Key Takeaways
Wix just announced the launch of a dedicated Wix app inside ChatGPT, allowing users to generate full Wix Harmony websites without leaving the chat interface. The past 12 months have been quite busy for the company, which has been actively integrating more easy-to-use tools into its platform for decades.
It’s another step closer to the low-code era we’re still in the beginning stages of. The collaboration allows users to not just build a website, but also add features like bookings, payments, and SEO tools either through their own doing or making edits conversationally.
“By adding another powerful entry point to Wix Harmony, we’re making it even easier for anyone to start, run and grow their online presence in the environments they already use every day,” said Shahar Talmi, GM of Developer Platform at Wix.
That much is true: Wix has always followed what the masses are asking for.
Builder Meets the Bot
Wix helped popularize the SaaS website builder model nearly two decades ago, building its reputation on simplifying the process of getting online. At that time, it meant drag-and-drop builders for people who didn’t know how to code. Today, it means generating a website from a prompt.
“With Wix Harmony we’ve redefined how people can build online, and now we’re extending that experience into ChatGPT,” Talmi said.
A look back about 15 years shows what the market expected from Wix at the time. One review described its drag-and-drop editor this way: “If I had to describe Wix’s unstructured editor, I would say: freedom.” Funny to read that now with a bit of hindsight.
OpenAI is not unlike Wix in the sense that it helped bring LLMs into the mainstream. They said the collaboration is an example of real-world AI usage.
“Wix is a great example of the kind of real-world value apps can bring into ChatGPT, helping users go from an idea to a live online presence all in one place,” said Sanj Bhayro from OpenAI.
Sam Altman, its CEO, has also suggested that conversational AI would eventually act as a gateway to digital services. In 2023, he told “Time” that users will be able to have “a fairly simple and short conversation with the model, and a huge amount of things get done on your behalf.”
It looks like everybody wants to join in on the fun, though, because Wix isn’t the first — nor will it be the last — to bring this kind of product to market. About a year and a half ago, fellow SaaSer Squarespace introduced Blueprint AI, which allows users to generate websites through a similar interface. Hostinger, a more traditional hosting provider, has also built its own AI website builder toolkit, Horizons.
It is all yet another chronicle of how the web continues to change before our very eyes.
