How Wix Builds with AI, with Chief Architect Yoav Abrahami

Wix powers millions of websites worldwide. We spoke to Yoav Abrahami, their Chief Architect, to learn how his team is integrating AI into the company’s massive engineering org - from internal dev tools to the next generation of its website builder.

Here are some of the highlights from our conversation:

AI as a productivity multiplier, not a replacement

Yoav compares today’s AI tools to a junior developer: they can help the org move faster, but only if guided well.

“AI today is like having another junior developer working for you. You have to explain what you want - and it’ll make the same mistakes a junior developer would.”

Instead of chasing fully automated code generation, Wix treats AI as a force multiplier: useful for repetitive edits, refactors, and documentation - not for architectural decisions.

Yoav recommends builders to start by defining guardrails and context. Expose your internal APIs, schemas, and design systems so AI copilots can reason within your domain.

Building for developer velocity

Wix has over 100 engineers dedicated solely to improving developer velocity: optimizing build times, testing, and code generation. AI is now another layer in that stack.

“Developers are your most expensive and abundant resource. Any minute saved for them compounds across the whole org.”

Yoav thinks engineering leaders should measure where time is lost (builds, tests, onboarding) and deploy AI only where it directly saves developer time.

Experiment relentlessly, measure sentiment

Yoav’s team runs countless AI POCs across testing, monitoring, and code review - keeping what works and scrapping what doesn’t.

“Some ideas work, some don’t. The best metric is developer feedback.”

They combine hard metrics (time to fix bugs, ramp-up time) with soft ones (how engineers feel about using the tools). 

Track both quantitative and qualitative signals. Developer enthusiasm is often the earliest indicator of real productivity gains.

The real challenge: UX, not models

AI integration isn’t just technical, it’s experiential.

“The funny thing is, the hardest part isn’t the AI. It’s the UX. We’re basically back to 1980s interfaces - writing text, getting text back.”

Wix’s AI site-builder, Astro, took a year to design because the team spent a lot of time thinking deeply about the user experience design. 

This highlights a common theme across the conversations we’ve been having with engineering leaders for AI Speedrun. The companies that integrate AI the best focus on how users interact with AI, not just what model is plugged in.

Expect the hype cycle, and prepare for what follows

Yoav is clear-eyed about where we are in the curve:

“We’re in the middle of the code-generation hype. There will be disappointment, then we’ll find the real use cases.”

The companies that derive meaningful value will be the ones that treat AI like any other technology wave: experiment early, measure impact, and iterate through the dip.

The next economy: when AI becomes a distribution channel

Perhaps Yoav’s most prescient insight was about what comes after websites, and how the next distribution channel won’t be search or social, it’ll be AI chat interfaces.

“Search is a $100B economy. Social is another. But there’s no economy yet for AI -no way to spend $50M on AI that drives your business.”

Yoav’s observation aligns with the growth of AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization - where brands compete to be discovered on ChatGPT and Claude. 

As the web shifts from being human-readable to AI-readable, visibility won’t depend on backlinks or keywords but on how well your product, APIs, and documentation are structured for models to understand and retrieve. 

Final thoughts

Yoav’s philosophy is simple: velocity compounds.

“AI won’t solve all your problems - but if you’re not using it, you’re making a big mistake.”

For engineering leaders, that means keeping AI grounded in measurable gains: faster feedback loops, cleaner handoffs, and a better development flow. 

We had a really great time jamming with Yoav! You can catch our full conversation on YouTube, alongside our previous conversations with product and engineering leaders at Intercom, Monday.com, Vercel, and more.