Courses 2 through 4 in this track are about AI agents calling into WordPress, MCP servers, tool definitions, and the Abilities API from the other side of the wire. This course goes the opposite direction: your own WordPress plugin code calling out to an AI model to do work for you, generating text, checking similarity between two pieces of content, summarizing a post, drafting a reply. That direction is what the PHP AI Client SDK is for, and it has nothing to do with MCP or the Abilities API on its own.
This course builds directly on the overview lesson in
WordPress AI Foundations, which introduced
wp_ai_client_prompt() and the three official provider plugins at a conceptual level.
If you haven’t taken that course, at minimum read its
PHP AI Client SDK overview lesson
first, since this course assumes you already know what the function returns and why it
exists. From there, everything here can be taken on its own, independent of Courses 2
through 4, though it pairs naturally with them: an ability’s execute_callback calling
out to an LLM is exactly where the two directions meet, and the final lesson walks
through that combination end to end.
By the end of this course you’ll have real, tested plugin code that generates text and embeddings against Claude, GPT, or Gemini, handles the errors that come with talking to an external service over a network, and falls back between providers instead of hardcoding one vendor. Course 6, AI Content & SEO Automation in WordPress, is where these exact techniques get put to work in full projects, so treat this course as the toolbox that project relies on.