The SaaSpocalypse that wasn’t, with Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes

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The SaaSpocalypse that wasn’t, with Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes

Mike Cannon-Brookes on AI in the enterprise, Atlassian’s new org chart, and why chatbots aren’t the future of work.

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is editor-in-chief of The Verge, host of the Decoder podcast, and co-host of The Vergecast.

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.

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.

For any organization that has software and technology as its core competitive advantage, we make a broad platform that allows them to collaborate on content, manage projects, and unleash the knowledge of their teams and organizations across their business, their strategy, operations, all the way through to their service teams in all areas of their business. It’s a very large platform now that we provide.

Just in terms of what work is today and what it might be in the future as we add more and more AI to these enterprises, maybe this is too reductive, but I have always thought of Atlassian as a company that makes tools to help teams figure out what they’re going to do tomorrow. Jira is a perfect example of this. You don’t do the software engineering in Jira, but Jira helps you organize large teams of software engineers and file tickets and prioritize problems and tasks.

I was a Trello person a long time ago. My goal in life now is to never use any enterprise software. I feel like that’s a sign of true success if you’re just an iPad person in first class. I’m working on it. I’m not saying I’m there yet, but that’s one of my goals.

But there was a time when I was the managing editor of The Verge and my job, straightforwardly, was to look at Trello every day and make sure everyone was doing the right thing at the right time. And I’ve always thought of Atlassian as that class of products. We’re going to organize the processes of the company.

There’s something about AI that’s changing that. Has that conception of Atlassian changed for you? Is it changing faster because of AI?

Understanding what work you have to do at an individual level like Trello, at a team level like Jira, or at an organizational level like our Strategy Collection for large-scale strategy and operations — that is definitely a big part of what we do.

Understanding where processes are at — It’s less about work to do than processes. If you think about a business as a system of processes that are put together, everything in a business is some sort of system. It’s a process in the collection of all these, and how well we execute them is what your business is doing. The fundamentals of that haven’t changed. The way those processes run, the number of them running, and how to figure out what’s going on hasn’t changed.

We think about Jira as a human reference to work. When we say that, it’s a really interesting term because, as you said, the work is not done in Jira. Developers don’t live in Jira. Marketers don’t live in Jira. Finance people don’t live in Jira. Jira is a workflow engine with highly collaborative parts that enables teams to understand what they, their colleagues, and their broader organization are doing. That’s why agents and AI and other things are going to increase the speed of those processes. In a lot of ways, they will increase the reliability, the quality, and the consistency of output of certain processes.

They also put more emphasis on where the humans, the judgment, the intuition, the human bits that are unique, and the initiation come from. It’s our job to make sure that that’s all still understandable so someone can just look at any level of their business and know what the fuck’s going on. What are people doing? Are we successfully doing whatever it is that we’re trying to do, whether that’s service function in a finance sales deal, exception service desk to work out how many exceptions did we give out in sales this quarter, or it’s an engineering team who’s trying to work out, “There’s stuff happening all over the place. What did we build this month? Or what are we going to build next month?” All of those things are incredibly hard to do at scale and volume in a business.

One of the more important features of the tools you’ve built is legibility. It’s user experience. You have a big database of exceptions given out by salespeople, and you need to look at a dashboard and see how the company’s doing. Or you have a whole bunch of tasks, and Jira will let you see at various different levels of abstraction how many tasks are being completed at any given time.

That was something that was very important for human managers. A lot of the capability unlock of businesses as they added software like