Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

For a long time, Jira was where you went to track work. You updated a status, closed a ticket. Something important has shifted now that agents can be assigned to work items. Jira is still a record of what happened, but now it’s something else too: a place where work can move between humans and agents. That shift got me thinking. What if I leaned into it fully and ran an experiment? What if each stage of the SDLC had its own specialized agent and the board itself handled the routing between them?

According to Atlassian’s 2026 State of Teams report, a growing gap has emerged: while AI makes individual tasks faster, many teams are struggling to keep that work aligned. In this panel discussion, Atlassian executives share an inside look at how they are operationalizing AI within their own departments to turn early experimentation into durable, connected ways of working.

Every week, it seems like the rules change for building products. We’re all figuring this out in real time, and one of the best ways we’ve found to do that is to sit down with other leaders who are in the thick of it. That’s why Atlassian recently started a series called AI Talks at our San Francisco offices with senior leaders building AI products. We break down what’s working, what’s broken, and what feels uncomfortable.

Whether I speak to customers or Atlassian’s own engineering teams, the message is consistent: the unprecedented adoption of powerful coding agents has transformed software development, but the hard parts of delivering software are…gasp…still pretty hard. Teams still have to decide what to build, and why it should exist. They need to understand the system they’re changing and which constraints matter.

In Q4 FY26, Atlassian’s People Insights (PI) team stopped treating AI as a productivity add-on and committed to something harder: fully agentifying its operations—giving AI persistent access to the team’s context, data, definitions, and workflows so it can act as a genuine collaborator rather than a smarter search engine.

89% of executives say AI has increased speed. Only 6% can point to org-wide ROI. IDC’s Wayne Kurtzman and Atlassian’s Liz Fosslien unpack what’s missing – and where CIOs should start. Everyone on your team is faster. So why isn’t your organization moving further?