WordPress 6.7 AI tooling in a B2B editorial workflow

A B2B infrastructure software vendor publishes 35–45 long-form posts per month across WordPress, case studies, integration guides, and release notes. Editors spent disproportionate time on repetitive section scaffolding (comparison tables, CTA bands, code snippet callouts) while engineering was bottlenecked on custom landing pages.

WordPress 6.7's refined Site Editor, pattern library improvements, and first-party AI assist features (via Jetpack AI and experimental core hooks) offered leverage, but leadership was skeptical after a failed ChatGPT copy-paste experiment that produced off-brand tone and broken heading hierarchy.

What we did not do: auto-publish without review; generate meta descriptions without keyword field input; or replace subject-matter expert quotes with synthetic testimonials.

Simplileap's role was not "add AI buttons", we integrated AI into a governed editorial system: custom Gutenberg blocks with locked attributes for H1/H2 structure; pattern library segmented by content type; AI prompts constrained by a brand style guide stored as markdown in repo; human review required before status moves from draft to "ready for SEO".

Developer productivity gains: block scaffolding from Figma frames using AI-generated block.json starter templates (reviewed in PR); ACF field group suggestions from sample JSON exports; WP-CLI script to validate alt text and internal links before publish, failures block deploy on staging.

Problems faced: AI drafts occasionally hallucinated integration partners not in the approved list, solved with a retrieval step against a curated partner CSV; Site Editor sync conflicts when two editors edited patterns, mitigated with revision locking and explicit pattern ownership in Notion.

Outcome: median time from brief to staged draft dropped from 4.2 days to 2.1 days over eight weeks; zero SEO-critical heading regressions in QA; engineering hours on marketing landing pages down ~30% because editors self-serve patterns. Engagement under NDA, Series A devtools company headquartered in Bangalore.