Atlassian co-founder and CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes used an appearance on The Verge's Decoder podcast to reject the idea that AI will wipe out the software-as-a-service industry, a scenario the publication referred to as the SaaSpocalypse. He argued that AI is actually increasing usage of Atlassian's tools rather than replacing them. The company makes platform products including Jira, Trello and Rovo, which businesses use to organize teams, manage projects and share company information.
Cannon-Brookes said all of Atlassian's products are expressions of a single core platform, which shapes both how the products are built and how the company itself is structured. He described Jira as a workflow engine with collaborative features that serves as a human reference to work, noting that developers, marketers and finance staff do not perform their actual work inside it. According to him, AI agents will speed up processes and improve their reliability, quality and consistency, but will also place more emphasis on human judgment, intuition and initiation.
The discussion also covered how AI is changing Atlassian internally. The company conducted a round of layoffs earlier this year, and Cannon-Brookes said he felt it needed a different mix of skills. He was asked what that mix looks like and how AI is altering what it means to run a software company. He also pushed back on comments from Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, who had appeared on the same podcast and discussed AI eliminating what he called measurement roles.
Cannon-Brookes said the fundamentals of business as a system of processes have not changed, even as the way those processes run and the number of them in operation evolve. He framed legibility and user experience as important features of Atlassian's tools, since managers need to see how work is progressing across large teams. He questioned whether databases will still be reviewed by humans or fed into synthesized systems, and pointed to Rovo as a new face of Atlassian in some respects. He recorded the interview from Atlassian's base in Australia, which meant the conversation about org charts took place at 5AM local time.
More company and startup news from TechManNews.
