The Power of Opt-in AI: Building Digital Resilience in the Hype Era

Peer pressure within the wider tech industry has led to broad AI adoption within software even though users don't always find it useful. This talk will show you why the Wagtail CMS project decided to resist that pressure and make AI an opt-in feature for Wagtail.

I'll go over how we recognized the transformative potential of AI tools but also observed that not all organizations want to adopt AI at the same rate. With a range of considerations in play, particularly environmental impact and, more recently, cost, we felt that AI in Wagtail needed to be a choice rather than an inevitability.

I’ll walk through why we developed guiding principles for opt-in AI adoption. Then I’ll show you how we used those principles to create a more resilient way to incorporate AI into software that empowers users and gives them more control over their AI journeys.

About Meagen Voss

Meagen Voss began her journey into content management nerdery with a WordPress website in the early 2000s and is now a Wagtail Community Manager and Editor of Wagtail.org at Torchbox. When she’s not coding or writing, you can find her hiking in the mountains of North Carolina.