Luke Oatham

Luke Oatham

Head of Helpfulness & Product Lead, GovIntranet

Luke has over 20 years experience in IT and digital communications, working with a wide range of clients, including at Transport for London and the Ministry of Justice.

His job title may sound daft, but captures Luke’s diverse mix of skills: a developer, then an information architect and user experience practitioner, his digital skills cover a range of specialisms including usability, content and information design, digital engagement, search, web analytics and a twist of human psychology. He’s also a seasoned WordPress developer.

He leads work on GovIntranet, a straightforward intranet product serving tens of thousands of users around the world.

He runs a blog at intranetdiary.co.uk covering topics such as content strategy, staff engagement, search and analytics.

Session

About Gary Jones

I'm a Customer Experience AI Engineer in the enterprise WordPress space, currently figuring out how AI fits into the way our support and engineering teams actually do their jobs at WordPress VIP. Most of my recent work sits at the intersection of three things: AI inside engineering and support operations, the open-source plugins our customers rely on, and the community that holds the WordPress ecosystem together. On the AI side, I've been exploring how AI agents and MCP servers can connect to the operational tools support teams use day-to-day, from scheduling and coverage through to triage. There's still a lot to learn here. On the plugin side, I review and merge contributions to VIP-owned WordPress plugins used by tens of thousands of sites. Earlier this year I helped launch customerhub.wpvip.com, a community hub for our enterprise customers. On the community side, as of WP 7.0 I've contributed to 29 of the last 39 WordPress core releases, I'm a General Translation Editor for British English on translate.wordpress.org, and I'm an organiser for WordCamp Europe (Basel 2025, Krakow 2026). I'm also a named contributor on PSR-5, the PHPDoc standard. Before VIP, I ran my own agency for ten years, was a long-standing contributor to the Genesis Framework, and co-hosted the UK Genesis Podcast. Earlier than that, I taught maths and IT, including a stint as a team leader for prison education. The teaching instinct still drives a lot of what I do.