[00:00:20] Nathan Wrigley: Hello there and welcome once again to the WP Builds podcast. You've reached episode number 486, entitled Unlocking WordPress automations with Uncanny Automator. It was published on Thursday, the 22nd of October, 2026.
My name's Nathan Wrigley, and before we chat to Ken Young from Uncanny Automator, a few bits of housekeeping.
The first thing to mention is that we have launched our show.fm app. If you're a podcaster thinking about podcasting or know anybody in the podcasting space who makes a podcast or works in the podcasting industry, send them to show.fm . That's a URL show.fm . Have a look around. It is, without a doubt, the most comprehensive tool in the podcasting space to help you make a podcast. Certainly go and check it out. I'll be droning on and on about it in the days, weeks, and months to come, I'm afraid.
The other thing to mention is that if you are making WordPress websites, you might want to check out the next iteration of the Page Builder Summit. I have been involved in the first eight, I'm stepping away, but Anchen le Roux is taking over that mantle, and you can find out more at pagebuildersummit.com.
The WP Builds podcast is brought to you today by show.fm. Podcasting is brilliant. Everything around the podcast, hmm, not always. Show.fm brings it all together. Book guests prepare episodes, generate show notes and transcripts. Automate the boring stuff, publish your show, and track your audience all in one place. And right now, you can become one of 100 founders for a significant discount. You can get three years of our Studio Plan, including hosting, analytics, automations, and more. A hundred places available only. Go to show.fm/founders and claim yours today.
Okay. What have we got for you today? Well, today I am chatting with Ken Young from Uncanny Automator.
I suppose you would describe Uncanny Automator as the Zapier tool built inside your WordPress website. So it enables you to link up a whole myriad of different services from things that are triggered inside of WordPress. It does a whole lot more than that as well, as you're about to hear. But we hear about Ken's journey. Why he built it. What the roadmap has been like. What it's been like getting to 50,000 instals and so much more.
We also talk about some new features, AI features, page builder features and things like that. Really very interesting episode, especially if you like saving time with automations.
I hope that you enjoy it.
I am joined on the podcast by Ken Young. Hello, Ken.
[00:03:06] Ken Young: Hi. Hi, Nathan. How are you?
[00:03:07] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, good, thank you. Ken's joining us from, Canada. Toronto in Canada, and we're here today to talk about automation, all the different things that you can do specifically inside your WordPress website.
I'm sure you've been to 1,001 different SaaS platforms that will do automation, but the take that we've got today is all of that being done inside of WordPress. I'm kinda gonna guess, because I think you've done a great job with PR, Ken, I'm kinda gonna guess that most people have actually heard of your product.
Whether they've downloaded it and had a play, I don't know, but certainly been in my brain for many years. It's called Uncanny Automator. So that's two words, but the link, Uncanny Automator, is, put all of that into the show notes. But, for joining us, Ken. That's what we're gonna talk about.
Do you wanna just give us a little potted bio? Tell us about the history of the company, how it got started, how you're involved, why automation as opposed to forms or SEO else you coulda done? So over to you.
[00:04:08] Ken Young: Sure, sure. so yeah, we started, the company i- was called, is called Uncanny Owl. and we started it in 2013, and we actually had planned to, to make it an e-learning development company. So we started in e-learning, building e-learning programs. and we started experimenting with WordPress and LearnDash as kind of a delivery platform for learning.
And, we blogged about it. People found us, started saying, "Hey, can you help me build my LearnDash site?" So we started building LearnDash sites, and then we realized, a lot of these sites, they needed the same kind of functionality, so we started building LearnDash plugins.
[00:04:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay.
[00:04:55] Ken Young: And we built a bunch of those, and then we started thinking about, okay, the next plugin we wanna do is something that'll help us, that'll let people create, personalized learning paths in LearnDash.
So when somebody completes a lesson, then you can unlock this course over here, or if they do like a pretest, you can mark some lessons complete 'cause they already know that stuff, right? So it's a kind of a trigger action thing that'll let people make their courses more responsive to what learners are actually doing.
And then while we were building that, we were like, "Okay, we're gonna use these hooks, these, these actions to kinda trigger things, and then we're gonna run these functions to do stuff." we realized, every plugin's got filters, actions, we could hook into and functions we can run to do things.
Why don't we just make this, an automation product that can do, that can connect to WooCommerce and your main, your WordPress site, so when a post is published, something happens. and that just led us to creating, Uncanny Automator. It, it just kinda came up, that this would be a much, a, a product with a much larger audience.
It would help, back when... So that was about eight years ago, I would say.
[00:06:15] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.
[00:06:17] Ken Young: Yeah, and, back then there were tons of these little connector plugins, connect WooCommerce to LearnDash plugin, and that's all it did. and people were installing these. We were installing them, and they weren't great.
They were bloating sites, right? We had a b- bunch of these connector plugins that, that didn't really... they integrated the two products in a certain way, but n- oftentimes not the way you wanted. so then with this kinda trigger and action model, we could, you could build your workflow the way you wanted it to work.
And, And yeah, that's where we were in the industry. It was the first plugin that thought about doing this with the actions and hooks and, and that's how it got started.
[00:07:07] Nathan Wrigley: That's really interesting. I suppose if you've got these kind of atomized plugins where you've got one plugin over here which does this one thing, it binds, I don't know, WooCommerce to LearnDash, or it binds MailChimp to the, I don't know, your custom.
[00:07:20] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:07:21] Nathan Wrigley: Like that. You can't really chain those things, can You, you can do one thing, but you can't then follow it on with another thing. All of the hooks have got to fire at the exact same moment and, that's gonna be a bit messy.
[00:07:32] Ken Young: Right.
[00:07:33] Nathan Wrigley: The promise that you bring is that you can chain things in a interface. So do this, wait a bit, then do this, and then maybe if this thing happens, go off in that direction and start doing some of this, and.
[00:07:45] Ken Young: Exactly.
[00:07:46] Nathan Wrigley: that direction. So you can bind a thousand things into this one workflow, I think was the word.
[00:07:52] Ken Young: Yeah. and, and back then also a lot of these connections happened with custom code too. That was one of the other things that people were doing. they'd have to hire a developer to say, "Hey, I want to connect my plugin, A, plugin A to plugin B," and it doesn't, they don't do it, so they don't talk.
We need to, we need something in there. so being ab- having this tool let people do a little bit more of that custom functionality they wanted to without having to hire a developer or get into the code.
[00:08:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah. a really neat idea. I forgot to mention the URL by the way, so just reading it into the record. If you go to automatorplugin.com, so Automator, T-O-R plugin.com, you will be launched into the Uncanny Automator website. And over there, making the claim that five stars on WordPress.org and 50,000 companies are currently using the product.
it's not this is not new. this has been around and battle tested and what have you. guess the best description, I know you're gonna cringe when I say this because I'm gonna use the word Zapier, but that feels like the quickest way for me to get into the audience's head exactly what you're doing. You've got.
[00:09:06] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:09:07] Nathan Wrigley: SaaS app over there which does similar things. You're obviously bound into the WordPress ecosystem. what does that allow you to do that perhaps a SaaS tool couldn't do? are there limitations on what you can do or does it grow the universe a little bit you to do things in both directions?
WordPress being the cause of something and then resulting in other actions and can it work in the other direction? you do something elsewhere on a non-WordPressy thing and then WordPress is triggered to do other things like post things or whatever it may be.
[00:09:38] Ken Young: Yeah, Zapier actually, it's funny, that's when we first created Automator, we called it Zap- Zapier for WordPress. That's how we described it to people because they, the, the concept just made sense when we said that, versus trying to explain this workflow builder and there's triggers and actions and, yeah.
So in terms of the architecture, having it in a plugin is actually, is actually really good for people who are concerned about privacy because when you run plugin to plugin automations, your data doesn't leave, your site. It doesn't have to go to an external service and then come back to your WordPress site.
It just runs directly on your site, which means it's faster, typically faster because, automations, they're not heavy. they're doing one thing. They're, enrolling a user in a course or something like that. And, and you don't have to round trip the data and wait for the server to respond and get back to you.
Of course, our app integrations, they do have, they do go through a server on our side, and that makes it, that just makes it easier for users to connect to an external service. because if we didn't have a server doing that, then users would have, typically have to go to the s- the service like Facebook and b- create an app on that service, like a developer app.
Yeah. And then, and then they'd have to set up a web hook that goes to that, that app or get it approved or, all that stuff. that's just too technical. And so we have a server that helps people to one-click connect. It just says, "Do you want to let Uncanny Automator connect?"
And, I think when it comes to, s- adding functionality like this to a WordPress site, most people, they would prefer to have a plugin that does it versus attaching... the complexity of attaching an external platform to your website and then getting that working together and, paying a subscription to this external platform that, that then is running next to your site.
But, just... I don't know. This is my thinking is that, most people who are building on WordPress, they look for plugins to, solve their p- problems. And, and having Automator as a plugin, just makes it feel more natural than, having to jury rig stuff through, something like Zapier, especially if it's just plugins that you're trying to integrate.
[00:12:08] Nathan Wrigley: You also get this pro-- I have certainly experienced the problem of silent failure as well, because kind of Zappy is this one place where you go set things up and never return.
But do you know what I mean? you'll go in and set things up, and it may be, in my case, it may be six months before I go back in and I suddenly realise, "Oh, I didn't actually activate that," or the connection got broken, I recycled a key or something, and all of a sudden everything's silently failing.
I'm guessing if it's in your WordPress website, the minute you click publish, if that would be-- were the, the trigger to automate a bunch of stuff, if that's the moment where things fire, can see the cascade of things and the dominoes falling in the place where you already are, and you don't.
[00:12:48] Ken Young: Right.
[00:12:48] Nathan Wrigley: An RSS feed to get scraped and yada, yada, yada.
[00:12:53] Ken Young: And y- you can set up your, The way we built er- error logging is actually interesting. We, made it a, an action, a trigger actually. So you can say, if an er- if an, if a recipe, encounters an error, send me an email or send me a Slack message. So you just build your error reporting, with automations, which is cool.
[00:13:14] Nathan Wrigley: Interesting. So you up a... Okay. when it failed, let me know in this unique bespoke way what.
Yeah, that's cool. so how do you decide what you're gonna integrate with? So again, using the metaphor of Zapier, you go there and on the homepage they've got their million and one things that you can connect with, all the different SaaS apps that you might pay for. how do you decide what it is that you're gonna integrate? Do you have like a, a community that you poll all the time, or is it just more Ken and his intuition, like I use this, so let's integrate that? because it feels like this is a never end... You're never gonna stop. There's.
[00:13:48] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:13:49] Nathan Wrigley: The journey of integrations.
[00:13:51] Ken Young: Exactly.
[00:13:52] Nathan Wrigley: Which ones, and where are you at right now in terms of numbers, and have you got any that are just about to launch or anything like that?
[00:13:59] Ken Young: So early on, we prioritized, the most popular plugins. We didn't have any data, so we just said, we're gonna build for WooCommerce and all the other plugins that millions of people are using. and then, once we got the product out, we got a lot of requests, as you can imagine.
"I need this trigger for, my workflow," or, "I need this action to run." and we got, feedback like that, and we built, using that feedback, because that's really one of the best ways we could have evolved the product is what are people actually using it for? We couldn't anticipate all of the workflows that customers might wanna use Uncanny Automator to build.
So when they told us, "Hey, I'm building this workflow and I need this trigger," we just used that as our evolutionary roadmap. and, and going forward, we've, we're going to be adding, a lot more of the, a lot more plugins and apps. Just we're able to, move a lot faster with AI now to help us.
It it reads the APIs. in the early days, it was everything was manual, just coding every single API response and figuring out all of the formats that, that these, these plugins used and apps used. but now we can move a lot faster, so we're gonna be actually adding a lot of new integrations, pretty quickly.
[00:15:24] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. so you mentioned AI, so obviously, we might get into the whole AI topic in a moment, but that's curious just from a business point of view, the capacity for you to be more agile, is re- readily available because, you point your AI agent of choice at the API documentation for, I don't know, SaaS app X over there. And it will probably, since about January 2026, it will probably fairly accurately give you the which is required, which enables you to just going and increase the cadence in which you're, you're shipping this stuff. That's, that, yeah, that's brilliant, isn't it?
[00:16:03] Ken Young: Yeah. It's been really a, a huge help, especially with the other features we've been building too, which we'll talk about.
[00:16:09] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, we'll get into that in a moment. if you're doing this, I'm curious as to what your users are actually using it for, because it feel, it doesn't feel like there's too many plugins where you basically open the floodgates. Most plugins that I can think of, there's a real confined nature to it.
It does this thing and there's real boundaries on what you can do. But because you've got this workflow builder, you anybody can do anything.
[00:16:38] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:16:38] Nathan Wrigley: You can imagine some people getting really carried away and getting over complicated, or people misunderstanding the product and what have you.
So I'm curious, just give us a few things that people are doing which will then give the listeners an idea of, oh, okay, on Uncanny Automator can do that kind of thing. But then also I'm curious if you've got any, real outlandish things that any of your customers have done where you've scratched your head and thought, "Oh boy, I never expected when we built this that would be happening."
So let's go for the more straightforward ones, just to give the listeners a bit of a, a hook into what kind of things you can do.
[00:17:12] Ken Young: I think one of the biggest things is form automations. forms typically you collect data, you, you put a form out there, people fill it out, and you get a form submission. with Uncanny Automator, you can have that form submission do anything pretty much. if you want people to...
You wanna build a self-enrollment form for courses, for example, you set a bunch of courses in a dropdown. If a user selects that course and they submit the form, they're automatically enrolled in the course. or, the same thing for, groups or, giving people a subscription in WooCommerce.
Whatever it is that, that you wanna automate with users submitting forms, we can do that.
[00:18:01] Nathan Wrigley: Re- I'm just gonna pause you there because, in, in the old way of doing things, if I rewind the clock kind of 10 years, you go and you buy a form plugin and you basically wait. Y- you may even buy a form plugin on the strength of the fact that it connects to your CRM of choice or whatever it is that you happen to do. You go down the road of buying a form plugin because it's got that integration. Now y- you, I think you've got 240-ish integrations, both in the WordPress space and in the wider kind of SaaS ecosystem.
[00:18:30] Ken Young: Right.
[00:18:31] Nathan Wrigley: And so you don't need to worry about that kind of.
[00:18:34] Ken Young: Y- yeah.
[00:18:35] Nathan Wrigley: On there, it'll then connect you with all the other bits and pieces.
So that kind of just takes that whole pain away, which.
[00:18:40] Ken Young: Yeah, for sure. For sure. And it's, beyond, CRMs are definitely a huge, very popular integrations, right? People wanna tag users when they do certain things or segment them based on form submissions. and that's easy to do. you can build like self, self-service, so like around content where if you want users to be able to submit posts, for example, that you could have them, the, the form create a new post, with their content that they submitted.
You could even have AI review it first and decide whether, we wanna publish this or not. and, yeah, in terms of, workflows that people are building, we don't actually collect, a lot of that data. part of.
[00:19:33] Nathan Wrigley: Way, isn't it? Of course you don't. yeah. Now that you say it, it makes perfect sense.
[00:19:38] Ken Young: Yeah. Yeah, the SaaS products, they've got everything that, you know, everything you're doing in the platform, they're, they've recorded and they've got, the data on that. But for us, with es- as I mentioned, the plugin integrations, they don't go leave the user's site.
We could build something that scrapes all that data and sends it all to us, but then that's really, w- we don't really wanna be doing that. we do have some statistics about which integrations are most used, and it's, what you'd expect kind of WooCommerce. And since we d- started out in LearnDash, actually a lot of our users use LearnDash.
[00:20:16] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah.
[00:20:17] Ken Young: Yeah. But, but yeah, so we do see some of the data about what people are using, and sometimes when we get support tickets, we get there are some really crazy, recipes that people have built.
[00:20:29] Nathan Wrigley: You.
[00:20:29] Ken Young: With, you know.
[00:20:30] Nathan Wrigley: There where.
[00:20:31] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:20:32] Nathan Wrigley: Are you doing here? Yeah, you've got 9,000 steps.
[00:20:35] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:20:35] Nathan Wrigley: Your.
[00:20:36] Ken Young: Things like that.
[00:20:37] Nathan Wrigley: Workflow. Maybe you could rein that in a little bit. okay, so the, the fact of the matter is you can go dead simple or you can go really complicated. and just to give you an idea of the depth of the product, if you go to automatorplugin.com, as mentioned before, and again, these links will all be in the show notes. and then you go plural with an S, then, oh boy, the list ju- it basically never ends. I think 240 plus was the statement that was made on the outside. And it or less every plugin that you've ever really come across is plus pretty much every SaaS app that you are likely to come across. And I'm presuming that the way you build this, 'cause I haven't played with your plugin, is like a visual builder. you start with a trigger and then you click add, and then you bind things and add delays and, this then that kind of.
[00:21:33] Ken Young: Yeah, exactly.
[00:21:34] Nathan Wrigley: To an end and yada. Is that how it works?
[00:21:37] Ken Young: Yeah. Yeah, that's it for sure. And, one of the, the unique things about Automator is you can have multiple triggers. Like a lot of these automation platforms, you can only have one trigger.
[00:21:48] Nathan Wrigley: Oh.
[00:21:48] Ken Young: That runs a bunch of actions. But in this case, you can actually have as many triggers as you want.
So if you want someone to complete a course and then fill out a form and then join a group before something happens, you can actually build that with Automator. That's just one of the, the differentiators.
[00:22:03] Nathan Wrigley: I'm con- I'm really intrigued by that. So normally, as you say, there's a trigger, on form submit, do a thing.
[00:22:10] Ken Young: Right.
[00:22:10] Nathan Wrigley: You're saying that it, you can stack those in effect, or put them parallel to each other side by side. So if this happens, and this happens, and that happens.
[00:22:21] Ken Young: Yes, exactly.
[00:22:23] Nathan Wrigley: Is there a kind of... so is there a clause in the middle there if this happens, like is there an infinite amount of time that it could wait for the and to happen? 'Cause.
[00:22:31] Ken Young: Oh, yeah.
[00:22:32] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that's.
[00:22:33] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:22:34] Nathan Wrigley: So you.
[00:22:34] Ken Young: And.
[00:22:34] Nathan Wrigley: Things in a queue where they've done two out of the three things, and then, later they do the third.
[00:22:40] Ken Young: Yep.
[00:22:40] Nathan Wrigley: Then finally the jigsaw starts to be built. That's so interesting.
[00:22:45] Ken Young: Yeah. And it's actually tied in with how tightly integrated we are with WordPress, because we can, we can track which user completed those actions, right? If you're sending this data to Zapier, you would probably have to send the user and then somehow check if that user ran that trigger before, and then, yeah, I think it makes it a lot more complicated when it's, a SaaS product that doesn't, isn't aware of your users.
Because all of the logging also for Automator is on your site, so you can keep logs as long as you want, and they're just there, and, they keep a record of what people have done.
[00:23:25] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. that's really interesting. I like that. That's lovely. and presumably in the back end of the plugin you can see what's been running, what's stalled.
[00:23:35] Ken Young: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:23:36] Nathan Wrigley: Progress is for all of this, us- in the normal way that we'd expect.
Okay, l- let's draw a line under that.
Hopefully, dear listener, you've got some impression of the, the capabilities there. But I'm gonna move us on a little bit and force us into a couple of other different directions. The first one... we'll go to AI in a minute. Although AI, I think, is bound up in this next piece because it would appear that you're pushing new boundaries for yourselves with, a page builder or something.
[00:24:05] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:24:05] Nathan Wrigley: Us what that's about? 'Cause it, it feels like, okay, that's a weird, a weird angle. page builder companies are normally, that's what they do. They do a page builder, and that's their thing, and, you're... You might bind to it. I see that you do, by the way.
You bind to a load of the, the page builders. But it seems like an unusual pivot. So how does this map to that? Is there a mapping, or is it just a totally separate product that you're launching? What's going on?
[00:24:34] Ken Young: So actually, the first thing we laun- before Page Builder, we launched Uncanny Agent, which is, an agent that you can chat to on your site, and it can do stuff for you. so we actually, the evolution was actually first Uncanny Agent, and then we thought, what else could this agent do for you besides, random tasks that you've got for it or building recipes.
And page building was something that we came up with. page builders are, WordPress page builders, they, they solved a problem in that you don't need to learn how to code HTML, CSS to build a page. but then they, do require their own knowledge where you've gotta, you've gotta understand design.
You gotta understand how to, design a nice-looking page, yourself, and you've also got to, know how to configure all these blocks that they're throwing at you. So you can drag and drop blocks onto a page, which is easy, but then you gotta go and, adjust, configure all the blocks, and you gotta adjust the spacing between all the blocks, and you gotta make it look nice.
And, so they, have, they have their own drawbacks. It takes a while to build a page, and we just thought, agents actually, AI is really good at working with HTML and CSS. It's just like it.
[00:25:58] Nathan Wrigley: It speaks the language so.
[00:26:00] Ken Young: Yeah, and then, with page builders, we've used page builders on our own sites, of course, and, it's always bothered me that you've gotta have this...
Once you start building with a page builder, you're basically locked into it. you can't, you've got the short codes that they generate, and if you turn off the plugin, your page completely d- gets destroyed. and you've basically, you're basically stuck with that page builder. To migrate to another page builder is just rebuilding everything from scratch.
And then, with all the short codes, it's slower to render because you've gotta, the short codes have to go look up, what's the HTML that's supposed to generate the HTML with all the settings that you configured. AI knows HTML and CSS, and that's the br- the language that browsers speak, so why not just build pages directly in HTML and CSS, with AI?
And, and it works beautifully. it really works. if you've got, you're starting up a WordPress site and you wanna build a page, you just tell it, "I want this page. Here's the content that I want on it. here are some images that I wanna use," and it'll just build your page.
And, it can also, refine it. You just discuss, "Oh, I don't like that image here. Let's put it down here," or, "Let's add a little bit of space here." And it just, it's just t- working with someone to, to actually build a page.
[00:27:26] Nathan Wrigley: So.
[00:27:29] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:27:29] Nathan Wrigley: I kinda want AI not to be capable in so many areas, but all, all those dominoes fell many months ago where you inspect the HTML that's coming out the other side. And, and obviously caveat emptor, you have to prompt it to be, clever and thoughtful and, and use as little, nonsense as possible, let's put it that way.
But it's crazy how good it is.
[00:27:53] Ken Young: Right.
[00:27:54] Nathan Wrigley: I get what you're saying. So in the era of page builders where, they definitely do the thing that you wanna do, but you might spend a fairly large amount of time going in and clicking in, then sub-clicking into another setting and finding the padding and.
[00:28:08] Ken Young: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
[00:28:10] Nathan Wrigley: In the era of AI, it's more like point to an element and say, "Can you add some padding underneath that?
[00:28:16] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:28:17] Nathan Wrigley: Pixels to start with, and we'll go from there.
[00:28:19] Ken Young: Right.
[00:28:20] Nathan Wrigley: 10 seconds later, it's just done it.
[00:28:23] Ken Young: Yep.
[00:28:24] Nathan Wrigley: It feels like you're having a conversation, like you said, with a designer. it's so annoying.
[00:28:33] Ken Young: Yeah, and it's, it's, really, it's really easy to iterate things with, the way we set it up, too. you can click an element, as you say, and click, Update with Uncanny Agent. And then it tells Uncanny Agent that's the, the element that you wanna change, and then you just type in your feedback.
And I th- I think actually, with people using AI, you can get an HTML page from any AI, like ChatGPT or Claude, and they'll build it for you. But then working, inside WordPress with it means you're copy and pasting it maybe into, the source of a, a post.
[00:29:17] Nathan Wrigley: Or a page or.
[00:29:18] Ken Young: Yeah.
So one of the big things about the p- Uncanny Page Builder is that it works within the WordPress post framework. even though it's creating HTML and CSS pages, they're designed to, you'll have revisions in there. You'll be able to undo, redo, and all that stuff. it's not the same as going to an AI and saying, "Hey, build me this page," and then you've got this HTML page that's outside your site that you then have to paste in, and if you wanna make changes, you're going back and forth.
So a lot of that, a lot of the thinking and design around Page Builder was getting this HTML builder working inside the WordPress framework, and able to, be just as seamless as a page builder that's built specifically for WordPress.
[00:30:06] Nathan Wrigley: So I'm imagining an interface whereby I go in, I click inside the WordPress, UI, I.
[00:30:12] Ken Young: Yep.
[00:30:12] Nathan Wrigley: New post.
[00:30:14] Ken Young: Right.
[00:30:14] Nathan Wrigley: Then you take over from that point. Forgive me, I haven't.
[00:30:17] Ken Young: Oh yeah, no, it's, so it's just if you've got Elementor or something on your page, you click build page bu- build with Elementor. It- there's a build with Uncanny page builder button, and then it opens up an interface. Yeah.
[00:30:29] Nathan Wrigley: Need to.
You can go in and-- you can go back to the, the regular WordPress post editor.
[00:30:36] Ken Young: Oh yeah.
[00:30:37] Nathan Wrigley: And CSS and all that. So it's built inside, which tells me then presumably it can use t- the templating system that we've got, so it can use, headers and footers and all of.
[00:30:46] Ken Young: Yep.
[00:30:46] Nathan Wrigley: The normal way. Can you make your headers and footers? Can you go into those parts of full site editing and use the uncanny agent to say, "Okay, let's fiddle with the navigation. Not entirely sure how. Yeah, it can.
[00:30:59] Ken Young: Yeah, so you can, set up a header and footer with Uncanny Agent. We're not using the WordPress full site editing capability, but it's, we've got our own, header and footer, management system in there where you can build it with Uncanny Agent, or you can just s- you can select, use my theme's header and footer, and then Uncanny Agent just builds the content within that framework. So.
[00:31:20] Nathan Wrigley: Really.
[00:31:20] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:31:21] Nathan Wrigley: I, do like the kind of iterative nature of it. I think one of the frustrations of using any tool is, A, the learning curve. to be really proficient at any of the page builders out there, you've gotta sit down and you've gotta learn where every single thing is.
[00:31:36] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:31:36] Nathan Wrigley: Muscle memory.
to actually deploy your muscle memory, and every time you wanna build a page, you have to go in, and maybe it's half an hour or a quarter of an hour or whatever it may be to get things configured just how you want them.
[00:31:48] Ken Young: Right.
[00:31:48] Nathan Wrigley: The, it, I just can't see a future in which AI isn't more widely used to just have this conversation where it feels like you're sat next to somebody. "Okay, no, not that red. can we go a little bit darker on the red in the header? Yeah.
[00:32:02] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:32:03] Nathan Wrigley: And can we swap that picture for one of a cat? Not that cat, a brown cat. Yeah, that's great. And then the header, can we just t- tilt it a little bit and have the, I don't know, the typography on, about 10 degree?" And it just happens.
[00:32:18] Ken Young: Exactly. yeah. that's where I think, a lot of things are headed with as people become more comfortable using AI. we just wanted to, to be a part of that, that revolution in how, things are being done.
[00:32:34] Nathan Wrigley: I, I do wonder, and I'm going slightly off piste. don't know if you're making use of things like, voice-to-text. all which connect to, I don't know, ChatGPT and Claude and all these other things, where you hit a button on your keyboard, in my case the function key.
[00:32:51] Ken Young: Right.
[00:32:52] Nathan Wrigley: A little thing pops up, and it just listens to what I'm saying, and I let go of the function key, and within, I don't know, a quarter of one second, everything is summar- well, not even summarized. Basically, it gives me the perfect version of what I was about, what I tried to say, including getting rid of all the ums and the ahs and, "Oh, no, I didn't mean to say that." so I can imagine a scenario where you really are talking, like actually talking.
[00:33:17] Ken Young: Right.
[00:33:17] Nathan Wrigley: So it's not even typing out, "Can we add the margin?" It's literally hit the function key, "Can we add a little bit of margin?" Let go of the function key, press return. "Oh, we go.
[00:33:27] Ken Young: Yeah, you.
[00:33:27] Nathan Wrigley: Care of.
[00:33:28] Ken Young: Into the future here. So yeah, that is one of our, one of our plans. but right now you could use your own, OS level tools to do that. But, we're think- thinking about putting a, a voice interface in there. So it would be, yeah, it would be built in.
[00:33:44] Nathan Wrigley: Of us are wearing headphones at the moment. I know you can't see us, dear listener, but both of us are wearing headphones, which strikes me as, give it 10 years and something will be built into the headphones to scan our brains and we won't even have to go through the manual chore of pressing the function key.
[00:34:00] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:34:00] Nathan Wrigley: Think, "Can I make the font bigger?" And it will happen. Maybe not. Maybe that's a little bit out into the future. so that's a separate product then. So it sounds, I don't know if there's a binding between the stuff that you're doing with the, Uncanny Automator and the page builder you've been building.
Is there some sort of special connection which enables you to, I don't know, throw in these automations in some way or are they totally separate?
[00:34:23] Ken Young: Oh, it's actually not a separate product.
that's part of Uncanny Automator now. so we think, Uncanny Automator's now got like these three core capabilities. one is the recipe builder, which is the automations that we talked about where you build those. the second is Uncanny Agent, which can... is your chat interface where you can, ask Uncanny Agent to build a recipe or build a page now.
[00:34:51] Nathan Wrigley: I see.
[00:34:52] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:34:52] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so it can just go off in both directions. Build me... Do b- act as a page builder now or my recipe builder. Okay, got it.
[00:35:01] Ken Young: Yeah. you just tell it what you want, and it'll switch into the mode that, that you, for doing what you wanna do. and yeah, and page builder is the other capability. yeah, we're e- evolving the capabilities of Uncanny Agent and, we don't expect to stop with these three capabilities, but, they're all, in there.
And actually, one of the unique things we're doing with, with this product is that, we're including the AI. So you install it, and if you're a free user, you create an account. if you're a pro user, you purchase it, and then you, just start chatting right away. we're, we've got the AI in there, then we're providing it.
You don't have to buy a separate subscription and then connect it with, API keys or an MCP server or anything like that. It's really, out of the box. We've optimized, the models behind it and their whole harness about, what they're capable of doing, on your site.
So yeah, it's, pretty unique that way. A lot of the products that I've seen out there are, bring your own AI products, which is good. those are good too. They have their place for sure. I think a lot of people might wanna just get into things and start using a product. And that's where we're, where we've set it up.
[00:36:25] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and I can see the s- the sense in that. A, because on the page building side, you want it to be constrained by, what actually should end up in a WordPress post or on your Automator side, the recipe builder, if you've got your own AI presumably in the background, the blurb that I might give out in terms of, "Okay, build...
I, I want to connect this thing to that thing," it has some intuition to steer you in the right direction. So it'll get you there.
[00:36:52] Ken Young: Right.
[00:36:53] Nathan Wrigley: Than me trying to explain, "Okay, I wanna connect the..." It knows. It's just been built with that background knowledge of
[00:37:00] Ken Young: Exactly.
[00:37:00] Nathan Wrigley: Form solution to that CRM solution, and it can just do it in the background.
[00:37:05] Ken Young: Yeah. So it's got all of the, the knowledge about the product and all of its capabilities built in.
[00:37:12] Nathan Wrigley: Wow.
[00:37:12] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:37:13] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, you're in a-- it f- feels like you are in a really strong position and you've painted a pretty bright future for yourself there because I can't really think of many other companies that are doing quite as much.
[00:37:27] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:37:28] Nathan Wrigley: The page builder is one thing, but then this whole automation piece is a really interesting other thing that you've got bundled up. and you may not want to reveal too much about this because it's staring into a crystal ball a bit. But you have confidence, that the suite of products that you've got is aligned for the year late- later part of 2026, 2027, 2028? Have you got good feedback from your customers and do you just feel that this is a really strong direction for you.
[00:37:58] Ken Young: It's, it's still pretty early.
but, yeah, I think w-we actually, in the last, since we released, we released, we gave free, f- users of our free product, Uncanny Automator Lite, we just, announced that we're giving free usage of Uncanny Agent to those customers. p- previously it had been paid customers only that were able to use Uncanny Agent.
But now we're actually providing usage, to our free customers. And, since we released, in the week since we released that, we got as many, five-star reviews as the previous four months, before that. So I think, the, people are liking what we're doing with the product. it's, y- you talk about it as though, page builder's not really part of autom- automation.
But the way I see it, automation is actually, the definition is, using technology to, to minimize human intervention in a process, right? so the workflow builder is one way to do that, and, y- just using AI is another way to do that. just u- just using AI to do something that a human would've done is a form of automation.
So putting Uncanny Agent into the product, putting page builders into the product is just, other ways of automating what you're doing on your site.
[00:39:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, think you've convinced me. I don't think I fully understood it, and now I think I, I get it a little bit more.
[00:39:30] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:39:31] Nathan Wrigley: Of curiously, in the era of AI where it feels like the, what's expected from you as a web, let's say website builder, let's go with that phrase, is going through the roof.
The expectation now, the cat's out the bag with AI. Everybody now knows that a lot of things can be done, so the client is gonna come to you and for your $5,000 budget or whatever, I think there's gonna be a lot more expected of you.
[00:39:57] Ken Young: Right.
[00:39:57] Nathan Wrigley: Gives you that framework, doesn't it?
"Oh, yeah, we can. We can connect you to your, I don't know, "G- Google Sheets," or, "We can connect you to your, CRM of choice," or whatever it may be. "Yeah, we can totally do all of that." And to have that in the back pocket as an agent, and then to be able to turn around and do that quickly and affordably but still give value seems like a really nice promise.
[00:40:21] Ken Young: Yeah. Yeah, I do. I think so. and, having the framework that we built for the Recipe Builder and the workflow, the Workflow Builder actually gives our agent a lot more capabilities than just an AI agent. So all of the actions that you could add into a, into an automation, into a recipe, Uncanny Agent can actually run those directly.
If you've got, if you've got, add a user to a course, add a user to a group, or, post to my Facebook page, you can actually just tell Uncanny Agent, "Hey, post to my Facebook page," or, "Add this user to this group," and it runs the action. So we've actually built this huge library of a- of things that Uncanny Agent can do now.
And every time we add a new integration, it adds to that, to, to Uncanny Agent's capabilities.
[00:41:14] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah.
[00:41:15] Ken Young: So it's working, in two ways. when we add a new integration, we're expanding what you can do just by, chatting, and you are also expanding what you can build in terms of prebuilt, these prebuilt, automations, workflow automations.
[00:41:30] Nathan Wrigley: So that's really nice because presumably in the previous iteration before AI, despite the fact that you had a, a really robust product, you still had to build the thing.
[00:41:38] Ken Young: Exactly, yeah.
[00:41:40] Nathan Wrigley: Take long, you still have to build the thing. And it may be that, connecting Facebook takes 15 minutes and then connecting, I don't know, Google Sheets takes another 15 minutes and what have you.
And before you know it, several hours have gone and what have you. It, sounds like now the promise is more say the sentence, wait 12 seconds, and you're done.
To doing that thing is lower, so you can basically achieve things.
[00:42:04] Ken Young: Yeah, and, there are some, things that prebuilt workflows make sense for. repeatable actions where someone's always filling out this form, so you always want it to do this thing afterwards. but then there are things that you only wanna do once. oh, this user contacted me and, they wanna be added to this group, and then you just ask Uncanny Agent to do that one thing.
it doesn't make sense to build a whole automation for that because it's just a one-off thing.
[00:42:29] Nathan Wrigley: Oh, it. So literally you c- yeah. Yeah, okay. So in the, i- in all systems at the moment, you set up this thing which is repeatable and predictable, but there's always a trigger at the top of that funnel, and the.
[00:42:40] Ken Young: Exactly.
[00:42:41] Nathan Wrigley: In this case, you just wanna do it once. You i've got this.
[00:42:45] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:42:45] Nathan Wrigley: Figure that this post is gonna go really well into my Facebook page, or whatever it may be, and you just it, type it in. Okay, just this one. Send off this to Facebook page and... that's.
[00:42:57] Ken Young: Yeah. So now you can automate your non-repeatable tasks.
[00:43:03] Nathan Wrigley: Right.
[00:43:03] Ken Young: Of a way to think about it.
[00:43:05] Nathan Wrigley: so Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah, so for example, I don't know, you might use a social sharing plugin or something which when you publish a post it sends it off to, a variety of
could do that or not do that. the minute you've published it you might change your mind and go, "Actually, you know what?
Yeah, let us send it," and off you go. Oh.
[00:43:23] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:43:24] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, that's really interesting. just before we hit the record button, you mentioned, that you had a sort of a roadmap item. I don't know if you want to mention that. Do you?
[00:43:33] Ken Young: Oh.
[00:43:34] Nathan Wrigley: Get into that?
[00:43:34] Ken Young: yeah. so you know, I mentioned that, as we add new integrations, that gives new capabilities to Uncanny Agent, where you can ask it to actually do those things. we're also going to be releasing, very shortly a, an MCP server in Uncanny Automator. So you can actually go and, for the people that wanna use their own AI, they can actually, they'll actually be able to connect to, the MCP server in Automator and have their AI, make use of all those capabilities that we've added.
and I think we're gonna expose them via, the WordPress Abilities API, as well. So if you're using, if you're using another product that y- that can tap into the WordPress Abilities API, then you'll be able to use Automator's, actions as well. so yeah, there's really a lot of, functionality and capability that we're adding to Automator because we've got a lot.
we invested so much in, in building out these integrations and what they can do, and now that, AI can take advantage of them, we're just gonna open the floodgates basically.
[00:44:44] Nathan Wrigley: Like the whole in reverse, if Instead of it all flowing out of the WordPress website, suddenly it can begin to go in the opposite direction and you can ask things of your... I don't know, you're logged into Claude or something and you, in Claude.
I just want to do a thing. I.
[00:45:00] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:45:01] Nathan Wrigley: Go into WordPress. I can just say to Claude, 'Okay, okay, th- that piece of text that I just wrote, publish it as a WordPress.
[00:45:08] Ken Young: Exactly, yeah.
[00:45:09] Nathan Wrigley: And return." Honestly, in such crazy times. I.
[00:45:15] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:45:15] Nathan Wrigley: Don't... It's insane. But that, that's the way it's going, right?
Like the m- a kind of minimal interaction.
[00:45:22] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:45:23] Nathan Wrigley: With whatever piece of infrastructure you've got. And if you've got this, automator built in, why not? If you're in Claude all day, every day, but you want to publish something on your WordPress site and then fire all the, these other things off, you're off to the races.
That's really interesting. So that's not ready at the moment. We're recording this right at the end of August and... But there's no.
[00:45:44] Ken Young: Right.
[00:45:44] Nathan Wrigley: But I don't know, September, October sort of time, something like that.
[00:45:49] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:45:50] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Perfect. we won't hold you to that just.
[00:45:53] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:45:54] Nathan Wrigley: in case it doesn't ship.
This, this podcast I think will go out towards the beginning of September, so it may be that's coming around. okay, so I'm gonna knock it on the head there. We'll wrap it up. But, before we go, are there any sort of socials where you would encourage people to follow what you're doing? we've mentioned the domain, so we've got that one wrapped up.
But do you f- do you have yourself available online? Do you respond to, I don't know, comments on X or... I think I remember in the show notes you're not a big fan of social media, so maybe.
[00:46:23] Ken Young: I'm trying to build up my social media presence, but, yeah, I guess the best way to reach out to me would be LinkedIn personally. but, we have, we have an Uncanny Automator pro- profile set up on X and, Facebook and LinkedIn. So, if you wanna reach out that way, that's great too.
[00:46:44] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, that's great. in that case, we will knock it on the head. One more time though, just read it into the record. If you wanna go check it out, the, best place to begin is automatorplugin.com, And there's a menu across the top which will get you everywhere you need to go. So Ken Young, thank you so much.
Good luck. I hope that the year 2027 sounds like it's gonna be very busy and productive.
[00:47:09] Ken Young: Yeah.
[00:47:10] Nathan Wrigley: That's the case.
[00:47:12] Ken Young: Great. Thanks, Nathan.
