Even if you’ve never touched any of Atlassian’s products, there’s a good chance others in your organization (like IT and customer service teams) use them every day. Best known for Jira, Confluence and my favourite, Trello, the Sydney-based company keeps a low profile but has a large presence in collaborative enterprise software. Its products are instrumental in helping many companies perform tasks such as tracking support requests and managing projects. Over Atlassian’s 21-year history, all of this has led it to more than 10,000 employees, more than 265,000 customers, and $3.5 billion in revenue.
Like nearly everyone in the software business, Atlassian has spent 2023 redesigning its product roadmap around generative AI. At its Team 23 conference in April, Atlassian introduced a “virtual teammate” called Intelligence; This one, like much of this year’s new AI, consists of a variety of features spread across multiple products rather than anything specific. After a beta period during which approximately 10% of customers tried it, many of these tools are now generally available; These include summarizing working documents, performing tasks such as database queries in simple language, and providing automated responses to help requests. .
Even more AI-powered functionality is on the way, including a glossary builder still in beta that automatically identifies and defines an organization’s internal terminology; This is a boon for beginners who have yet to figure out all the necessary buzzwords. As an example, Atlassian co-founder and CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes says, “If you’ve been at Atlassian for 10 years, you know what ‘Socrates’ means.” “Socrates at Atlassian is our data lake. If you’re new, you may be wondering ‘Why does this page mention Socrates? ‘Are we in ancient Greece?’ It’s easy to get confused.”
“One of the big concerns about AI technology is that it is magical,” explains Cannon-Brookes. “Big language models are amazing. As software creators, they give us many more tools to paint. We can deliver better customer value to a greater extent. But sometimes, in the rush to deliver these amazing experiences, I don’t know that engineering has a broad enough diversity of thought to deliver responsible products.”
For core business processes, secrecy – even if surprising – is a red flag. “Resource is really important in an organization,” says Cannon-Brookes. “You have very strict management rules. You want to know what it is.” From understanding security issues to avoiding biases that can be translated into large language models, many organizations are treading carefully, and they want the companies from which they buy software and cloud services to do the same.
Atlassian isn’t the only enterprise technology vendor that feels a particular burden to use AI correctly. For example, in August, I wrote about Microsoft’s responsible AI initiative, which involved hundreds of people. But Atlassian works particularly hard to explain what it does, reflecting one of its five Responsible Technology Principles: “Open communication, no nonsense.”
The team tasked with assessing the impact of the company’s use of AI and other emerging technologies is “a mix of human rights, HR, policy, compliance, legal and engineering experts trying to make sure we’re building responsible technology at some level.” at a broad level,” says Cannon-Brookes. “When you get to AI capabilities leaving the building and being delivered to customers, that has some very interesting implications.”