It’s 4 p.m. on Friday. The CRM manager at a $40M Shopify Plus brand wants to fire a 20-percent-off win-back push to 8,400 lapsed-cart subscribers before the weekend traffic peaks. In PushEngage 4.2.3, she opens her AI assistant, describes the campaign in one sentence, and watches it ship. Before 4.2.3, she opened Slack, pinged the contractor who builds her campaigns, found him offline, emailed her agency, and waited until Wednesday, losing the weekend’s recovered cart value to a 48-hour ticket queue.
The bottleneck on retention work is not strategy or budget. It is execution latency: the gap between a campaign decision and a notification firing. PushEngage 4.2.3 closes that gap by registering 23 abilities through the new WordPress Abilities API. Your AI assistant can now send pushes, build segments, query analytics, and tune your WooCommerce automations on your behalf, driven from a chat instead of a ticket.
This post walks through what’s in the release, the 23 abilities grouped by what they actually do, four prompts you can copy into your assistant tomorrow, the permission model, and how to turn it on.
What’s in PushEngage 4.2.3
The release ships three things. First, 23 abilities registered through the new WordPress Abilities API, the standard layer that lets WordPress sites expose their capabilities to external tools through one consistent protocol. Second, drop-in compatibility with the WP MCP Adapter, which translates those abilities into MCP calls any compatible AI assistant can consume. Third, verification against the WordPress 7.0 beta, so the PushEngage WordPress plugin keeps working when 7.0 ships stable.
In practice, that means any AI assistant that speaks MCP can now run your PushEngage admin work. Most popular MCP-capable assistants connect to WordPress either natively or through a desktop wrapper. You describe what you want in plain English. The assistant calls the ability. The work happens on your site.
The 23 abilities, grouped by what they actually do
Function names are not how a retention manager thinks. Here are the 23 abilities translated into six groups that match the work you actually do.
| Group | What it covers | Abilities |
|---|---|---|
| Send push notifications (4) | Fire a notification, look up the result, list past sends, check the site’s connection status. | send-notification, get-notification, list-notifications, get-connection-status |
| Build and target segments (4) | List segments and audience groups, create a new segment, add subscribers to a segment. | list-segments, list-audience-groups, create-segment, add-subscribers-to-segment |
| Read your analytics (3) | Pull aggregate sends-views-clicks, run a date-ranged report grouped by day, week, or month, fetch subscriber-list health metrics. | get-notifications-summary, get-analytics-overview, get-subscriber-analytics |
| Configure auto-push (5) | Read and update which post types auto-push, manage category-to-segment mappings, list categories, inspect attribute mappings to WordPress user meta. | get-auto-push-settings, update-auto-push-settings, list-categories, list-category-segment-mappings, get-attribute-mappings |
| Run WooCommerce and WhatsApp automations (4) | List push-automation campaigns, enable or configure them, list WhatsApp automation campaigns, check WhatsApp credential status. (Available when WooCommerce is active; WhatsApp status also requires valid WhatsApp credentials.) | list-push-automation-campaigns, update-push-automation-campaign, list-whatsapp-automation-campaigns, get-whatsapp-status |
| Diagnose and verify (3) | Pull plugin version and key settings, read WordPress, PHP, and server environment, fetch debug log files. | get-plugin-info, get-site-environment, get-debug-log |
Four of those groups cover channels: web push, the WooCommerce automation surface, WhatsApp, and the auto-push pipeline that drives content notifications from your posts. That is the same four-channel coverage PushEngage has shipped for years, now agent-controllable from one chat window.
What you can actually ask your assistant to do
Four prompts to try this week. Each one names the work, the abilities the assistant calls, and what comes back.
1. Send a flash-sale push to your engaged-shoppers segment.
“Find my engaged-shoppers segment, then send everyone in it a push notification titled ‘Flash sale ends midnight’ that links to https://yourstore.com/flash-sale with the sale-hero image.”
The assistant calls list-segments to find the segment ID, then send-notification with your title, message, URL, and image. The destructive flag on send-notification means the assistant confirms before firing, so you stay in the loop on every send.
2. Pull the last 30 days of recovered revenue, by week.
“Show me a week-by-week analytics report for the last 30 days, and tell me which campaigns drove the most clicks.”
The assistant calls get-analytics-overview with the date range and group_by: week, then list-notifications to map sends to titles. You get the breakdown in chat, with no dashboard switch.
3. Pause your WooCommerce browse-abandonment automation until Tuesday.
“Disable my browse-abandonment campaign for the next four days. Turn it back on Tuesday morning.”
The assistant calls list-push-automation-campaigns, finds the browse-abandonment campaign, and runs update-push-automation-campaign with enabled: false. On Tuesday morning, you ask it to re-enable. The same abilities cover your cart-recovery, post-purchase, and back-in-stock flows. Those templates ship as ready automations, not as blank canvases you have to architect from scratch. If you want to refresh how those templates are configured first, the PushEngage Workflows announcement covers the visual builder behind them.
4. Build a new segment for shoppers who hit /pricing in the last 7 days.
“Create a new segment called ‘pricing-page-visitors-7d’ that captures anyone who visited /pricing in the last seven days.”
The assistant calls create-segment with the segment name and criteria. You can layer the new segment into a campaign in the same chat.
The permission model: what your assistant can and can’t do
Three rules cover every ability.
First, every ability requires the manage_options capability, which is the same WordPress permission gate that protects your admin. An assistant authenticated against a WordPress user with admin rights can run the abilities. An assistant authenticated against a contributor cannot. The model maps onto what you already use to manage humans.
Second, only one ability is marked destructive: send-notification. Any MCP-aware assistant interprets the destructive flag as “confirm before running.” A request to send a notification surfaces in chat as an action waiting on your OK, not a silent send. Settings updates and segment creates are non-destructive; the assistant runs them without prompting on every change, which is what you want for the volume of small configuration work that happens during a campaign.
Third, the debug log ability (get-debug-log) returns admin-grade content like URLs and request payloads, and is gated to the same admin permission as the rest. Your assistant has the same access as the human admin running it, and no more.
How to turn it on (under 5 minutes)
- Update the PushEngage WordPress plugin to 4.2.3 from your WordPress admin. If you have auto-updates on, this has already happened; check the plugin version on the Plugins page. If you need a refresher, our walkthrough on how to install the PushEngage WordPress plugin covers the basics.
- Install the WP MCP Adapter from the WordPress plugin directory and activate it. The adapter translates the abilities your plugin registers into the MCP protocol your assistant speaks.
- Connect your AI assistant to your WordPress site per its own MCP-setup docs. Every major MCP-capable assistant has documentation for this; the connection uses a WordPress application password tied to your admin user.
That is the entire path. No engineering ticket. No code change in your theme. The same five-minute install model that has always shipped with the PushEngage WordPress plugin now extends to your assistant connection.
WooCommerce abilities register only when WooCommerce is active. WhatsApp abilities register when WooCommerce is active and WhatsApp credentials are valid. If you do not see those abilities in your assistant’s tool list, check those two prerequisites first. The same goes for the deeper WooCommerce abandoned-cart recovery flows the WooCommerce abilities tune. Those flows expect a live WooCommerce install behind them. For broader auto-push behavior, our older guide on how to automate your browser push campaigns is still the right reference.
What’s coming next
The 23 abilities in 4.2.3 cover the high-frequency work: sending, segmenting, reading analytics, tuning automations. The next releases extend the coverage. Chat Widget abilities are arriving so your live-chat configuration can be inspected and tuned from chat alongside push. More granular per-notification analytics will let your assistant break down a single send by segment, geo, and device without you joining tables by hand. And we are working toward app-push parity with the web-push surface, so the same prompts work whether the campaign is firing to browsers or to mobile apps.
The lapsed-cart winback push at the top of this post would have gone out Friday afternoon, not Wednesday, and recovered the weekend’s lift on a real number of carts. The abilities in 4.2.3 give that hour back to every campaign you run. They are available on every PushEngage plan, and if running retention work through chat is about to push your subscriber list or your campaign volume past your current limits, see what each PushEngage plan includes.
