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How AI is Reshaping R&D at Wix: A Journey, Not Just an Upgrade


AI R&D at Wix

The AI era is no longer a distant horizon - it’s here, reshaping how we build, design, and collaborate. At Wix, we’re not just keeping pace with this shift, we’re actively rethinking how research and development should look in an AI-first world.


This is more than a tech upgrade. It’s a mindset change.


We’ve launched the AI in R&D initiative not as a buzzword, but as a focused, company-wide effort to explore how artificial intelligence can genuinely enhance our workflows, decision-making, and developer experience. From engineering and product to UX and content, we’re aligning forces to rethink our entire development pipeline - from idea to impact.


Why This Matters

Imagine showing up to a race with your legs tied. That’s what it feels like trying to build modern software without AI assistance. The stakes are clear: teams that embrace AI can move faster, build smarter, and offer better experiences. Those who don’t? They risk falling behind.


This isn’t about replacing developers. It’s about empowering them - to focus on what matters, automate the rest, and navigate complexity with confidence. That requires not only tools, but trust, understanding, and a new set of shared practices.


The Real Challenges

It’s easy to say "let’s use AI". It’s much harder to integrate it meaningfully.


AI is evolving fast. Models, protocols, and tools change weekly. Just staying on top of things like Model Context Protocols (MCP) - which govern how AI interprets context - and ensuring our Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) support these capabilities is a challenge on its own.


We also can’t ignore the challenging reality of tech work: maintaining legacy systems, fixing bugs, and updating services. Can AI help there too? That’s part of what we’re figuring out.


And finally - education. Many devs didn’t grow up with LLMs and prompt engineering. We need to bridge that gap through hands-on learning, smart tooling, and internal culture shifts.


How We’re Doing It: The Four Pillars

At Wix Engineering we have made a strategic decision to transform our organization to be AI first, and to do a mind shift to leverage AI in everything we do by building the correct tooling, support functions and confidence.


To turn this vision into action, we’ve built the initiative on four key pillars:


1. Architecture & Infrastructure - Creating strong ecosystems We’re laying the foundations to ensure our AI integration is future-ready. That includes MCP integration through MCP hubs and gateways, working on implementing A2A flows in a standardized way and creating gradual rollout mechanisms to expose changes in prompt that affect users (we believe a prompt change is similar to an API change, more on that in a different post in the future).


2. Education - Building knowledge and trust AI can’t be a black box. We’re investing in upskilling our teams - explaining how LLMs work, what “AI as a product” actually means, and how to make the most of these tools inside our own architecture. The agenda is to make our developer understand AI through its finer details, so that when we create scaled systems, we take into consideration the capabilities and limitations of AI.


3. Online Development - Developer Centric This relates to the part of our workflow where a developer is working on active development and is interacting with various agents across the system. We want to be in a place where our flows for generating code are automated and the developers are reviewing the said changes with assisting tools.


4. Offline Operations - Production Centric Once development is done, and the code is in production, a whole new set of responsibilities become a part of the day to day work for our R&D teams. Monitoring, migrations to new tech stacks, code reviews and bug fixes can be delegated to various agents and reviewed by the production artifact owners.


Wrapping It Up 

The AI in R&D initiative isn’t just a project - it’s a mindset shift. 

This initiative is not about short-term wins. It’s about preparing for a long-term transformation - one where AI becomes a natural, trusted part of how we think, work, and grow as a company.


We’re still in the early chapters. But the intent is clear: to build a future where developers feel supercharged, not sidelined. Where AI isn’t just another tool, but a partner in building great products. Wix is ready to make that leap - not just to adapt, but to lead.


It's our way of asking tough questions, testing new ideas, and learning together how AI can actually make our work better. This is a team effort. It’s about developers, product managers, designers, and content folks all leaning into the unknown - figuring out what works, what doesn’t, and how we build smarter from here. 


We know the landscape is changing fast. But with the right tools, shared learning, and a bit of courage, we believe Wix won’t just keep up - we’ll help shape what comes next. We’re excited for the road ahead. And we’re just getting started.


This is just the first post in a series of articles where we’ll share examples and demos of workflows that integrate AI, case studies of tool usage and best practices, real-life feedback from our developers and a real discussion on how this mindset shift is already impacting our product. Stay tuned.


 

This post was written by Asaf Yonay

 

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