#221 – Rahul Bansal on Using AI Everywhere at rtCamp

Transcript

Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case using AI everywhere at rtCamp.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast, and you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you or your idea featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox? And use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Rahul Bansal. Rahul has a long and accomplished history in the WordPress ecosystem. As the founder and CEO of rtCamp, a company he started 17 years ago, he’s led his agency through the rapidly changing landscape of the web, helping enterprise clients such as Google, Fortune 500 companies, and major publishers solve complex problems with innovative WordPress based solutions.

rtCamp specialises in everything from large scale website builds, to more bespoke projects like Chrome extensions and SaaS connectors, and has grown to a team of hundreds over the years.

Today’s episode takes a deep dive into Raul’s recent talk at WordCamp Asia, which focused on what it will take to launch and scale an enterprise WordPress agency in the future.

The conversation focused on real, hard won, lessons from rtCamp’s journey, but also how rapidly the playbook is changing with advances in technology, particularly the explosion of AI tools and workflows.

We discuss Rahul’s philosophy around hiring, namely building a team of people whose strengths complement each other rather than just replicating your own skillset. This approach has allowed rtCamp to adapt to new challenges, fill gaps in expertise, and whether major industry changes.

We then explore how this idea of complimentary sets can also apply to choosing the right kinds of clients, those who value your expertise because they need what you offer, rather than simply hiring somebody who does what they already know.

A theme that emerged in the conversation was specialisation. Rahul outlines how, whereas rtCamp’s earliest differentiator was a simple focus on WordPress, when virtually nobody else in India was, today’s agencies must drill down much further to stand out choosing niches within niches, such as WooCommerce, or payment gateway integrations, and becoming recognised experts in those areas in order to thrive in a much more crowded field.

Towards the end of the episode, the discussion turns to what might be the most significant topic for agencies today, artificial intelligence. Rahul describes how recent advances in AI have not only altered his agency’s practises, but given them a firm mandate. If something in rtCamp can be done by AI it will be.

We talk about how AI is being leveraged inside rtCamp to automate and optimise everything from sales and proposal writing to project management, and even technical proof of concept builds. With a unified platform for all business processes, the agency is now able to significantly reduce costs, speed up delivery, and focus on higher value consulting and creativity, reshaping roles and team composition as a result.

If you’re interested in what it takes to stand out and succeed in the evolving world of enterprise WordPress agencies, how to confront uncertainty with both optimism and realism, and how AI can become not just a bolt-on feature, but the operational backbone of your business, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so without further delay, I bring you Rahul Bansal.

I am joined on the podcast by Rahul Bansal. Hello, Rahul.

Rahul Bansal: Hello Nathan. Thanks for having me here.

Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome. Rahul and I were both at WordCamp Asia and that is going to be the main focus of the podcast today. We’re going to be talking about agencies, growth in agencies, and then probably delving into AI a little bit at the end because of a recent announcement that came out of rtCamp, which is the company that Rahul founded many years ago.

In order to, I suppose, lend credibility to a conversation about agency work, would you mind Rahul, just introducing yourself and tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do in WordPress, and maybe give us a few little interesting facts about rtCamp and what you do over there.

Rahul Bansal: So I’m, as you mentioned, founder and CEO of rtCamp. We started this 17 years ago. We primarily help large enterprise client, sometimes we build websites for their marketing team, which is the most common use case of WordPress. But at the same time, we help large tech companies like Google communicate better with the WordPress ecosystem for their offering. Like sometimes we build products that includes neither thing, neither plugin, but something like Chrome extension. For large companies sometimes we build like SaaS connectors for technology companies.

Yeah, so we work with, like a big companies really Fortune 500, and the idea is to deliver something related to WordPress in one form or another form.

Nathan Wrigley: If you go to the rtCamp website, you can probably Google it I would’ve imagined, then you’ll be able to get some impression of what the company is like.

I think last time we spoke you were into the sort of 200 employees level. I’m not sure if those numbers have gone up or down or what have you. But you get an impression of how large it is. And one of the interesting things that I spotted during my time at WordCamp Asia was just how vibrant the community, the WordPress community is. So maybe we’ll get into that a little bit as well.

I’m going to concentrate to begin with on the presentation that you gave at WordCamp Asia. If you would like to see that, wordpress.tv will have a video. And if the video is already available, I will link to it in the show notes. But the presentation that Rahul gave was entitled, how to Start an Enterprise WordPress Agency in 2026. And I’ll just read the blurb that goes with it because it was fairly short and easy to manage.

Building a WordPress agency business for large enterprises. In this talk, I’ll share the story of how rtCamp grew from a small WordPress shop into a globally recognised enterprise agency, trusted by Fortune 500 companies and major publishers. If you’re starting an agency today or looking to move up market in 2026, this session will give you a realistic roadmap building on real lessons from my personal experience.

So I suppose what I’m going to do at the beginning, Rahul, if it’s all right with you, is just ask you to tell us some of the bits and pieces that you mentioned during that. Some of the advice that you would give an agency owner beginning in 2026.

Rahul Bansal: Yeah. So first, like I deviated a little bit from the blurb because when I applied this talk I had a different frame of mind that, hey, I’m going to do this. And then as I was preparing the talk, and in during those months, especially like last few months, the AI has reshaped everything. And then I realised that a lot of what worked for rtCamp won’t work even for rtCamp if I start again today.

Rather than making it as a nice story about what worked for us, I lean more towards practical advice, and that’s where the essence remained. But I focus more on the 2026 part, because when we started, it was 2006. The first time when I used WordPress was 2006. rtCamp started in 2009. 20 years is a big time. And then at the end of this 20th year, like we are going through this AI led change.

So a lot of things that worked for me won’t work anymore. And that is how I restructured my talk to take enough from our history, enough from our learnings, what worked for us.

The way we hire is very different. And after the talk, if that one line that stick with the audience, that many people told me that the hire your complementary set was the most different idea. And it’s timeless idea. It’s relevant in AI world also.

So the idea was basically that we have this bias that when we try to scale, like basically when we go from freelancing to agency business, the idea of building a business, we try to find people like us. But my idea was that we should initially, especially, we should find people who are opposite of us. Like I was good at engineering, bad at sales, so my co-founder is sales heavy. My English was not good. His English was very polished.

So I literally listed down my weakness and found people who were opposite of me. Even interesting part was that, to the few initial hires I asked the questions, whose answer I had no idea whether they’re saying right or wrong.

So that was the most interesting idea and I think that’s still relevant today. I will do exactly same thing if I have to start building a new agency. I will build in WordPress, build in AI, any kind of business I will, my initial few hires will all together will cover each other’s weaknesses.

It’s at certain scale then you need to replicate, like, you need 50 engineers, you need 20 React engineers, you need five people who can write same proposal. That comes much later. But starting is all about finding your complementary set. And this was inspired by a set theory from math class that I attended in when I was like some 12-year-old. That stuck around before the life. And that is what I put in this talk as a biggest lesson we learned and that worked.

The second most specific thing that I would say, practical advice, like that was more about hiring advice, but that is not only hiring address, that is, I advise in many walks of life applicable.

When you’re looking for your client, you have to look for complimentary set there as well. Because you are trying to sell to agencies like yours, your margins gets hit a lot. You need to find people who do not understand WordPress at all because then, that is why your expertise become more important and premium for them, because they need to depend on you. They value you more. You are not commoditised for them.

So that hiring your complementary set works across the board. But then the most specific advice I gave that I didn’t follow myself, I would say. Actually there was nothing to follow that. When I started WordPress was just a blogging platform. There was custom post type were not yet part of WordPress Core. Everybody was just building blogs. We were playing around themes, and the race was to make our blog look unique. The metric usually was like traffic and how many email subscribers you got.

So there was no niche to pick. Like, that was the only thing WordPress was doing. And after post type, people started building a lot more than WordPress. Actually people started pushing WordPress earlier, and as a result of that, WordPress created those APIs to make it easy to extend WordPress beyond blogging platform.

But today, in 2026, there is so many things happening. And if you’re starting new and you do what rtCamp did on day one, like, hey, we are WordPress agency. That is not going to work.

It worked for us 20 years back because we were like, probably only one in India at that time who said at that time that we will be only taking WordPress project. Because India was a land of outsourcing. Like in supply chain, it was like a, it’s like a Chinese manufacturer saying that, hey, we are only going to assemble if you are building for iPhone. So it’s like, hey, we are only going to write PHP if it is going to end up as a WordPress theme or plugin. We are not going to do what was Cake PHP project at that time. We are not going to write custom PHP script.

So in a way we picked the whole WordPress as a niche among the largest set of choices available to us. But if your largest set of choices was building a iOS company, like mobile app company. Mobile app was big because with the introduction of iPhone, there was a sudden shift and huge demand for iOS apps, and we haven’t built one till 17 years. Like literally we built our first iOS app, public iOS app last month.

That time we were like, well, we are going to only do WordPress. So now that advice translate into, pick a niche within WordPress because WordPress itself is the web now. That time, WordPress was very small. Now you can choose e-commerce. Within e-commerce then you can probably pick WooCommerce. Within WooCommerce then probably you can pick like, depending on your market, payment gateway specialisation, ERPs, back office specialisation, subscription based businesses.

Start by picking a niche as small as possible and then go bottoms up, rather than starting with everything. So that was the key takeaway of my session, I would say that. Pick a niche, position yourself as a expert in the niche. Don’t just say that, hey, we build WooCommerce store, or we build WordPress site.

Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Yeah, I’ve got all of that. So firstly, hiring. That’s an interesting one. Hire people that are different from you. I was imagining when you were saying that, I wonder how long you can do that, because you can’t, eventually, you have a company of a hundred people and all of them are not the same as you. Eventually it must be nice to find somebody who’s a little bit like you.

But then also you mentioned picking clients who will trust your expertise, I think is a good way of describing that. Because they themselves are perhaps not expert within that WordPress platform.

And now of course, moving forwards, what worked for you in terms of being a WordPress agency 17 odd years ago, that was, as it turns out, really successful. But now you are going to be amongst tens of thousands in India alone, if all you say is that you are a WordPress agency. So you need to go a little bit more specialised and niche down.

I wonder, Rahul, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s always easy to look back and sort of see for example, from my perspective, I see rtCamp as an entirely successful enterprise. You know, you began all those years ago, and decisions were made and you grew and you grew and you grew and you grew, and now we are where you are now. Committing a lot to WordPress with incredible growth and a really amazing agency on your hands.

But I’m just wondering, looking back, with the benefit of hindsight, were there any moments where you made some decisions where you were very nervous about how it was going to be?

So for example, one of those could be WordPress. There was no writing on the wall that said WordPress will be the successful CMS. That really could have gone either way. It could have been Drupal, it could have been something that some kid in a basement created. So I’m just wondering, are there moments when you look back and you think to yourself, gosh, I am so glad that we did that random choice than all the others that we could have made?

Rahul Bansal: Yep. So it’s a reality that, one of the co-founders we lost, within the first year of company formation was because, I refused to add Joomla to our offering. And Joomla I think was market leader at that time when we started. So we were like more like engineers, like some were good at sales, some were good at communication, but we were all from the same kind of school, like we didn’t know if there was any survey existed.

So we didn’t back by any data. The only reason we chose to stay with WordPress or build this agency with WordPress because we were using WordPress. So rtCamp for the most part, people missed that. So rtCamp was not started as an agency. rtCamp was basically a media company, a blog network. And that blog network was running on WordPress. As a technology blogger. It’s like just imagine WP Beginners, like that is more relevant example.

So by the way, we, and WP Beginner were operating at the same time, that’s the power of niche. Like say I chose to focus on WordPress and say very very well. And my technical blog was everything like from iPhone to Windows operating system to Mac OS update to web APIs, to HTTP2. Whatever, like it was a larger technology blog So we were more like a stripped down version of TechCrunch rather than picking a niche. And Syed picked this WordPress as a niche.

Both were contemporaries in that same era. Now just imagine Syed in those days I started an agency. So we were using WordPress, we needed to stand out because, social network or blogging or web was still a fancy place. Like minimalism wasn’t the trend. It was how much you can push, like how you can make your website look different without using Flash. That was the coolest thing. Like how much you can push jQuery, how advanced CSS you can write. So all those things led to we customising our WordPress a lot.

Another thing that worked in our part was, our blog was one of the biggest in India. Globally also, it had good traffic. In fact, it had so much traffic that one of the most Googled keyword in my name was Rahul Bansal, how much money this guy make. Like that was the first question I used to get asked because traffic was insane. We used to get a lot of traffic.

That led us to writing nice WordPress code. In early days, like especially when I was freelancer, I had to write amazing WordPress code that will scale and host it in a way that it will also scale. So not only WordPress, we choose Nginx before it become a norm. Like before there was. anybody started any WordPress managed hosting company. We managed to scale WordPress at a very high level.

And so now we, are this famous blog running on WordPress handling so much traffic, on Linode’s $10 something plan. Customising it. So we got this natural market. We got initial customers were technically our competitors, like other tech bloggers. It’s like TechCrunch hiring Mashable to customise their blog So something like, because Mashable has a tech team. So that was at early story of rtCamp.

And then we realised that we are making more money and faster money via customising WordPress. So we started cutting down on our editorials. And then, slowly, slowly like the business has shifted from, being a blogging agency, to WordPress custom development agency. That’s why we chose WordPress.

And that has been the principle since then, like we only sell what we use. That was the reason we didn’t, so it wasn’t any ideological decision. So the ideology is at open source level. So rtCamp is committed to providing open source solution to its client from day one.

Joomla tick that box. But Joomla didn’t tick the box that we use Joomla. We don’t use Joomla. There was no reason for us to have our blog running on WordPress and website running on Joomla, and that’s why we stick around WordPress when there was no data, no trend. And I think in hindsight it was just luck. I would say like it could have backfired.

Nathan Wrigley: Well, okay, I really like this story. Firstly, I like the fact that you are identifying luck as a component, because I think too often when you listen to people who have had success, they sort of chart this narrative of how brilliant the decisions were along the journey and how impeccable, you know, we did this and then we did this, and then we did this, and then we did this. But never a nod to luck.

And of course, with the benefit of hindsight, we did this, we did this, we did this does lead to where you are now. But I really enjoy it when founders and people have that confession in them. Yeah, there was a bit of luck.

But also, and we’ll get onto this in a minute, because a big part of what you are about to do, or have recently done with your business kind of leans into what you’ve just been saying.

It sounds like you were led by what was in front of you, if you know what I mean? It doesn’t sound like there was a great big, okay, by 2016 or 2026, we want to be here. It was more like, okay, this is where we’re at now. These are the things that are coming to us. Okay, looks like WordPress, not only are we using it, but it looks like people want us to help them to use it. Well, let’s go there then. Let’s put the blogging to one side and let’s become more of a, I don’t know, a technical helper for you and your website.

So there’s this sort of lucky piece, but also the willingness to steer into favourable winds, if you know what I mean? I love that story. Thank you very much for that. I also admire your humility in all of that. That’s lovely.

So the next thing then, I suppose that I want to get into is some change in the landscape at the moment. And again, this maps to what you were just saying about move where the wind takes you. We all know that AI is a thing. You cannot have missed that. But I think a lot of people are taking nervous steps into their business and how they’re doing things with AI and maybe biting off a little bit here with AI and leaving the rest as it is, and biting off another chunk here, and leaving the rest as it is and slowly moving into AI.

You have a very different approach. And I will link in the show notes to a blog post on the rtCamp website, which I read several weeks ago. I’ve got to say, I was a little bit, not surprised, that’s the wrong word, but it was written in such a way that I thought, gosh, now that’s interesting.

Because in it you painted the case that rtCamp in the future is going to do AI everywhere. And I know we hear that all the time. You know, we’re going to use AI here, and we’re going to use AI there. You have painted your colours on the mast, and literally, I think you said, if it can be done with AI, it will be done with AI. There will be no stone left unturned.

Okay. Firstly, why? Why have you got that approach? What’s the reason? Now, I’m sure it’s fairly obvious, but lay it out for us anyway.

Rahul Bansal: Yeah. So I don’t know from where it comes, anytime I see things going south across industry like COVID or, like AI, like everybody was gloomy, my brain kind of think of opposite. So in my brain, I’m not building, I’m actually imagining an AI only agency with humans required to probably feel capture. That’s how my brain works. So it’s like AI first.

Then again, like WordPress, so I have been lucky more than once in my life. So before this AI came, this famous saying by Steve Jobs like you can only connect the dots looking backward. Three to four years ago, riding on the digital boom, we survived the COVID, like all agencies grew. rtCamp grew a lot more, and a lot faster in very short span of time. And to manage this humongous workforce, we needed to refactor a lot internal tooling, softwares, processes, to the point that we have internally codified our mission that we want to build McDonald’s of consulting business, inspired by that movie Founder. That was also part of my talk at WorkCamp Asia.

And in fact, I had somebody to literally a complimentary set example. I know we want to build this, but I don’t have that kind of mental model. So that’s the brief I give to our chief delivery officer that you have to give me this. McDonald’s of agency business.

We start thinking of every process that we can repeat, and we realised that we need to take control of our software stack. And we ended up finding something, in open source. That’s, I would say truly a spiritually aligned to the WordPress ecosystem called Frappe ERPNext, which handle our accounting, payroll, project management, CRM. So many business processes in one single source of truth, like single source of truth for so many things. Earlier it was all siloed data.

So this was started with a different intent, to scale rtCamp, 2000 people, 5,000 people, 10,000 people, because that was a business model then. Agencies growth with capacity. You want to sell more, you need to hire more. Basically agencies growth was limited by on one dimension, the inventory, human inventory you can have. So we started implementing this open source back office software automation with the idea that we will own, central piece of our operating system of connecting, getting thousands of people working together.

Then AI happened, and then we realised we don’t need to hire those many people anymore. Year on year, we moved from 200 to 250, but I think next 50 will be very slow. Because, now we are no longer aiming to sell, or hire people. But as luck would’ve been, we ended up creating this system of record, which is unified and cleaned. When we think of a client or a project or a human. All aspect of their metadata is available in a single system.

So that is why we can leverage AI more than a company, agency to agency. For agencies using say, Jira for project management. QuickBook for accounting, some other software. If their operations is scattered across 6, 7 software, we have leverage over them. Not only we are paying very less because all our software is open source. The data is first party. Like sitting duck there to query in any way we can. We are not limited by SaaS providers, enterprise plan or this AI capability.

So that is where we realised that we can take this huge bet on AI where we can now build a lot more, in a lot less time using AI across the board. And if you look at a business like not just WordPress business, when you buy something, like you buy a car from a car company. You are actually paying for everything that company does, advertising, researching on the EV technologies, hiring a brand ambassador to put billboard, sponsoring F1. Anything that company does. every penny they spend on their business, the customer ends up paying it.

So we thought like now we have a single stack, which technically takes care of 70 to 80% critical nature of our business operations. From when the lead enters the CRM, the project management, time entry, people’s new management, everything is linked. Everything is beautifully linked in a single unified interface and database. So why don’t we just use AI to cut down the cost.

Because now we cannot charge by hours, we can try, but, it’s not making sense anymore for clients. They want us to commit to fix output bid. Now when we say, hey, we can migrate this thing for 100k, or we can build this website for half million dollars. So those numbers, traditionally, and actually all the time will include all the operation cost. Like my salary. I’m not doing any coding work, but my salary will be eventually paid by all the clients. Electricity bill that is also going to be paid by all the client.

So we thought like rather than just thinking AI to build a website, let’s use AI to bring our operational costs dramatically down. Because we have single source of truth for maximum data we have, and that is where we went all AI in. Now it’s like we can submit a proposal in one third of the time.

In old days we used to build PPTs. Now we vibe code a WordPress demo site and attach it to the proposal. Hey is this something that you want? Not just the screenshot, not just the Figma, like we are actually building Playground, like websites, and launching them and sharing those links to the client. Go play with it. We are even trying to copy the design systems if they’re migrating. So migration is a big category of work we do.

So that is what we mean by going AI ready. So we are leveraging AI to reduce the cost of sale, increase probability of winning the project by pitching them something. And then while estimating the effort, like let’s say we would traditionally say, oh, this might cost us a thousand hours. Now we blindly said Make it 30% less, as if it will be done in 700 hours and it will be, sometimes it backfires.

But then on some project it’ll be 500 hours. In some project it’ll be 900 hours, but average will come back to 700 hours. Then again, the idea is we have a central operating system, which gives us, like bird’s eye view of how healthy our projects education are. Are we getting returns on our AI engagement? And all this is possible because few years back we took a bet in different direction.

Like we choose WordPress because we wanted to be a better media agencies, and that was what media agencies were doing in the early days. But we ended up building an agency business with the WordPress. Likewise we choose this Frappe ERPNext software. To operationalise our back office. But now it is starting out to be our advantage point in this areas like we are able to do AI a lot more. In the end, it’s all about bringing the cost down at certain quality. You have to keep the quality up, and just make it more affordable. If that is not. as a business you cannot do that with AI, then something is wrong.

So AI is not about building something new. I have another approach. So if you’re an agency people are hiring you to move things from A to B, like you are the movers and packers of internet. I put crudely, what rtCamp does. We move things, like a shipping company who moves your house, remove you from Sitecore to WordSpace.

And that’s still big part of our business. We don’t have to reinvent or reimagine different experiences all the time. Sometimes we have to just do what everybody’s doing, the boring part. Put AI there to make it efficient, more cost effective. And if you do that, that means more people wanting to shift to new house. Again, a different approach. People think that they need to build something out of the world to benefit from this AI way.

My idea is that pick a boring thing and make it so affordable that people who were sitting on the fence, just imagine travel, Middle East travel. Like this is a very actually a bad example, might sound inhuman, but, say like X number of people wanted to experience Dubai as a destination, but let’s say, it was beyond their budget. For some even unfortunately now suddenly that comes within their budget, they will be able to do that.

People wanted to move to WordPress Initially, agencies were quoting a hundred thousand dollars for that big shift. Now if you can, suddenly you can do it in 50k a lot more people will shift. So, you don’t have to do things like out of the world thing. You don’t have to invent new. You have to sometimes just make existing problem more efficient to solve.

And it was not always about money, especially in large client. It was not always about 100k versus 50k versus half million versus 1 million. It was about timeline. It’s like you are refurbishing your home and it is going to take three month, then it’s a different mental model, like to put up yourself in a hotel or a second home for three months. If a magically a new company appears and hey, we can refurbish your home overnight. You don’t mind checking into hotel for one night. And that is where I feel like this WordPress will be net gain because of AI. Agencies has to be optimistic, and think differently to gain from AI.

Like, what people are doing is everybody’s trying to act like a ChatGPT, OpenAI, it’s their job to invent AI algorithm. We are agency. Our job is to apply AI, not invent AI. We don’t have to think of what is Opus 4.8 will do. Let cloud engineers think of that.

So we need to understand we are AI’s consumers or consultant, and that is where some people are getting it wrong by vibe coding things that they’re not able to sell to anyone. Then they will cry that, hey, six months later they will realise they built stuff nobody bought. Now they don’t have money to pay AI bills, or their developer salaries and then they will try that, hey, AI took over job, AI killed our business. No, think what existing problems we can solve with AI cheaply, efficiently, with better quality. And a lot of work is there to be done.

Nathan Wrigley: There’s a lot in there, but one of the things that I’m taking out is. So prior to AI coming along and demonstrating to us all what it could do, which by the way didn’t kind of happen overnight, although it feels like it did, there was a sort of, a year in which we could suddenly see, oh boy, it’s getting much more performant and much more interesting. But prior to that, it sounds like post COVID, you kind of inspected your business and were thinking, okay, how can we refine everything that we’ve got in the business and how can we put it all into this one system?

And again, with the benefit of hindsight, and I’m maybe going to use the word luck, maybe that’s not the right word. You, having done that work, then meant that when AI did come along, you weren’t trying to link up four or five or six or ten different things. You had this one source of truth. Which meant that you could cut waste, for want of a better word. You know, waste could be measured in terms of dollars or it could be measured in terms of time or it, whatever it may be.

You happened to be in that place because you’d done that preparatory work, not necessarily knowing that AI was going to come along and make all of this fun stuff possible. But with the benefit of hindsight, that’s exactly what it did.

And it’s curious, you said 70 or 80% of the business could be streamlined in that way. And I’m so staggered by that number. I thought you’d be in the kind of, I don’t know, 20, 30% or something like that. But a full 70 to 80%. So does that mean 70 to 80% of the things available, or do you mean that you were able to cut 70 to 80% of the cost or the time? Because I wasn’t sure which 70 or 80% you were meaning.

Rahul Bansal: It meant different things. First like, as I mentioned that we are not thinking AI adds just something to sell, but something to consume first. Because, again, dog fooding principle. We managed to sell WordPress better because we were a blog network. That’s why we could understood publishers better. We got into this Frappe ERPNext consulting because we built our backend with it. Now before we make any promise with AI, we have to be net gainer with the AI. And we believe that our internally, we will be.

So there are two parts, actual cost of building something and the meta cost. Like cost of sale, like the writing proposal. marketing costs, like case studies, going to even preparing for articles. Non build cost is definitely, we are able to bring, I would say it’s already half, but it’ll be, further down. I will give you a very simple example.

Like in early days is when somebody used to submit rtCamps form, inquiry form, a human, would manually check like, Hey, what is the domain name of this email id? Are they on LinkedIn? Some 30 minutes and then they will write a note hey, this looks like a good quality lead. We are fortunate that we get a lot of inbound inquiries, so we had to have prioritise, like which leads we are going to respond first.

Now, as soon as somebody submits a form an AI integration does that, within minutes. And the notes are much more details, it creates action items. Across like WordPress our Frappe CRM, our Slack, everything runs like a clockwork, and we don’t need a human. So that, junior human job is definitely gone. So in sales team, we used to have like this entry level job. That is no longer there. Some jobs are actually going to get vanished. So now going on a call, meeting notes, a lot of those things are getting automated. So the cost of sale has dramatically came down.

What is the effect? Like, say we can now assume flat 10% discount compared to earlier pricing when we are thinking of a migration project. Like, let’s say, in early days, we used to think like hey, anybody wanting to migrate from Adobe Experience Manager? We must assume that they need to pay us 100k. On the initial call, we can say, hey, that would probably cost something like minimum 50,000 dollars.

The minimums, the starting numbers has came down because we need less energy to have those pre-sales conversations. Less number of minutes of ours spent building those demos. Very fast discovery. Data mapping sometimes happens in minutes. In fact we did one 10 days to prepare this migration literally in five days, that was unthinkable. And that included data migration, QA testing, like automation testing where somebody built a bought in panel, which would randomly open a Zendesk ticket and verify that all metadata and deploys are migrated into new health desk system, all within five days.

This is where I have been saying that the cost of building custom solutions will fail. For like so low, like it’s 60, 70, 58. Like definitely more than half. It’ll be reduced by half more. People will buy custom solutions. So agencies are going to grow from here in just these one or two years. Because agencies, to price something upfront, we need consistencies. Like I’m running an airline and if my jet fuel is my biggest cost, and that is out of my control. Then how do I price my tickets? That’s AI hallucination, which is, I would say the jet fuel version of aviation industry.

Something happens in Middle East and fuel prices goes up. A war starts. So now when AI hallucinates so it’s like what we are internally tracking, or what we call as a KPI or internal metric is that, worst case, AI gains, that’s already 20%. Best case is more than 90%. In some cases it’s literally 90%. This range will keep compressing and that’s what I think 70% is my expectation in two years. We will have that maturity that, the build time will fall by 70%. That means. the client companies will hire more agencies to do more work.

WordPress will emerge as a winner, not only for its ecosystem, but its ability to expose structured data without any proprietary walls. AI was so fast that only an open source can keep up with it. In fact, we are seeing more migration inquiries with with the AI boom.

Nathan Wrigley: Oh, interesting. I was going to ask a sort of follow up question. Do you think that you, so you were mentioning, how to describe it, a rising tide carries all boats, or you certainly implied that the pie is getting bigger, if you know what I mean? So you are getting more phone calls, more migrations, more work, and you can obviously do that more affordably. And because you can pass on some of those savings to the clients, the price point lowers and so you get more inquiries because there’s this virtuous cycle of price going down, but quality staying the same or getting better.

I wonder if you, given your success in the past, I wonder if that transition will be easier for you, because the phone is already ringing, than it would be for somebody who was beginning in 2026? Because we all know when you begin, getting the phone to ring is probably the hardest thing. You know, getting those first 5, 10, 15 reliable clients, whatever it is that makes you work.

I wonder if you are in a uniquely good position, having a history of clients, a roster of clients that will come back to you. And also just being famous, for want of a better word, in the WordPress space, for doing the kind of things that you do. I wonder just what your thoughts are on that.

Rahul Bansal: They’re both pros and cons. The only con for rtCamp is that our business model, a big part of what’s traditional like setting our flagship revenue stream for last 8 to 10 years was staffing solutions. We used to provide engineers, sometimes to other agencies, sometimes to publishers. So usually they used to have the leadership layer with them. We were more of executors, and if AI within the IT industry, the first casualty of AI revolution was that people who code, or people who can only code but cannot think. But luckily our hiring was very different.

While it is taking time, so as I said, net headcount addition has been slowed down. I think this is probably first time rtCamp’s career site doesn’t have any engineering opening. If we would’ve been like a publicly listed or like a shareholder owned company, we might have got mandate to fire a hundred people right now, because we have already gained by, so much that, our one third of our WordPress engineers are currently out of work when the work is rising.

Because traditionally, when we needed eight people, now we were able to do in four people. But now we are using this. We have our own challenges, going from one kind of business to another kind of business model. The switch is causing some friction, but we are communicating it openly. We are giving people like more freedom. You give us ideas like which part of the entire business equation you can optimise. Is it editorial experience, is it migration cost? Is it data mapping, visual testing? So people are constantly building.

So change is there. Change is scary. It is scary for us also because we don’t want to fire people. We don’t want to lay off people. We want to return this team. From here onwards, we don’t see we are hiring more engineers for at least a year, because we have enough of them. But, we are so optimistic about this WordPress growth and the pie getting bigger.

We are hiring more sales and marketing team. Two days back I was telling like traditionally, we had this 90 to 10% ratio, like in 200 people, our headcount team, we would have 20 people. That would be, we can call as a sales and marketing department, I think next 50 hires will be only sales and marketing.

Nathan Wrigley: Oh, that’s a big skew, isn’t it? So you’ll go to more like 30% marketing as opposed to 10% marketing.

Rahul Bansal: Yeah sales and marketing. By the way, when we say sales, sales in rtCamp means slightly different. It’s more of a initial consulting, basically making those solid promise, which can be backed by engineering, not over promising. So our sales team needs are more like a WordPress consultant, but we have a category within rtCamp which we call Growth Engineers, who are some of our best coders. But rather than writing code, they go on the first client call and make promises on behalf of WordPress which are practical, feasible, and real.

That is what our internship look like, because coding is race to bottom. Eventually the cost of building will shrink to the point that you don’t need many, you won’t need many traditional developers in any agency. You will need people who can imagine what needs to be built. There might be 20 different ways and which way this project should be executed. That prompt engineering, context in engineering.

So the value is shifting and it’s definitely shifting away from people who can only code. That is why, probably from two years now, we might be at 300 people. Hundred of them will not be coding at all. But they will be prompting AI. They will be building vibe coded prototype in pre-sale stage to gain that customer confidence like early on that day. What you want is possible with the WordPress. It won’t cost that much. It’ll be given you fast enough that your life won’t be disrupted for many months, like your business operations won’t be disrupted for many months, so this is a thing

Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, nobody could deny that we’re in interesting times. I think a lot of people are very confused by what’s going on at the moment. You know, they’re trying to figure out a path. They’re trying to figure out how it affects their business. They’re probably in, I would imagine, quite a lot of cases, quite keen to stick to the ways that they’ve done it in the past. But certainly the picture that you’ve painted over at rtCamp is that you are aligning yourself with a very different future, kind of embracing AI, seeing where it can take you, trying to adapt your business. Being optimistic about it rather than pessimistic. Because I think there is quite a lot of pessimism around there at the moment. But seeing the opportunity and seizing it.

Absolutely fascinating. There was so much to unpack there. I feel like we could talk probably for another nine hours about this because it genuinely is never ending. I would love to prize back the curtain a little bit more. However, time allows only this much. So what an interesting conversation. Thank you very much, Rahul.

Just before we end, could you just tell us where we can find you online, should somebody want to, you know, maybe they’re experiencing a bit of anxiety of their own. Their agency is in a rudderless ship at the moment and they’re trying to figure it out. Where can people get in touch with you best?

Rahul Bansal: I am actually available on all social networks. I use LinkedIn least and email is most level way, I’m a bit old school there. But, yeah, Twitter. I check daily.

Nathan Wrigley: I will link to your bio in the show notes, but also, I will link to the presentation that you gave and any other bits and pieces that we discussed that I can find links for. I will mention those well. So head to wptaven.com, search for the episode with Rahul in it.

Thank you so much for chatting to me, and all I can say is all the best. I hope that all of the intuitions that you have turn out to bear fruit and be fruitful for you.

Thank so much for chatting to me today.

Rahul Bansal: Thank you Nathan.

On the podcast today we have Rahul Bansal.

Rahul has a long and accomplished history in the WordPress ecosystem. As the founder and CEO of rtCamp, a company he started 17 years ago, he’s led his agency through the rapidly changing landscape of the web, helping enterprise clients such as Google, Fortune 500 companies, and major publishers solve complex problems with innovative WordPress-based solutions. rtCamp specialises in everything from large-scale website builds to more bespoke projects like Chrome extensions and SaaS connectors, and has grown to a team of hundreds over the years.

Today’s episode takes a deep dive into Rahul’s recent talk at WordCamp Asia, which focused on what it will take to launch and scale an enterprise WordPress agency in the future. The conversation focused on real, hard-won lessons from rtCamp’s journey, but also on how rapidly the playbook is changing with advances in technology, particularly the explosion of AI tools and workflows.

We discuss Rahul’s philosophy around hiring, namely, building a team of people whose strengths complement each other, rather than just replicating your own skillset. This approach has allowed rtCamp to adapt to new challenges, fill gaps in expertise, and weather major industry changes.

We then explore how this idea of “complementary sets” can also apply to choosing the right kinds of clients, those who value your expertise because they need what you offer, rather than simply hiring someone who does what they already know.

A theme that emerged in the conversation was specialisation. Rahul outlines how, whereas rtCamp’s earliest differentiator was a simple focus on WordPress (when virtually no one else in India was), today’s agencies must drill down much further to stand out, choosing niches within niches, such as WooCommerce or payment gateway integrations, and becoming recognised experts in those areas in order to thrive in a much more crowded field.

Towards the end of the episode the discussion turns toward what might be the most significant topic for agencies today, artificial intelligence. Rahul described how recent advances in AI have not only altered his agency’s practices, but have given them a firm mandate, if something within rtCamp can be done by AI, it will be.

We talk about how AI is being leveraged inside rtCamp to automate and optimise everything from sales and proposal writing to project management and even technical proof-of-concept builds. With a unified platform for all business processes, the agency is now able to significantly reduce costs, speed up delivery, and focus on higher-value consulting and creativity, reshaping roles and team composition as a result.

If you’re interested in what it takes to stand out and succeed in the evolving world of enterprise WordPress agencies, how to confront uncertainty with both optimism and realism, and how AI can become not just a bolt-on feature but the operational backbone of your business, this episode is for you.

Useful links

rtCamp

Rahul’s presentation at WordCamp Asia 2026: How to start an enterprise WordPress agency in 2026

The same presentation on WordPress.tv

A year of reinvention as we turn 17

Frappe tools mentioned several times during the podcast

Rahul on X

Rahul on LinkedIn