Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Our Jira engineering team was spending more time than we’d like focused on KTLO (keeping the lights on) tasks – the small, but important maintenance tasks nobody wants to spend time on. This includes work like cleaning up old feature flags, chasing flaky tests, fixing identified vulnerabilities, addressing accessibility issues, and chipping away at a long tail of bugs.

Maria Christley is the Head of Design for the Atlassian Design System, leading over 35 designers globally across Design Language, Accessibility, Systems Architecture, and AI. She is a 2025 Women Leading Tech finalist and has spoken at Figma Config and UX Australia. Rachel Radford is a Design Manager on the Atlassian Design System team, where she leads designers working on the systems, components, and practices that power Atlassian’s products at scale.

AI use is accelerating across the modern enterprise. Teams are moving faster. The barrier to building will continue to drop. But the cost of building the wrong thing is about to skyrocket, because teams can now ship more of it, faster. Atlassian’s State of Teams 2026 report found that 89% of executives say AI has increased the speed of work. But only 6% feel confident they can point to specific organisation-wide AI ROI.

Today’s workplace is currently defined by a paradox of progress. We are deploying the most sophisticated productivity tools in human history, yet the people expected to lead this transformation are more disconnected than ever. Organizations are pouring billions into AI, but they are often neglecting the most critical node in the system: the manager.

Simpplr has spent years building AI into the intranet. Search, smart answers, and content creation are among the many ways AI is woven into how employees work inside the platform. Now, we’re giving IT the governance layer to match.

I sat down with engineers who use AI coding agents for the vast majority of their implementation work. Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey found 84% of developers using AI agents for software development are using them for actual implementation work, so I wanted to understand what that looks like up close. What I heard reshaped how I think about where developer tools need to go next.