Atlassian joins the AI frenzy and announces a new virtual teammate

The software giant led by Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar has launched a new virtual teammate as interest in ChatGPT and AI technologies explodes.

Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes on the sidelines of the company's Teams conference in Las Vegas.

Australian enterprise software giant Atlassian has joined the AI frenzy, adding a suite of new capabilities and a “virtual teammate” it says will increase efficiency for its 250,000-plus customers as Elon Musk announced his own foray into the nascent technology.

Announced at the company’s Team 23 event in Las Vegas, Atlassian chief executive Mike Cannon-Brookes said the new functionality – dubbed Atlassian Intelligence – was built in collaboration with ChatGPT maker OpenAI and would be embedded across all of its cloud software products, including Jira, Confluence and Trello.

Workers will be able to automatically summarise decisions and action items from meeting minutes, draft tweets based on product specs, and ask questions such as “how much can I spend on my home office set up?”, Mr Cannon-Brookes said in an interview.

“It’s awesome for us, it’s exciting,” Mr Cannon-Brookes said.

“We’ve done machine learning and AI for a long time, but we’ve now got a lot of new capabilities and we’re building it in as a core capability of our cloud platform, no matter what market you’re in and what product you’re using.

“There was a lot of work done under the covers, there’s a lot of legal, privacy and non-technical work, to make sure customer data is protected and to make sure the customer understands what is happening with their data.

“This will enable our customers to be far more productive: I think about it as a superpower for individuals to be able to generate things, summarise things very rapidly and it’s almost like giving individuals a multiplier, in terms of a fundamental productivity improvement across all of our software.”

The emergence of ChatGPT has sparked concerns over privacy and data sovereignty, along with the spread of misinformation, the effects on employment and broader risks to society.

Italy this month banned the technology as regulators scramble to keep up with the pace of its rollout.

“The pace of it has been very rapid. In terms of technology disruption, it’s certainly been faster than any of the prior technologies like the internet, or mobile,” Mr Cannon-Brookes said.

“The obvious applications of this set of technologies to enhance human productivity are massive. That’s very exciting but we need to be cautious with any new technology.

“Fundamentally, we have to be careful when it’s doing things autonomously versus doing things in an assisted manner. We probably don’t yet want to completely have our hands off the controls yet.”

The executive said that while Atlassian’s virtual teammate would be helpful across all Atlassian products, the future might not necessarily involve workers having AI assistants follow them everywhere they go.

Mike Cannon-Brookes and fellow Atlassian founder Scott Farquhar.

“Do I think large language technologies and more broadly AI will appear everywhere? Yes. But will you necessarily notice it as some sort of creepy sci-fi system that follows you around? I don’t think so,” he said.

“It’s more that the way you will interact with technology will get deeper and more human at each stage.

“I don’t know that we will necessarily have these super assistants that follow us around like a single Jarvis kind of thing but all the software you interact with will get smarter, often in ways you can’t perceive.

Mr Musk, who famously accepted a bet from Mr Cannon-Brookes to build a big battery in South Australia within 100 days, announced his own version of ChatGPT, dubbed “TruthGPT”.

He told Fox News this week he would help fund the AI app himself amid concerns technology such as ChatGPT would affect freedom of information.

“I’m going to start something which I call TruthGPT, or a maximum truth-seeking AI, that tries to understand the nature of the universe,” Mr Musk said.

“And I think this might be the best path to safety in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe is unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe.”

Atlassian also used its Team event to announce updates to its Confluence collaboration app, including a whiteboards feature and a new Chrome extension.

Mr Cannon-Brookes said the event represented an important moment for his company.

“We deploy updates thousands of times a week so incremental improvement can be hard to see sometimes. Once a quarter to be able to package everything up and deliver that as a cohesive story is quite powerful both internally and externally for our customers.”

David Swan travelled to Las Vegas as a guest of Atlassian.

Originally published as Atlassian joins the AI frenzy and announces a new virtual teammate