Before I express my thoughts, I want to clarify that this blog post will be reviewed, revised, and improved with the help of Grammarly's AI. Although I've been cautious about relying on AI to enhance my writing, I recognize that my dyslexia and ongoing grammar challenges impact my writing ability. However, I'm skilled at organizing my ideas to convey a message. In the context of this post, I see AI as a helpful tool, similar to wearing glasses, that aids me in communicating and interacting with the Drupal community. Nothing in this post is generated by AI through prompts. My inspiration for sharing these thoughts came from attending DrupalCon Atlanta.

Like many people, I am skeptical and hesitant about using AI in my day-to-day tasks, but this is about to change. Until recently, my daily use of AI was limited to using PHPStorm's AI assistant to suggest or look up some code occasionally. Frequently, I’d smirk at its hallucinations and never ask the AI assistant to correct itself.\

At DrupalCon Barcelona, I was impressed by the demo of Drupal CMS' AI capabilities, but I did not attend any AI sessions. A month after DrupalCon, I had breakfast in Brooklyn with Jamie, co-founder of FreelyGive and one of Drupal's AI evangelists. We discussed improving the sustainability of the AI module's ecosystem based on my experience with the Webform module's sustainability. At the same time, I sensed from his excitement that the possibilities with Drupal and AI were limitless.

At DrupalCon Atlanta, the only AI session I attended was "AI Won’t Steal Your Job—But It Will Make You (and Your Clients) Unstoppable." For me, it was life-changing. You should watch the presentation once it is available online; some examples went above my head. My takeaway was that some of the Drupal community's most brilliant engineers and thought leaders are increasing their productivity tenfold by exploring and using AI.

In my presentation at DrupaCon Atlanta titled "Mixing the Schema.org Blueprints Module into a Drupal Recipe to bake a sweet content model, I included a slide recognizing how the community has grown more ambitious, with developments accelerating and our tools evolving. This statement has become an understatement regarding the changes occurring in the Drupal community and the world around us. The best barometer for what's happening in Drupal is the "hallway" track.

In the "hallway" track, the conversations between sessions and during meals are where you can hear the latest information and informal discussions in the community, such as where the next DrupalCon will be held. Frankly, the "hallway" track allows you to see and understand what is 'really' happening in the Drupal community, and some of it can be downright frightening; Lay-offs are scary.

Sadly, no one will give a session about what the community should do about companies losing business and employees losing their jobs. At first glance, the layoffs in our community could be written off as the beginning of a recession or even the downsizing of the community. If you dig deeper, some companies with brilliant leadership and top talent are letting go of people, and these companies need to rethink their business plans and growth strategies. It does not take much to realize that the only way for these companies to survive is to lean into AI and increase their productivity and value to clients.

Conversely, if companies need to lean into AI, every employee must embrace it.

In response to the Drupal Site Template marketplace, where organizations can purchase themes and design, there was a lot of concern about how we will prevent low-quality AI-generated themes and site templates. That is the wrong question or concern; the right question is how we will generate and support high-quality themes and site templates created using AI.

My key point is to keep our jobs and community, and we need to continually ask how AI would improve or address a need or requirement.

For my organization, content translations are the best example of where we should pivot our approach and strategy. AI will replace the need to translate content manually or using basic machine translation. Of course, AI can automatically translate any content using machine translation. Yep, machine translation is never perfect, but with AI, you can ask it to rephrase something confusing or explain a concept, and you can even ask it to describe something as if you are a three-year-old child.

Instead of translating content, we need to ensure the quality and comprehensibility of our content for machines. We need well-structured data, and Schema.org is the standard for structured data.

Schema.org is intended to help with SEO, but in an AI-driven world, SEO may be irrelevant because people might stop searching and ask an AI for an answer. An AI understands what it is reading and can assess its meaning and relevance. As an experiment, I requested ChatGPT to generate Schema.org JSON-LD from a webpage using a specific Schema.org type and properties; the output was close to perfect and could be perfect with some additional prompts.

Where does this lead the Schema.org Blueprints module? Is it relevant? Some expected benefits, like generating Schema.org JSON-LD, are not as significant. A standardized content architecture is still wholly pertinent and may be vital. We can stop thinking and debating our content models and create standardized, reusable ones. For me, it is essential to start mixing AI into the Schema.org Blueprints module.

"Mixing AI into my Schema.org Blueprints modules" will be my working title for next year's DrupalCon session. I have a year to work on the code and content while AI products and integrations will continue learning and improving exponentially.

Off the top of my head, I need to explore:

• Extending the existing AI agents used to generate content types and fields in Drupal to leverage Schema.org types, properties, and relationships.
• Providing tools to extract and suggest the appropriate data to populate Schema.org properties.
• Explore improving data migrations to a Schema.org-based content module by massaging and standardizing unstructured information.

There is a lot for me to explore, and I urge everyone to start a similar exploration in their day to work and projects.

The thought leaders in the Drupal community have been experimenting with integrating AI into Drupal's module ecosystem. For example, Drupal CMS provides OOTB must-have features like image alt tag generation using AI, which most websites want and need. As developers, we can look at the successful use of AI in Drupal CMS to extrapolate endless possibilities as long as you ask an AI the right questions with the correct prompts.

This post begins my exploration of using AI daily. I've used scary words like manifesto and layoffs; change is scary, especially when it is so fast, and some things are out of control; what is in our control is our response.

I titled this post a manifesto; it seems appropriate to quote "Viktor Frankl" to better iterate the reality we face and how we can adapt to it. For the record, no AI could replicate his observations' importance, tone, and brilliance.

The best response to the AI shift is to understand, leverage, explore, and use it smartly and openly, which is happening in the Drupal community.

Thank you for inspiring and thank you for listening.