Meet the keynote speaker who’s spent her career making impossible platforms work and now she’s turning her attention to AI.
Monday, August 17, 2026 at 9:15am
Every so often, a keynote speaker’s bio reads less like a resume and more like a list of things people said couldn’t be done. This year, that’s exactly what we’ve got.
Bo English-Wiczling, Vice President of Global Developer Relations at PayPal, is taking the mainstage to talk about something every one of us building on WordPress right now is quietly wondering: what does AI actually mean for the day-to-day experience of being a developer?
Why she’s the one to answer that question
Bo didn’t arrive at “how do we make developers’ lives better” as a theory, she’s been doing it at scale for almost three decades. At PayPal, she now owns the developer platforms that move billions of dollars around the world and the integration layer connecting developers and sellers to the consumers who use them every day. That’s not a small stage to build for, in fact it’s most of the internet’s wallet.
And that’s just her most recent chapter. Before PayPal, she built and led the Database Product Management Developer Relations team at Oracle, the first Developer Relations org the company had ever had. She was running a team and inventing how a company that size talks to, listens to, and builds for millions of developers worldwide. If you’ve ever wished a huge platform actually understood what it’s like to build on it, that’s the muscle she spent years training.
Go back further and the pattern holds. She built the first mobile phone activation platform at Best Buy, adopted across 29 telcos in North America and Europe. She built the first anti-money-laundering platform at Amazon protecting millions of third-party marketplace sellers. Before any of that, she started out as a web developer herself, building real applications for organizations like Allianz and the American Heart Association so when she talks about developer experience, she’s talking about it from the inside.
She holds a double major in Computer Science and Philosophy from the University of Minnesota, which, frankly, tracks because you don’t solve “impossible” problems for 28 years without also being the kind of person who asks why before how. She’s a Certified Scrum Master and Certified Agile Coach, a board advisor for Whatcom Community College’s CIS/Cybersecurity Committee, and a genuinely passionate advocate for open source communities and underrepresented voices in tech.
Why this keynote matters right now
Here’s the thing about AI and developer experience: everyone has an opinion, and most of those opinions are coming from people who’ve built maybe one platform, or none. Bo has spent her career sitting at the exact intersection this moment demands with enterprise scale, developer empathy, and a track record of building the first version of things other people were still debating.
When she talks about how AI is reshaping what it means to be a developer, she’s describing a shift she’s already several platforms into navigating and she’s going to tell us what she’s learned, what’s actually working, and what the hype gets wrong.
If you build things on WordPress or anywhere else this is the keynote to build your morning around.
See you on the mainstage in Phoenix!
Bo’s keynote will be held on Showcase Day: Monday, August 17, 2026 at 9:15am.
View this year’s full schedule and speakers to plan your time with us.
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