Team 24 - Atlassian doubles down on Jira and launches new AI assistant, Rovo

(@philww)

AI is a big theme at the opening of Atlassian's Team 24 annual conference in Las Vegas today, with the unveiling of an all-new AI assistant called Rovo. It's accompanied by the debut of a new all-in-one version of its flagship Jira product, which brings together the features of the separate Jira Software and Jira Work Management products, along with goal management features that were previously part of a separate product called Atlas. Meanwhile there are various enhancements to other products across the range, including Confluence and Loom, mostly AI-related. The conference will also be the last with co-founders Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes as co-CEOs, following Farquhar's announcement last week that he will leave the role in August to spend time with his young family and focus on philanthropy.

Jira is Atlassian's core product, created at the company's foundation to help developers manage their work within agile software development teams. When Jira Work Management was introduced just three years ago, it was positioned as an easier-to-use version that would serve the needs of enterprise teams outside of the IT function. Now Atlassian has decided it's better to serve all teams within a single product, to ease cross-team collaboration. Instead of shielding non-technical users from some of the deveoper-focused power features and complexity by keeping them in a separate product, the new Jira will expose functionality as it's needed. AI will play a role, too, providing automations and suggestions to help users when setting up new projects or onboarding new team members. Tiffany To, SVP Product, Transformations and Platform at Atlassian, says:

It's bringing all of the pieces together. It's telling the story about there being a fundamental teamwork foundation, where we believe everyone across the company whether its' a developer, marketing, HR, etc, they need to be on the same platform and toolset to be able to align their goals, plan and track work, and share knowledge. And so those are obviously anchored on our core products. We're bringing Jira Work Management and Jira Software together into just JIRA, which is what customers have been asking for, for a while.

Absorbing the goals functionality from Atlas into the product reinforces Jira's role as Atlassian's primary enterprise platform for work management. Atlas was launched two years ago as a standalone product to help team members track work across the various enterprise teamwork tools they use. That functionality, including goals tracking, will now become part of every Atlassian product, including Jira, and the separate Atlas product will be phased out.

The new focus on Jira as the primary vehicle for enterprise work management means that Trello, the popular individual task manager acquired by Atlassian in 2017, will no longer be pushed as an alternative enterprise tool and instead will focus on its core proposition for personal to-do lists.

Rovo intelligent assistant

The new Rovo intelligent assistant is built on Atlassian's teamwork graph. Capabilities include:

• Intelligent agents which can generate, review and refine content, automate and streamline tasks, answer questions, make recommendations, help onboard new employees, or automate repetitive tasks such as cleaning up Jira backlogs, organizing Confluence pages or reformatting content.
• Intelligent search which provides answers from data inside and outside of Atlassian, with the ability to pull information from third-party sources including Google Drive, Microsoft Sharepoint, Microsoft Teams, GitHub, Slack and Figma, as well as industry-specific and custom-built apps. Search results are personalized and contextual, with users only able to see information they're entitled to see.
• Conversational chat, so that users can engage in interactive conversations with Rovo to find answers, get feedback and resolve issues. Rovo also provides knowledge cards, which provide in-context snapshots of specific information about projects, goals, people and so on.

Among a raft of new features across the product set,some of the most notable include multiple content types and smartlinks within Confluence, so that for example Loom vides or Figma links can be organized within Confluence, customizable company hubs in Confluence, and AI-assisted transformation between content types across Atlassian products including Confluence, whiteboards and Loom. In Loom, new AI-aided features include the ability to edit videos from a transcript, taking out hesitations, transforming for example a video bug report recorded in Loom into a Jira ticket, or allowing sales teams to create customized video messages at scale. Important new analytics features build on Atlassian's cloud data lake to provide analysis of teamwork across the enterprise.

My take

The advent of generative AI has brought challenges but also opportunities for teamwork vendors. Consolidating functionality into the flagship Jira product simplifies an offering that can often be confusing, and using AI to make the product easier to use gives Atlassian a new opportunity to broaden its appeal into new use cases. We'll have more here on the ground from Team24 in the next few days.