Spots 
Mike Cannon-Brookes on AI in the enterprise, Atlassian’s new org chart, and why chatbots aren’t the future of work. Today, I’m talking with Mike Cannon-Brookes, who is cofounder and CEO of Atlassian.
Atlassian is one of those companies that every other company runs on — it makes important platform tools like Jira and Trello that allow people to organize and manage big teams, create shared databases of company information, and generally allow work to happen. As you’ll hear Mike say, all of Atlassian’s products are actually different expressions of a single core platform, which really shapes how Atlassian itself is structured and how those products are built.
All of this means Atlassian is also right in the middle of the way AI is changing how all these companies work — AI tools might be able to look at all the different tools and systems you have and just read them for you, making a big migration to Atlassian’s platform less enticing. Or, if you buy the idea of the so-called SaaSpocalypse, AI might just build all of these tools for you, destroying this entire category of businesses.
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Obviously, Mike had a lot of thoughts pushing back on this. So we spent some real time talking about the value of design, human users, how AI is actually increasing the usage of Atlassian’s tools, and what this all looks like a few years from now.
Of course, AI has also changed Atlassian. Like so many other tech companies, Atlassian did a round of layoffs earlier this year, with Mike saying he felt the company needed a different “mix of skills.” So I asked Mike what he thinks that mix of skills is and how AI is changing what it means to run a software company.
But Mike was also refreshingly direct about what AI can’t do, and he was willing to push back on his own friends like Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, who was just on the show talking about AI eliminating what he called “measurement roles.” This was a fun one — and shoutout to Mike, who recorded this from Atlassian home base in Australia, which meant he had a deep conversation about org charts at 5AM. Okay: Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes. Here we go. Mike Cannon-Brookes, you’re the co-founder and CEO of Atlassian. Welcome to Decoder. Thanks for having me, man. I am really excited to talk to you. I believe you’re in Australia? It’s tomorrow for you. What’s going to happen tomorrow? It’s tonight. It’s a great day here. It looks beautiful. It looks like it’s going to be an amazing day.
At this point in the AI news cycle, I feel like I can just demand to know what’s going to happen tomorrow, and everyone understands the urgency behind that question. There’s a lot going on with Atlassian. There’s a lot going on with your products. There’s a lot going on in the very concept of SaaS businesses and business processes generally.
Let’s start at the very start. I think people know Atlassian. They know Jira. I started my career as a Trello person. Tell people what you think Atlassian is today.
Atlassian is a platform that enables businesses to collaborate and manage work across their teams. We connect their business teams and their technology teams to handle the most challenging work problems in a singular platform across any organization that is technologically driven.
Mike Cannon-Brookes on AI in the enterprise, Atlassian’s new org chart, and why chatbots aren’t the future of work.