Below is our recent interview with Ken Young, Co-founder and CEO at Uncanny Owl:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to Uncanny Owl?
A: Uncanny Owl has been building WordPress plugins for well over a decade now. But that’s not how the company started.
When I founded the company with a friend, we actually started out in eLearning program development. Then we started experimenting with LearnDash (an LMS plugin for WordPress) and blogging about our experiences. From that blog, people started finding us and asking us to build LearnDash sites for them.
So for a while we were building LearnDash sites, and we realized we were implementing the same solutions over and over, and that’s how we got into building our own plugins. We eventually built out a suite of 6 eLearning plugins, which, since they were built for real-world use cases, ended up being quite popular. So we found a tiny niche in which we became pretty well known for our plugins (and our support, which really was the best in the business).
Our seventh plugin started out as another eLearning plugin, one that would let you automate certain aspects of learning programs, but we quickly realized that it could easily be extended to connect all of your plugins with automated workflows. Back in those days it was basically impossible to get plugins and apps talking to each other without custom code. Something like: when someone buys a product, they get enrolled in a course, added to your email list, and your team gets a Slack message, automatically. But Uncanny Automator made your WordPress plugins and apps work together with a drag-and-drop interface. It really democratized workflow automation on WordPress.
Today, the eLearning plugin business is still going strong (and we’ve got some new plans in the works there) but right now Uncanny Automator is where the really exciting things are happening.
On top of workflow automation we recently released Uncanny Agent, currently the most capable AI assistant available for WordPress. It combines the power of AI with WordPress tools so you can actually use AI to get things done on your site, like writing blog posts, analyzing your eCommerce or eLearning data, building automations (of course) and building pages. And on building pages, last week we launched Uncanny Page Builder, the first WordPress page builder built from the ground up for building pages with AI. So just like we did with automation, we’ve democratized good page design in WordPress, making it accessible to anyone that can converse with an AI chatbot.
Q: That’s an interesting history! You’ve certainly come a long way from building eLearning courses. So what makes Uncanny Automator better than the other automation tools out there?
A: Well, we’re much more than an automation tool now. Over the past few years, automation was the tool businesses turned to when they wanted to amplify their output—then AI came along and changed everything. When that happened, most automation tools added some AI-powered steps to their workflow builders and called it a day. Some added AI assistance for building automations. But at their core, they’re still just automation tools.
We really thought about how automation itself rewrote the book for businesses, and how we could do the same with AI. So we built tools that give WordPress businesses that next leap forward: Not just AI-powered automation, but AI-powered site management, AI-powered business analysis, AI-powered page building. Areas of the business that traditional automation couldn’t touch – that’s where we focused. So when users purchase Uncanny Automator they’re not just getting a workflow builder; they’re getting a product can help automate every aspect of their business on WordPress with AI.
Uncanny Agent really is uniquely capable. It’s not just a chatbot we bolted onto the plugin. We gave it tools that let it do real work and real business analysis. It can tell you how your sales are trending month over month or year over year. Which products are commonly bought together, which see the highest refund rates, by how much did sales spike during last month’s sale and how did it compare to the sale before that. Or perform that same kind of analysis on your course offerings, or memberships, or whatever your business happens to do on WordPress. Stuff that you would typically spend hours exporting data and manipulating it in spreadsheets to find out.
And then on top of that it can complete tasks via conversation. Just like you’d ask an administrative assistant over Slack: Add a customer to our email list. Or add all users from XYZ company to a new group. Register everyone that completed last week’s course in this week’s webinar. Find our content gaps and draft 3 blog posts to address them. Build a landing page for our new product. Uncanny Agent can do this because it can leverage Automator’s library of actions and run them directly. So anything you can do inside an automation, Uncanny Agent can do on command. So as we add new integrations, they expand Uncanny Agent’s abilities too.
And one more thing that sets us apart: it just works, right out of the box. We provide the AI so there are no API keys enter, no separate AI subscription to buy, no duct-taping five tools together and hoping they work together. Buy Uncanny Automator or create a free account and start chatting. And when you look at what Uncanny Automator can replace: an automation platform, an AI subscription, a page builder, maybe even some work that would be typically outsourced to a designer or developer, I don’t know why anyone would choose to pay extra for separate tools that don’t even work together.
Q: Uncanny Automator sounds like a pretty unique solution in a crowded space. Who is your ideal customer and why?
A: Anyone running a serious WordPress site while wearing way too many hats. The store owner who’s also the marketer, the support team, and the webmaster. The course creator drowning in enrollment admin. The membership site manager copying data between dashboards at 11pm. These people get the most dramatic benefit from Uncanny Automator. We routinely hear from customers who now say they can’t imagine running their site without Uncanny Agent. And with free Uncanny Agent usage now available to everyone, I’d say we’ve just become the best plugin for everyone new to WordPress — Uncanny Automator isn’t just another plugin you need to learn, it’s a plugin that can connect and teach you how to use all of the other plugins you’ve installed!
We’ve also got some developers and agencies using Uncanny Automator to speed up WordPress builds for their clients and provide automation and AI across their client portfolio, and we’re adding tools to make it easier for them to manage Uncanny Automator centrally. So soon they’ll be our ideal clients too.
Q: What can we expect from you in the next 6 months? What are your plans?
A: This is the busiest and most exciting stretch in our company’s history, and that’s not an exaggeration. We just launched Uncanny Page Builder, which lets anyone build beautiful pages on WordPress with AI through simple conversation. Pages keep working even if you turn the plugin off, which is pretty much unheard of in the page builder world.
We’ve also just rolled out free Uncanny Agent usage to our entire free user base, so everyone with the free plugin gets to experience an AI assistant that knows their site, at zero cost. We’re also working on giving our recipe builder its biggest refresh ever, making it easier to use and more powerful.
Later this year…well, let’s just say Uncanny Agent will be doing even more things you’d normally hire specialists for. And we’re going to help make WordPress a first-class citizen in the AI world by extending Automator’s capabilities to other AI tools. I don’t want to spill everything yet, but if you think AI in WordPress is interesting now, check back in six months. :)
Q: At the rate things are evolving, six months feels like a lifetime.
A: It sure does! With the way almost anyone can build with AI now, we’re sure to see a flood of junkware making it harder and harder for people to figure out what plugins are actually worth their hard-earned money. We’ve been around for 13 years and we plan to be around for 13 more, so you can be sure Uncanny Automator will be one of those plugins that’s worth it.
Q: What is the best thing about Uncanny Owl that people might not know about?
A: We’re 100% focused on WordPress. While that might seem obvious since we build WordPress plugins, we’ve seen other automation platforms get distracted and try to pivot to building automation for everyone…which means things get a little bit harder; a little bit less intuitive for WordPress users. Right now we’re redesigning our interface to make things even easier for WordPress users. The way WordPress handles users and data and permissions is unlike other platforms, and by building specifically for WordPress we can make automation, and now AI, super focused on the way WordPress users think and the problems that they need to solve.
