Ronald Ashri

Ronald Ashri

Ronald Ashri is Deeson’s Technical Strategy Director. Analysing emerging enabling technologies and market trends he identifies new opportunities and improved methods for solving problems. Ronald holds a PhD in Computer Science where research dealt with complex distributed systems, artificial intelligence, and Semantic Web technologies. After several years in academia working on artificial intelligence he changed directions and got involved with web development and practical applications of the semantic web. For the past 10 years he has consulting for large organisations, academic institutions and government organisations, leading teams on projects and product development.

An active member of the Drupal community for the past 9 years, Ron’s first WordCamp was last year in Vienna and it was a great experience.

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.