Tom Chute

Tom Chute

I started using WordPress when running a charity 7 years ago. I was the client, partnering with the agency I now work for, so I’ve experienced using WordPress on both sides of the fence. At my agency, I’m an Account Manager and Team Leader, working with hundreds of clients, and many team members, to deliver a wide range of WordPress sites. Prior to WordPress, I ran mass engagement, behaviour change campaigns relating to climate change and environmental conservation.

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.