Can you explain this buzzword ‘context’ that we have been hearing a lot at Atlassian Team ’26, and how AI plays a role in this?
So, what we've seen over the last couple of years with this AI revolution is this explosion of available intelligence. You now have these incredibly powerful models that can reason through a huge range of tasks, but what we’ve found is that the other key ingredient in making AI truly useful in a business setting is context. Specifically, the ability to give that intelligence information that is actually relevant to the task you need done.
And that’s harder than it sounds. You can feed models a lot of noise. You can run countless searches and dump huge amounts of data into the system. But what we’ve found is that if you can provide the right information, and help the model understand not just the data itself but the relationships between that data, it can produce much higher quality results while also saving tokens.
That’s really the thinking behind the two graph enhancements we announced this year.
What are the most impactful ways AI is currently changing how teams collaborate and get work done, and within Atlassian’s offerings, where are organisations seeing the biggest practical gains from AI today?
I’d say maybe four things.
First is we announced that we’re making our key work graph available for everyone to use across the AI applications that they care about. And we think that the ability to access that graph with everyone’s favourite AI tools, plus Rovo, will really make everyone’s use of AI more economical and higher quality. I am really excited to see customers just adopting that and coming back to us and telling us how much it’s improved their overall AI experience, not just at Atlassian. So that’s first.
Second, we’ve announced a lot of changes and upgrades to Rovo Chat, including this ability to go into max mode, which will spin up an entire virtual machine in the cloud for super long-running complex projects. The chat will even start learning new skills for you on the fly. It can even make an Instagram reel or a podcast on the fly if it wants to. And so, when we give that kind of power to our end users, we’re very excited to see what kinds of tasks they actually challenge us with and what Rovo does for them.
Third is Studio, where we’re doing massive work. A lot of the fun stuff there is being able to describe a business problem and not just get a point solution, like not just one agent or one automation, but actually Rovo saying, hey, here is a system for you. An agent, a workflow, an app, whatever you need to solve that business problem. And we think that’ll help a lot of folks really transform how they do a lot of the grunt work in their businesses, getting that off their plates in ways that they can trust and that are robust because they’re grounded in their own data and context.
And the last is DIA. I think it’s really crazy to me that if you look at customer-facing innovation in browsers in the last ten years, we’ve basically got better tabs, that’s kind of it, right? Not a whole lot. And when you think about how much business and even personal work gets done in a browser across so many tabs, you’re still trying to figure out which tab is which, what you’re trying to do, and copying and pasting stuff all the time. With DIA, it’s really about putting the browser to work for you in a new and exciting way, and I think we’re going to see a lot of response to that.
How do you approach building AI features that are genuinely useful in day-to-day work, rather than just impressive demos?
That’s a great question. I actually have a slightly different perspective this time going through this process, because what I’ve found is that with AI really accelerating the pace at which we can work and deliver product to customers, the opportunity to show it live in an environment like this actually helps us tease out issues, challenges, and opportunities even faster.
The fact that we know we’re going to come here and show it in front of thousands of people means we really want it to work in a way that feels natural. That actually forced us early on to say, let’s put it through the paces properly. I think as a result, we actually ended up with a better product, and we’re more ready than ever to share it with customers.
Trust and data security are top priorities for many businesses. How is Atlassian addressing these concerns in its AI offerings?
When customers buy products from us, they’re not just buying Jira or Confluence or whichever apps they’re using. It comes with an enterprise-grade promise. We’re supporting some of the biggest companies on the planet, and over seventy-five percent of the Fortune 500 use Rovo, our AI product. That means we commit to a certain set of standards.
Everything we’ve built from the ground up, including the Teamwork Graph and even Jira itself, has been designed from day one to meet the right permissions and regulatory standards. All of those things are a massive investment, but they are absolutely critical for our customers.
That’s why we feel very confident that what we’re bringing to market is suitable for them. On top of that, we’ve built a lot of governance controls, so customers have great visibility and the ability to control what their end users see, which is also very important.
How are you using AI in your day-to-day role to manage information, decision-making, and communication across your team?
One of the biggest ways I rely on AI is to keep me posted on what’s going on across my entire business. I’ve got a great team, they’re all working at a relentless pace, and it’s growing fast.
So what I really put my agents to work on is saying, “Hey, go and actually look across all the different areas where activity is happening, and help me understand where I should dive in.”
And then also to translate that into communications. A lot of my job is communicating to the team, helping them move together and move forward, and with so much activity that can be really hard. So now I rely on agents to translate all of that into communications I can actually send, in written form.
My chief of staff and I also work on a written digest every week together that AI helps us generate, and even a talk track for me so I don’t have to think about what to say in so many words. I just have an instantly ready document.
That’s just one example. These are important parts of my job that used to take many hours and often just didn’t get done because they took too long. Now it happens like clockwork. And when I multiply that across everything I do, that’s where I see AI saving me a huge amount of time and helping me focus on areas where I can add real value through judgment and experience, rather than just the mechanics.
