My colleague Adrián Gómez wrote a post about Odie, the AI assistant behind WordPress.com and WooCommerce support: Meet Odie.

Back in August I wrote about how Odie decides when to hand a conversation to a person. Adrián covers a different part: how the support team thinks about Odie, and why putting a bot in front of human support was not a decision to make lightly.

This line stayed with me:

A response can be technically correct and still miss the mark if it feels cold or disconnected from the person reading it.

Adrián says this is why the AI Squad exists. It’s a team of Happiness Engineers (Automattic’s support staff) who review Odie’s conversations. They look for wrong or unexpected answers, and they also check the tone, how clear the answer is, and whether it feels supportive.

He also shares an example about domains. Happiness Engineers kept seeing the same domain requests, and many of them did not need a person. So after testing and adding guardrails (limits on what the bot is allowed to do), Odie can now handle some of those requests directly.

What I like is the order. The people doing support noticed the pattern first, and the bot got the new ability second.

It’s a short read, and a good one if you are curious how our support team works alongside AI.