Two clients showed up with the same UX problem: visitors land on a complex site and can’t find the right path forward. One project ended up shipping a GPT-powered search block. The other shipped a deterministic, persona-driven block on rails, no AI at all. Both worked. Neither was wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This talk walks through both production engagements side by side. The AI search block, built for a community college’s 643-course catalog, comes with the production-hardening list nobody mentions in the demos: rate limits, kill switches, prompt-injection mitigations, token ceilings, and cost predictability. The persona-by-goal Mosaic block, built for an industrial services company after their legal team rejected an AI chatbot SOW, comes with a different lesson: deterministic UX, full editorial control, zero model cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Attendees leave with a framework for when an AI block belongs in a project and when a deterministic block does the same job better, plus a reusable persona-by-goal pattern they can adapt on their next engagement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Two clients showed up with the same UX problem: visitors land on a complex site and can’t find the right path forward. One project ended up shipping a GPT-powered search block. The other shipped a deterministic, persona-driven block on rails, no AI at all. Both worked. Neither was wrong. This talk walks through both production […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13655207,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_wcpt_session_time":0,"_wcpt_session_duration":3000,"_wcpt_session_type":"session","_wcpt_session_slides":"","_wcpt_session_video":"","_wcpt_speaker_id":[4660],"footnotes":""},"session_track":[45],"session_category":[],"class_list":["post-4697","wcb_session","type-wcb_session","status-publish","hentry","wcb_track-technical-wordpress"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pgSBpQ-1dL","session_date_time":{"date":"","time":""},"session_speakers":[{"id":"4660","slug":"paul-yuen","name":"Paul Yuen","link":"https:\/\/us.wordcamp.org\/2026\/speaker\/paul-yuen\/"}],"session_cats_rendered":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.wordcamp.org\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sessions\/4697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.wordcamp.org\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sessions"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.wordcamp.org\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/wcb_session"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/us.wordcamp.org\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sessions\/4697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5500,"href":"https:\/\/us.wordcamp.org\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sessions\/4697\/revisions\/5500"}],"speakers":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.wordcamp.org\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/speakers\/4660"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.wordcamp.org\/2026\/wp-json\/wporg\/v1\/users\/yuenvision"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.wordcamp.org\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"wcb_track","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.wordcamp.org\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/session_track?post=4697"},{"taxonomy":"wcb_session_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.wordcamp.org\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/session_category?post=4697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}