Mike Cannon-Brookes, CEO of Atlassian, says the feared SaaSpocalypse is not happening. The Australian tech leader argues that while artificial intelligence will automate routine tasks, it will not replace the human need for clarity and judgment in complex business systems. Instead, AI tools will likely increase the speed and reliability of workflows, making the company’s platform more essential rather than obsolete.
The core platform
Atlassian builds software that helps organisations manage work. Products like Jira and Trello allow teams to organise tasks, share data, and coordinate large groups. Cannon-Brookes describes the company not as a collection of separate apps, but as a single core platform expressed in different ways. This structure dictates how the business operates and how its tools are built.
The company sits at the centre of a major shift in how enterprises function. Some worry that AI could read existing systems and make migrating to a platform like Atlassian less attractive. Others fear AI will build all necessary tools automatically, destroying the software category entirely.
Cannon-Brookes pushed back against these predictions. He spent time discussing the value of design, the role of human users, and how AI is actually driving more usage of Atlassian’s tools. The conversation covered what the business landscape will look like a few years from now.
Changes at the company
Artificial intelligence has changed Atlassian, too. Like many tech firms, the company carried out layoffs earlier this year. Cannon-Brookes stated the organisation needed a different mix of skills. He explained what that mix looks like and how AI is redefining what it means to run a software business.
The CEO was direct about what AI cannot do. He challenged the views of peers like Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, who recently discussed AI eliminating so-called measurement roles. Cannon-Brookes recorded this interview from Atlassian’s home base in Australia, leading to a deep conversation about organisational charts at 5am.
What work is
Atlassian enables businesses to collaborate and manage work across their teams. The company connects business units and technology teams to handle complex problems within a single platform. For organisations where software and technology are core competitive advantages, Atlassian provides a broad system for content collaboration, project management, and knowledge sharing across strategy, operations, and service teams.
Cannon-Brookes noted that people often think of Atlassian as tools to help teams figure out what to do tomorrow. Jira organises large teams of engineers, files tickets, and prioritises tasks. Trello once served as a daily checklist for managing editors to ensure everyone did the right thing at the right time.
The concept of the company is changing as more AI enters the enterprise. Understanding work at an individual level, like with Trello, or at a team level, like with Jira, remains a big part of their function. However, the focus is shifting from work to do to processes.
If a business is a system of processes, everything within it is a system. The fundamentals of how these processes run and how to figure out what is happening have not changed. AI and agents will increase the speed, reliability, quality, and consistency of output for certain processes.
These tools also place more emphasis on human judgment, intuition, and initiation. The job is to ensure these unique human elements remain understandable. Someone in the business must always know what is happening. Managers need to see how many exceptions were given out in a sales quarter or what an engineering team built last month. These tasks are incredibly hard to do at scale.
Legibility and legibility
Legibility is a key feature of the tools Atlassian has built. A manager needs to look at a dashboard to see how the company is doing. Jira allows users to see how many tasks are being completed at various levels of abstraction at any given time.
This capability was vital for human managers. Adding software like Atlassian’s allows businesses to see and coordinate more things at a higher scale.
The next turn is that databases may no longer be looked at by human beings. They could be fed into synthesised databases, or AI could generate information at different levels of abstraction. Rovo, a new product for Atlassian, feels like the new face of the company in some ways.
The end state
AI will help with many processes. It will pick up steps in a workflow. Most businesses currently have a process and are using AI to automate 80% of it. This may not be 80% of the distance covered, but it can be the width of the task.
Consider the sales deal exception process. If a customer wants to pay in 45 days instead of 30, AI can write a readable document and approve it. For complex exceptions requiring specific conditions, a human is still needed for intuition and judgment.
Eighty percent of those cases may be easier with AI now because it is capable of processing rules in specific parts of the business. This increases the speed and quality of the process. It does not remove the need to know what is going on. Someone in the business will still need to know how many exceptions were given.
In most areas, businesses are finding new ways to scale and become efficient. They are also finding ways to make higher-quality products and services with AI. People are using AI in ways that are not expected. It is not all about mechanistic efficiency.
What it means
For people making things, the change is a shift from manual coordination to oversight. AI handles the routine processing of rules and data, allowing humans to focus on complex exceptions and strategic judgment. The tools will become faster and more reliable, but the requirement for someone to understand the overall state of the business remains. Managers will still need to know if targets are met and why exceptions occurred, even if the AI does the heavy lifting of checking them.
