see these compliances baking the AI part into it.

Yeah, I think you're right. I think they will have to because

it touches everything now. Yeah.

Everything

Because

I can tell you from being on the inside of SOC2 compliance,

there's really there's two things happening.

There's ~ technical compliance,

like are we using passwords, are we you know,

just the I call it basics, but I mean it's really complex stuff.

All of the software, all of the hardware lockdown.

But then the other aspect of it is the social aspect.

It's is Roger Yes.

you know, getting socially engineered.

And so we go through a ton of training about phishing and just how

to handle this data. And now we're starting to go through with AI.

Like I there's only specific places I can use AI,

specific accounts that are company tied.

And and we we've gone through a lot of this.

So ~ very hot topic. Yes.

Very interesting to see how it evolves.

Absolutely.

~ sidebar here while on the AI topic,

the big news this week is watermarking of AI text generation.

Yes. I'd love to hear any thoughts you have on this topic and maybe explain what

it is.

~ yeah, so Claude Anthropic announced that they were going to

put watermarks and this was kind of to I'll say pacify

to to align with the European nations that put out the

AI kind of guidelines is what I'll call them.

I forget what there's a yeah, specific one.

And so they were trying to fit into those boundaries,

I feel like as loosely as possible and still fit into those boundaries

is what they're trying to do. ~

But I know and everyone else knew.

I mean, you're talking about watermarking.

Okay, yes. Can you really truly or can can you come up with any type

of watermarking that could not be erased in some manner?

Well, we found out within 24 hours there's a GitHub project you

can download that just totally wipes away the watermark.

So you know it's kind of like,

yeah. I mean, really, at a certain point we're just not going to

be able to test and know.

100% that something is AI or is not AI generated.

I mean, I took my old articles that I wrote before you had any of

the generative AI tools, right?

These are ten year old articles.

And I fed them into one of the AI checkers.

And come to find out, I am 75% robot.

You just didn't know it. But you know,

Robbie the robot. Yes. Nice. I know I am.

I always knew it, but I was glad to have that proof.

Wild. I mean, I have an English degree.

I have been using the MDAS for years and now

I hesitate when I'm writing an email.

I like will rewrite a sentence not to have an dash in it,

even though it was proper. But P I'm like,

Well they'll just think I used AI.

Yeah. No, absolutely. ~ and I thought it was interesting.

There was a lot of commentary.

John Gruber from Daring Fireball was talking about how do

you actually watermark text without changing the meaning of the text.

And he was picking apart anthropics examples,

and they had like an example of my favorite fruits are mango and dot dot dot.

And and they the argument was they could say,

you know, kind of banana or orange.

And to the reader, that doesn't really necessarily change much.

But it's like to the writer, if I like bananas,

but I don't like oranges, like don't put oranges in for banana.

And then the example was, well,

what if it said I like mango and airplanes?

Or my favorite fruit of mango and airplanes?

Like that wouldn't make any sense.

But conceivably the AI can just be making these subtle changes to make

the watermark and completely change what you're trying to write.

Well, I I haven't watched that also.

So

yeah, i well it's Gruber, he's always very opinionated,

so so not a huge surprise on all of that.

We

didn't know anything about being opinionated.

All right, let's let's circle back to WordCamp US,

which is what we're talking about.

I will just finish off about speaking.

they were very well organized and like ahead of time we had to provide our decks.

we had to actually even do a run through of our presentation in front

of a volunteer. ~ so

I feel like they were trying to make sure they had a higher caliber

of speaking ~ sessions. And so because they were being very diligent about staying

on top of us, 'cause you know,

sometimes us speakers could wait till the last minute to finish a slideshow,

it could happen. Never, you know,

yeah, and never just ninety percent of the time.

We had to show up

You know, thirty minutes ahead of time in the speakers lounge

we had speaker wranglers. We got to meet our NCs beforehand and make sure they could

pronounce everything our name or in our bio and and they went over all

of that with us and so it was very well organized from that standpoint.

~ and then, you know, the room was huge,

bigger than we needed, but it was it's it was you know,

well decorated and lit. So

And it's fun to talk in big rooms.

It is. It's good practice. I gotta say the A V squad is on top of it here.

Yes. They were set ups and the everything was amazing and very easy to work with,

it seems. Yeah.

sure thing and then we were again we were a little bit early and they made sure that

you know all our mics were the the connection with the laptop

was good and everything so showed us where we couldn't could and couldn't walk

to stay in camera and things like that.

So it was it was very good, very smooth.

What about as a sponsor? How did you ~ feel things went for you?

Yeah,

you sponsoring WordCamps is always a lot of fun.

There's a lot of passion at WordCamps that you don't necessarily

see at other events, especially around WordPress.

~ typically when you're not at a WordCamp,

you know, WordPress is a tool.

~ at WordCamps, WordPress is a community,

it's a way of life. And so it's always just great to see ~ you know,

whether they're using Kinstar or not,

people that are just

Really passionate about WordPress.

So being able to sponsor that means we get to be front-center with all of that.

We had a lot of fun with our booth design this year.

~ shout outs to Sarah, our event manager.

She came up with a really great idea of black and white postcards.

And then she got a ton of really nice markers.

I've gotten I I didn't realize we had gotten like the creme de la creme of markers.

Nice. and so all day yesterday,

people just sat for minutes at our booth.

Coloring in their postcards. And even the people that were like,

I don't really color, they were just mailing the postcards home so their kids could

color them when they get home.

I thought that was really cool.

so it so that that's been just a lot of fun.

It's been a much more community-oriented booth for us.

but we're still having great discussions with people about their hosting

~ and about the challenges they're seeing.

I'm really curious to talk with people about what they're seeing from clients'

perspective when it comes to AI tools.

And one of the trends that's coming up,

and I mean it's been coming up for a while,

is tools like Lovable and Bolt and Replit,

where the clients just like, why aren't we just using these tools?

And it's it's very interesting.

There's agencies that are struggling to answer those questions,

but then there are agencies that have got it down.

And I think the ones that have it down are not focusing on technology.

They're focusing on results.

And the technology is just how you get there.

And so getting, I think, getting the client away from talking about

the tools and talking about what they're trying to achieve is the right play.

But you're the actual successful agency owner.

What what are your thoughts and experiences?

I do think you're right about that.

That and and and I think that's been something that we've had for years

as an agency, right? Is that a lot of times our clients I literally have

had clients that didn't know what their CMS was,

right? If it was Joomla or Dr or WordPress or Drupal,

they didn't even know, they didn't care.

It was like, this is what we want.

We want this website to do this.

And it they had no opinions

Because they didn't know those opinions,

right? ~ and so we've kind of for years done that,

but again, I was always transparent with them on what we were building with,

even though it might have sounded like alphabet soup to them.

I always made sure that they knew,

and that was also for their protection.

If they went to a you know, they wanted to leave our agency,

go to another one, they would know what they needed to ask another agency for,

right? Like, let me read. Robbie said they built this with WordPress.

Can you fix that? Yes. Okay. So I think with the AI tools.

we will still have to be transparent about which ones we use,

but again, it'll sound like you know alphabet soup to them.

I literally had someone the other day I was saying ~ well I'll have Claude

do something or whatever, and they were like,

~ who's Claude on your team? Literally.

And I was just like, Well, I actually it's Claudette in my world,

but ~ I was just like, No, I was like,

No, it's a tool we use. It's called Claude.

They were like, ~ okay. Awesome.

I know, I was like, wow, okay.

~ so yeah, and so we're actually still here at WordCamp,

so it's not over yet. So we haven't got to the the finale and we usually

do our recap after that. We're doing it a little bit early because

the creator studio, which was also a nice addition this year.

That's really cool. Yeah. ~ and so ~ we may have to do another little mini recap

after we've gotten past the the final words today and and see if there's

any big announcements.

Robbie, it's always great to spend time with you and talk.

Yeah, this is fantastic.

Yes. ~ yeah, I look forward to the next time.

Yeah, absolutely. All right, cool.

Well that's a wrap, y'all. Watch the next podcast.