The SaaSpocalypse that wasn't, with Atlassian's CEO
Decoder with Nilay Patel · 28 Sep 2026
Source: https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pdst.fm/e/pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/257/traffic.megaphone.fm/VMP2948196518.mp3
Transcript: https://podcasts.opennash.com/shows/decoder-with-nilay-patel/the-saaspocalypse-that-wasnt-with-atlassians-ceo-24d658/ (via OpenNash Podcasts, machine-generated)

Support for the show comes from Comcast Business. With advances in AI, cybersecurity is getting more powerful, but so are attacks. In the past twelve months, Comcast Business detected 24.5 billion phishing attempts designed to exploit user behavior, steal credentials and compromise devices. AI is forcing a shift in how organizations defend themselves, demanding not only faster responses, but continuous intelligence. To survive in the current climate, leaders must build a security first culture to equip their team with the tools they need to stay protected.

With Comcast Business, connectivity, intelligence and response work as one orchestrated system. Get better equipped to handle today's cyber threat landscape with the 2026 Comcast Business Cybersecurity Threat Report. Read it today at Comcast Business dot com slash cybersecurity. Cyber confidence starts with Comcast Business.

Support for the show comes from Ingin. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard. But if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. Ingin is the fastest growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes, earn up to 10% back on hotels. And in 2025, Ingin customers saved more than $300 million on travel with zero booking fees, no contracts and no BS.

More than a thousand businesses join Ingin every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at Ingin dot com slash Vox.

Support for the show comes from CrowdStrike. It's not a huge stretch to say that AI is the next major computing platform. Every platform shift changes the way we build software, and it changes security too. CrowdStrike is defining cybersecurity in the AI era with AI detection and response, or AIDR, a solution for seeing, monitoring and securing AI across the enterprise. Learn more about how leading companies are turning to CrowdStrike to secure AI and secure their business at CrowdStrike dot com slash decoder.

Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Mike Cannon-Brookes, the co-founder 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 those products are built. All of this means Atlassian is also right in the middle of the way AI is changing how every company works. 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. Obviously, Mike had a lot of thoughts pushing back on this, and 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 all this might look 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 that he felt the company needed a different mix of skills. So I asked him 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 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. We got deep. And shout out to Mike, who recorded this from Atlassian Home Base in Australia, which means that he had a deep conversation about org charts at five a m. Before we get started, subscribe to Decoder on YouTube to watch new episodes every Monday and Thursday, and subscribe to The Verge to listen to this episode and every episode completely ad-free. 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.

It is well, it's today, it depends on.

What's gonna happen tomorrow? At this point in the AI news cycle, I feel like I can just I can just demand to know what's gonna 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 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, uh, and manage work across their teams. So we connect their business teams and their technology teams to handle, um, the most challenging work, uh, problems, uh, in a singular platform across any organization that is technologically driven. So any organization that has software and technology as its core competitive advantage, we make a broad platform that allows them to, uh, collaborate on content, manage projects, uh, unleash the knowledge of their teams and organizations across their business, their strategy, operations, uh, all the way through to their service teams, uh, in all areas of their business.

So it's a very large platform now that we uh that we provide.

Uh, let me ask a question about that, 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 gonna do tomorrow. So, like, Jira is like 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'm a well, I was a Trello person a long time ago. My 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 like an iPad person on in in first class. I'm working on, I'm not saying I'm there yet, but that's one of my goals. But there was a time, That's the best 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 I've always thought of Atlassian as that class of products, right? We're gonna organize the processes of the company. There's something about AI that's changing that. Has that conception of Atlassian changed for you, and 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, uh, our strategy collection, uh, for for large scale strategy and operations, that is definitely a big part of what we do, right? Understanding where processes are at. It's it's less about work to do than processes, right? 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 some sort of process.

And the collection of all these and how well we execute them is what your business is doing. The, uh, fundamentals of that haven't changed, the way those processes run, the number of them running, how to figure out what's going on hasn't changed, right? So, uh, we we think about Jira as a it's a human reference to work. Uh, and 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. What Jira is is a workflow engine with highly collaborative parts that enables teams to understand what they, their colleagues and their broader organization are doing. Um, that's why agents and AI and other things, they're gonna increase the speed of those processes. In a lot of ways, they will increase the reliability, the quality, the consistency of output of certain processes. And they also put more emphasis on where the humans, where the judgment, the intuition, the human bits that are unique, the initiation come from.

Um, and it's our job to make sure that that's all still understandable, right? So someone can just kinda look at any level of their business and know what the fuck's going on, right? What are what are people doing? Are we successfully doing whatever it is that we're trying to do? Whether that's, um, service function in a finance sales deal exception service desk to work out how many exceptions did we give out in sales this quarter? Whether it's an engineering team who's trying to work out, man, there's like stuff happening all over the place.

What what did we build this month, uh, 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, right? You have a big database of exceptions given out by salespeople, and you need to look at a dashboard and just 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 how many tasks are being completed at any given time. And that was something that's very important for human managers, right?

And a lot of the capability unlock of businesses as they added software like the software Atlassian makes, is to just be able to see and coordinate more things at higher scale. The turn that's coming is that maybe those databases aren't gonna be looked at by human beings anymore, or they're gonna be fed into more synthesized databases. Or AI is gonna make some other kind of information at different levels of abstraction. I I know you've got a product called Rovo, which feels like the new face of Atlassian in some way.

What's the path here? What is it? What does the end state look like?

Look, there's no doubt AI is gonna help with a lot of those processes, right? There's no doubt it's gonna pick up some steps in a process. Most businesses at the moment they have a process and they're using AI to, like, automate eighty of this step, right? And it may not be eighty of the distance, it can be the wet, right? So if you think about that sales deal exception process that you you just mentioned again there, if AI can take eighty of the exceptions, say this customer wants forty five days, not thirty days, and we can write a relatively readable document.

AI is pretty good at reading the document and saying, Yep, this one's fine, right? But there's gonna be a customer that needs a lot more complex exceptions. They have, well, I wanna pay in ninety days in this way, and I want this thing and that thing. And that needs to go to a human for intuition and judgment. So eighty of those may be easier done with AI now because it's very capable at processing our rules. And, you know, in this this particular, uh, uh, part of our business, and that's great.

It'll increase the speed of the process, the quality of it. Um, it doesn't take away the need to know what's going on. So someone in the business will still need to know, okay, cool, how many exceptions did we give? And what happens in most of these areas is businesses find way more, uh, ways to make themselves scale and uh, uh, efficient, and they find way more ways to make higher quality products and services with AI. I I see this all the time where they are utilizing AI in ways that people don't expect.

It's not all about mechanistic efficiency. There's a huge amount about quality that is able to be measured, understood, uh, that was never before, right? Uh, and the deal exception process is is a good example because it's actually a very human process. It's not usually rule driven. The rule driven parts are easy. It's the non rule driven parts, right? Um, that are more complicated and require judgment. Overall, the business still needs to know for that process, do we need to add more people to this process?

Do we need to change it? How much is going through it? You still have a lot of work to understand the flow of work around an enterprise, um, which is it gets more complicated as the flow's volume goes up a lot.

I'm asking these questions because I'm headed towards a series of questions about the supposed SaaSpocalypse. And I'm very curious where you think tool providers like Atlassian fit next to. Okay, the frontier models are just gonna eat more and more capability. Eventually, Claude will just do this for you. You'll say to Claude, run my business for me, and in the backend, Claude will burn a bunch of tokens and it'll just do it all for you. Which is a promise that many, many people seem to believe in.

And you're describing a somewhat different path, right? Where the tools get smarter or more capable because of AI, and you're still adding a lot of human judgment. But at no point is a frontier model just coming and running your entire business for you.

I think if a frontier model is capable of coming and running your entire business for you, even assume four or five years worth of increase, you have a relatively simple business, right? If it's if it's truly running the whole thing, most businesses aren't simple. They are global conglomerations of rules, compliance, laws, staff in different places, um, human inconsistency, which is the same way of saying human creativity, by the way, um, that they're putting it all together to try to deliver products and services for their customers in their industry.

Healthcare, university, finance, uh, automotive, whatever the industry is, um, they're trying to compete with some other business. They are still gonna have a huge number of humans, I would argue, more knowledge workers, more developers in five to ten years time than today. Because the ability to do tasks to compete will go up the uh, the the the bar for competition will go up in almost all these industries. Um, y, you will still have a huge amount of things to go do.

Most of the things that we think are simple, uh, get done for you. That is the history of technology, right? I'm a big fan of saying AI is just technology. What we can do with spreadsheets, what we can do with the internet, what we can do with ordering goods online, right? You're like, oh, once Amazon arrives, we we'll all just have never have to go to the shops again. Like it doesn't happen, right? Um, if you think about um, I I heard someone talking about bank branches as an analogy, which I thought was a really good one.

Around 2,000, when mobile banking came along, everyone thought bank branches were dead. Bank branches started closing down, everyone wasn't gonna go to their branch anymore. Uh, it was just, you know, it was a pretty negative place. At least it wasn't in Australia, I'm I'm pretty sure it wasn't in America as well. If you look over the last ten years, bank branches are increasing. And people are like, huh, this is a narrative violation. Why is this?

And the answer is bank branches did close down. People did go to the internet banking, they did use their mobile app. They don't go into the branch anymore with a passbook to say, I'd like to send $100 to Neill, I please like, you know, here's his details and write them all down. But bank branches have adapted. The reason they're growing is there is a huge customer service element to a bank branch. The services they provide today are totally different to what they provided twenty five years ago due to the technology of the bank and the availability of things that, you know, they are much more about helping you with higher level processes and services than they ever have

been. And that turns out to be presumably profitable for the banks, which is why they're opening new branches. Um, so bank branches are going up. The things those branches are doing are totally different to what they were twenty five years ago. I think you'll see the same thing with knowledge workers and everything else, that it will still be incredibly important. I don't, uh, I don't see that that part changing.

One of the reasons I'm asking all these kind of foundational existential questions is to understand how you feel about Atlassian's relationship to businesses and how businesses might change as we add new technology. And I agree with your general framing, right, that automation technology arriving to a business is a pretty familiar phenomenon. But there's something else going on with AI that is either making that faster or more dramatic, and it's obviously happening to your business as well, right?

You're the CEO of Atlassian and you've made some changes around AI. So I wanna ask you the decoder questions now. How many people is Atlassian today, and how is it structured?

we are, um, I think publicly twelve, 13,000 odd, uh, around the world. Um, we are structured, uh, globally, I would say, so we're team anywhere. Um, so employees have the choice to come into an office or not. About 60% of people come in three days a week or more. Um, but 25% of people don't come in a single day per week. We run as a globally distributed company as we have done since the start.

When you start in Australia and San Francisco, you kinda get used to the Pacific Ocean being a little bit distribution. This is before Zoom. Uh, uh, we used to have these giant Polycom systems in in meeting rooms, could we don't have those anymore? Technological progress is nice. Um, we have customers all around the world, we have staff all around the world. Um, we are structured functionally, I guess you would say, with a lot of matrices internally.

I don't know if that's the answer you're looking for. Uh, that no, that's that's we have,

absolutely the answer I'm looking for. What do you mean by functionally with a lot of matrices?

right, uh. So we have a CRO, we have a CFO, we have, uh, two CTOs at the moment. We have two, uh, two large product groups, each of which has a CTO, uh, and a chief product officer. One in the enterprise and emerging side, and one in the, uh, future of teamwork side. Our products are organized into collections, so we have collections of apps that are all built on a single platform. Um, well over half of our R D is on the platform.

Um, the apps are increasingly a smaller amount of the proportional total investment in building. Uh, more and more is on the singular Atlassian platform, right? Customers hire us as a as a platform across their business to get work done, not for a single application. That requires a mattress, a matrix internally, right? Um, we don't have salespeople per product. If you want to think about it that way, we have to have people who the sales, customer success, the FDEs, they're all customer related motions.

So they're organized as per the customers in their geographies and their size and scale. Um, and then we obviously have to have designers, product managers on particular products who care about the purpose of a product. So you end up instantly with a matrix between how the customers are organized and how the products are organized. Um, and then we have a giant platform, so we have the technical platform that runs across all the products, so it's a very large platform team.

Uh, we then have, you know, finance and talent and other things that are also broad, uh, processes. So naturally, you end up with, you know, collaborative areas that you have to get together and we manage that through our operating processes.

Do you use, uh, the Atlassian platform to run Atlassian?

We do. We run entirely on the Atlassian platform. Uh, uh, we're the I used to say we're the number one user. We're not anymore of our, uh, strategy and operations products. To understand what our business is focusing on, what our large scale goals are, where the people, the investments, the technical systems, um, how they all come together, and, uh, what is going right and wrong across all of those. So we are a big believer in our strategy collection to operate, uh, uh, a large scale business,

One of my favorite questions to ask enterprise software CEOs is how much they personally use the enterprise software. How much do you personally use your products? an awful lot. Uh, What's your number one feature request for your teams?

look, our number one, my number one feature request is usually continual UI congruence. Uh, I guess that's that's the category that people would put it in. Uh, I'm a bit of a stickler for design and consistency. We we wanna achieve eventual consistency in design, which we're. We've come a huge distance in the last five years, and the last two years we've been truly world class at doing it. That's usually my biggest area where I use a lot of our products on a regular basis, and as such, I'm moving around the platform.

And you're looking for ways where this thing over here happens this way. Hey, they do it better over there. And so we're trying to achieve that eventual consistency across a large, uh, product surface area. Um, I use DR, our web browser is like, I think it's like ninety six, 97% of Atlassian now uses DR on a regular basis. I mean, that's on kind of daily, daily basis. So I literally spend many, many, many hours of the day.

Um, we we are building a web browser for ourselves because we've reached the point that we're like, man, this thing should just be better for knowledge workers. So we've built already, I would argue, the best browser for knowledge workers in the world, and it's getting much, much, much better. Keep watching this space. Um, so, yes, I, I, I would say there's no twenty four hour period go goes by where I don't use one of our products.

I'm not sure there's a I doubt there's a six hour period that goes by where I don't use one of our products at the moment.

I wanna talk about Dia in a second, cause I'm very curious about that acquisition. Uh, obviously, we covered the browser company very deeply at the Verge, and that was a big acquisition for you guys. Uh, setting that aside for just one second. One of the things I'm particularly curious about here is the distinction between the platform and the products that run on the platform. And again, maybe this is just productive, but it sounds like there's a a big layer of capability, and the products are expressions of those capabilities in in different ways, but they're all running on the same core platform.

Is that is that how you think about it?

Yes, absolutely. We have to build a single RD platform, whether that's how we talk to AI gateways, whether that's how chat works, um, whether that's how, uh, automation and identity and logging and governance and compliance and uh, um, content classification, whether that's how our home, our search engine work. There's many, many more technical capabilities that have to be shared. Then you have all of the next layer up, which is and and customers want that to work the same.

Doesn't matter if I'm in Confluence or Jira or Loom or the service collection. I, I don't have to. I automation shouldn't be different per per per place in the in the world. And that's very expensive, it's very hard, it takes a lot of time, but it delivers a huge amount of customer value and and loyalty. Most vendors don't try to do that, they literally don't try. Um, then you have a layer up, which is important, which is the consistency of operation, uh, and how operations, uh, processes can be mixed across applications.

So if I open a Confluence page inside of Jira, I want that to feel like a Confluence page, but I want it to be inside of Jira. I don't wanna leave Jira to open the if I just wanna read it, close it, keep going. So there's a lot of UI layer sort of recomposability, if you wanna think about it that way. Um, and then lastly, each application has to do its job. If you blend enterprise software together, you end up in a world of hell.

People have tried this many times. You want a tool to do a job. You wanna pick up a screwdriver or a hammer or saw and feel like that thing's gonna do the thing you hired it to do. The interface is designed to help you do that task, and so that's where there is a difference in the interface layer, the interaction layer between those tools. Um, and the the combination of those is where a lot of our design challenges live.

For example, Robo is our chat layer, is amazing, right? Uh, I would argue it's one of the best, if not very close to the best enterprise chat products in the world. Our customers continually say that. How come you're better than insert famous brand here? There's a lot of reasons why we perform better in evaluations and testing with Robo. It's not because we make a foundational LLM, I think, which is the the floor of thinking. However, using Robo inside a product, if you're going to Robo for the sake of Robo, awesome.

You have a question to ask, you wanna search across everything, fine, you go to a particular interface. If you're inside of Loom or Jira, or, um, you know, the service collection, you just wanna open up chat, ask a question. You want it to understand the context you're in, but you want that operation to be consistent across the platform. Um, that is, that's what we're, uh, striving for, uh, to deliver to customers.

Support for the show comes from Upwork. Every business owner hits a point where they need more expertise than they can handle alone. But another full time hire isn't always the answer. That's where Upwork comes in. With Upwork, you can hire highly skilled freelancers across a variety of specialties, from software development and AI implementation to marketing, design and business operations. You can browse profiles, review past work, and get help scoping the role. That way, you can hire with confidence and get started quickly.

And with Business Plus, you can access the top one of talent on the platform. Thousands of growing businesses already trust Upwork to hire highly skilled freelance professionals. It's free to sign up, and posting a job is simple. Visit Upwork dot com right now and post your job for free. That's Upwork dot com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. Spelled U P W O R K dot com Upwork dot com. Support for the show comes from Shopify.

Starting a business requires you to be resourceful, and the more you flex that muscle, the more you start to see opportunities for growth. For example, launching your business with Black Friday approaching means you can take advantage of the extra online traffic. Shopify is there to help you make it all happen. Shopify is the platform for a record breaking, reliable holiday selling season for businesses at every stage. Their pre-built website themes and AI site builder make it easy to launch a beautiful, professional-looking store.

And you don't ever need to touch a line of code to do it. They also have a mobile app that lets you run your store from anywhere. Their AI e-commerce expert Sidekick can help you manage almost any business task with a single prompt, including holiday discounts. With Shopify, you can easily sell everywhere people shop online, in person, across social media, and even in AI chats. If you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to Shopify dot com slash decoder to start your free trial.

That's Shopify dot com slash decoder. Go to Shopify dot com slash decoder today to hear your first. Support for the show comes from Granola. Have you ever left a meeting thinking that was productive? And then ten minutes later, when it's time to take next steps, you're at a loss. Or worse, you've been heads down the entire meeting, furiously typing notes instead of actually listening, and now your brain is fried. Meetings are a mess. Granola fixes that.

Granola is an AI-powered notepad that makes your meeting notes useful. It capture what happens in your meetings and turns it into clean, structured notes with decisions and action items pulled out and made easy to find. And the best part, Granola works through your device's audio, which means it integrates seamlessly into the video conferencing tools you already use. No setup, no awkward bots, it's just your normal meeting with superpowers. You get to actually listen instead of frantically typing every word, and still walk away knowing exactly what was decided, who's doing what, and what comes next.

Once you try it on your first meeting, it's hard to go without. You could try it totally free. Just head to granola dot ai slash decoder. That's granola dot ai slash decoder to get your time back. Go to granola dot ai slash decoder and try it on your next call.

One of my constant tropes on the show is that if you describe to me your org chart, I can tell you 80% of your problems, right? The structure of the company leads to some kind of natural politics in some kind of way. The tension between we have products that are designed to do a job, and we have a platform that contains the core capabilities is pretty well known, right? It's maybe your product teams are gonna desire platform capabilities that don't exist yet, or they will desire different platform capabilities from one another.

How do you break those ties? How do you make those calls?

Look, we have a number of ways that we are different and we try to do that. Uh, first, I would say most important, we have a platform centric CEO and co-founder who thinks in terms of platforms. Thinking in systems is my favorite book, man. I have it, I have a copy on every desk. It's the job of you. You have to put the platform first collectively, um, and then you go solve a bunch of problems. That does not mean genericism wins, but it does mean when you make trade-offs, you have to spend the extra effort and time to make it platform centric to make it work.

And that is a forever task, right? So it helps to have a CEO, if you think about the the referee across all the functions, that's platform centric. They know where I'm gonna land, and so we're gonna end up there. Uh, secondly, we have design as a very, very senior role. We have a massive investment in design. Uh, our chief design officer sits, reports to me, sits on our executive team. We have three, four, five now chief design officers in the business from other very large businesses, some larger than us.

We have a huge investment in design and experience, and I think in, especially in the AI era, that's getting ever more important. Actually, um, much as Claude Design or something would tell you the opposite, I I don't think so. I actually think design and the experience of software, if the if the cost of building goes down, um, the quality and differentiation is on the experience and the design. And that's not something that's easy to do. That requires a huge amount of taste and judgment.

Um, lastly, I think we aren't afraid to put things together in unusual ways in the organization when we need to solve problems. So the latest example of that probably is our internal IT and engineering function. Uh, now reports to our chief people officer, and I've combined those two roles, which is unusual. Like, why is HR running IT? That doesn't make any sense. Uh, it actually does, I would argue, at the moment, because of the things we need to do to transform our business internally continually.

Which is that if I look at AI and becoming more AI native as a business, I ended up with two piles of projects, the pile of projects that relate to talent, how I need to change and grow the people we have, get them using these technologies, get them thinking in certain ways. I have a huge talent problem. Hiring, growing, training, changing people is very difficult to be competitive, and I have a huge system problem. I need to change our internal systems to have MCP servers, I need to make sure that everything is operable, I need to make sure that we have all of these system changes so that AI rolls out.

How are we managing our, uh, uh, token spending? You know, there's a huge amount of system change. And so I end up referring a bunch of is this a talent problem or a system problem? And I say that doesn't make any sense. Usually the answer is this one's sixty talent, this one's forty system, and this one's the opposite way around. So I've put them all together inside the business so that our system changes to apply AI internally and our talent changes to apply AI internally are, uh, have are in the same function right now.

Um, which is a little odd, right? The people who deliver the laptops and the people who manage compensation work for the same group. But it actually makes logical sense based on what we need to change about our business at the moment, right? What is this sort of three year epic that needs to change? Um, so I do think we organize around the problems we need to solve and the goals we have as an organization when we need to.

This is a a brilliant segue, uh, because I wanted to ask about this exact thing. We have the I believe the formal title of your HR person is now chief people and AI enablement officer. That's quite a title. And the point you're making about the the systems of the business needing to change, leading to some change in your talent mix, I is coming true, right? In March, you laid off about 10% of the company. I watched the video you made in in Loom about that.

Um, and your point there was you're not necessarily replacing people with AI, but you had identified a change in the mix of skills that the company needed, and you were gonna make these changes proactively. Walk me through this. What what made you say, Okay, AI is here sufficiently that the mix of skills is different? And what changes did you make to your systems to make losing 10% of your people effective or worthwhile?

the environment we've lived in in technology for a while is continual hiring and growth. Um, the the markets have changed on their their view on that, right? So you have to say that because one of the ways that we've managed changing businesses over time has been hiring people in different areas, right? Uh, if you have red dots and blue dots and you say, well, we need more green dots, you just say, well, we're gonna hire all green dots for a while until we have a blend.

And you kind of you manage it that way. That is no longer, um, uh, a feasible path, firstly. Secondly, uh, we have certain areas of the business, right? Our AI

Wait, actually, can I just ask one question about that? You're you're kind of describing the COVID era overhiring that every tech company are doing, and you're saying that's kind of over.

uh, I don't, and yeah, I think people hire at the rate of the best decisions they know at the given time and what they're encouraged to do by others. Hopefully, they don't look at everybody around them, but I know that a lot of CEOs do look at the people around them and be like, I should do that. Um, I always think those are poor choices, but overhiring, I don't know. Pre-COVID, we were a few thousand people, you know what I mean?

So we we're four times the size, I don't know, three times the size we were pre-COVID, probably our businesses, you know, again, we're accelerating as a business, right? We grew thirty odd percent last quarter on 7 billion dollar run rate, um, which is the fastest we've grown in about two years. So

Yeah, so I think I'm just I'm just,

customers are opting for more acceleration.

yeah, I think I I'm just trying to understand the you can't just hire a bunch of green dots comment a little more clearly. Because I've heard from many of your peers, oh yeah, during that period, we we just hired everybody that we could. And it sounds like that's not specifically what you were experiencing, but it rhymes in some way.

It does rhyme, but I think there are definitely periods where that is the way to go, right? That's not the current three, four year, you know, a period of time, right? So that that's that's the first thing I say, because then you need to work out how do we change our skill mix? So we have a huge amount of internal programs to try to do that. We also have certain areas, our AI products and services specifically, and, uh, our enterprise sales areas are growing very, very fast.

They're doing well and we wanna invest further in those areas, right? And so when you have certain areas you need to invest further in, you run into very difficult choices. Where you're like, okay, I need to invest further in these two areas. I can't grow the overall in a significant way. I have to manage how to trans transition, uh, uh, the organization between that, right? Which leads to a lot of very difficult choices. Um, we are still hiring really hard in those areas, right?

In order to change the skill mix. But you also have a question of how fast we need to do that. Um, it doesn't, I always say, take away from any internal, um, training programs. I say that in in sort of air quotes. In terms of how AI is adopted and used, it's more around learn, play, share, you know, mutual learning. It's less like an L and D, I think, in terms of if I'm gonna sit down and watch a class on how to do this.

But that doesn't take away from that. It's it's a combination of all these factors as we've massively changed the business to be, you know, truly world leading at AI product development in the last two years. Um, there's no doubt that's been a rapid journey and we're trying to move as fast as we can to to get there and to stay ahead.

One of the things I I've heard from a lot of CEOs in your position is, oh, the value of our senior people has increased, right? There are more senior software engineer job listings out in the market right now. Because that, as you've said, that judgment and that taste is very important, and maybe the tools can just build that stuff for you. I'm curious for your view on design, right? The idea that all of our designers will not be enabled to just ship code is very tempting to a lot of people.

And then there's, you know, a third view that says product managers roles do everything and all these roles are gonna come crashing into each other. So what mix of skills specifically did you identify, and how are you prioritizing in this sort of classic triumvirate as more and more people get, uh, the ability to do all the other jobs?

I think it's very easy for people to have very binary takes on these things, right? Um, I find it amusing that if you put an engineer, a designer and a product manager in a room, they'd all sit there and they'd all say, Oh man, it sucks to be you, your job's gonna go away. And I'm like, Ah, that that probably is your answer right there. Um, look, we have a lot more product managers and designers who are writing code, from prototypes to actually shipping code than we ever have before.

That is for sure. We have a lot more marketers and finance people and and HR people who are doing the same thing, by the way. The code that they are writing and shipping builds on two things one a platform that has the engineering robustness to be able to scale and deliver to customers a European compliant data resident solution that is necessary the legal constraints of company country X et cetera so you have to build a technical environment that that is able to get out to a customer with the required degree of customer safety that is a non-trivial problem that's not something you're just gonna vibe code if I'm vibe coding my own solution to something for my household fine it

can just work well enough I'll go fix it if it doesn't if I'm doing that for a large organization I need some other controls and rules around it secondly I think the specialization of those areas all doesn't go away the the human judgment required in different areas it's like the edges of the roles are blending they're able to do a little bit more of someone else's job right I have a lot of designers who are able to ship prototypes that are working code prototypes instead of a a picture or a fake prototype in terms of a mockup that's great I still see them sitting in Figma a lot and doing that I have a lot of engineers who are sitting

in Cursor or Claude code or or whatever on a daily basis um writing features and building things and they're able to do more design than they were before that doesn't replace the need for the other job and it increases the quality of the overall software it increases the speed of collaboration between people if you want to think about it if they each understand each other's role they can have a much more fulsome conversation more quickly the specialized nature of what they do goes up it becomes more spiky I think um which is really really important the ability of building um platforms is going to get overused here becomes more important so we just this week for example we shipped um

one of our designers wrote an interesting blog post about uh we now have an MCP and a CLI for our design system internally we have a award winning design system uh Atlassian dot design it's it's very public we we publish all of our design system I've always said the role of design 50% of their job is to make our design system and to keep it being scalable flexible and buildable 50% of their job is to solve the hardest 5% of problems in design because the half where they're building the platform the what used to be templates and design documents that are now CLIs and MCPs to do design internally in the way that we want design to

work so it's consistent and coherent that is a really hard problem to build that However, they're unleashing thousands, if not almost tens of thousands of engineers, to build better designed things when they do that, right? Their leverage is a lot higher in building a design system than it is in solving, help me with this screen, help me with this screen. And it's the same in security, it's the same in, uh, customer, uh, support and customer success, actually, right?

If you think of bug fixing as the platform on which you reduce customer service, um, more and more of that role is required on building those scalable templates, platforms, ways that the other functions can build on top of so they can do that thing, right? If a product manager is vibe coding a feature, as in, they're just stabbing around some sort of code generating area, and it's an area where it's not infrastructural, it doesn't need to scale, it's, you know, fine.

It should leverage our entire design system. Turns out, uh, out of the box, that's not very workable. So we've just shipped minimum viable products and application programming interfaces internally, which are like on version four that are amazing at understanding our design system. So the designers can evolve that system and the features that are being built will continue to match what customers expect and that congruence and consistency. Um, that gets us huge leverage overall, but it's a non-trivial thing.

It doesn't mean the designers are gonna go away, the engineers are gonna go away, the product managers are gonna go away. Um, I, I don't, I. I don't think any of those roles disappear. I'm always joking that Decoder is fundamentally a show about org charts, which means I think I know what the next five years of the show is gonna be about. Because we're on the cusp of some of the weirdest org charts in history in AI.

True,

Matthew Prince from Cloudflare was just on the show. We talked a lot about his Wall Street Journal op-ed where he said, I'm gonna fire all the measurers at the company because I can replace them with AI. They can look at all of my systems and do all the auditing for me. And we're gonna have fewer middle managers because what they're really doing is measuring and auditing things and AI can do that. Mark Zuckerberg, there there are reports that he wants managers to have teams of fifty empowered by AI somewhere inside of Meta.

This strikes me as not a great idea, but we're gonna see how it goes. Where are you? Are you in classic org chart? Are you at wild ideas? How how is this coming together for you?

I'm certainly more measured than that, and I think the reality of how the world will be. I think it's easy to point to extremities. Is someone somewhere a manager with fifty people? Sure, are they effective? Maybe people always talk about Jensen, he's obviously very effective, he's a good dude. He runs things in a very weird way. Is that scalable and repeatable? I'm not sure it's scalable and repeatable. I'm not sure if you took an entire set of large companies and made them all work that way, they wouldn't have worse results as a collective.

Um, part of business is scalability and consistency and able to be understood and managed. That doesn't require uniquely talented individuals to understand a very odd structure as they move around a business. I suspect you are gonna get more role blending, people able to handle multiple types of skills. I suspect they're gonna be more sort of generalist. The edges of the role will blur into the roles around it. A product manager is able to do a bit more marketing and a bit more engineering, right?

And I think that applies almost all, all, all across the way, right? Finance people are probably able to do a bit more legal than they were before. They're able to understand the legal frameworks we have internally with agents and and that's then that's great, right? I don't think that changes the roles themselves. I think it may make teams a bit broader. I do agree with Zuck's general direction that organizations will become a broader triangle, a fatter, wider triangle, right?

The companies will get wider and hence less, uh, deep. I think broadly, that's a true direction. Do you go to fifty person teams? Then is span of controls like three people? Like, I mean, the the organizational depth is like three or something. If you if you multiply by fifty at each level, you have two and a half thousand people with two levels of reports. Uh, I would question that. So that that's probably not an average. I don't know about this term measurers.

I I don't know that anybody had sit around in a knowledge work job and say, my my, my role, my purpose is to measure things, right? I just walk around with a ruler and I'm like, Oh, that's a foot. Uh, I know there are a lot of jobs where that becomes I I know what Matthew's saying, that becomes the effective output of a role. Um, we're measuring it for a purpose, I would believe, and we are going to work out how to make that more scalable.

My probably way of looking at it is a little bit different. I think there are two types of jobs. If you want to simplify an organization, there are supply constrained and there are demand constrained jobs inside a business. So input bound and output bound. Well, what is the constraint on a job? So look at a marketing or a technology function, a creative function versus a a legal or a customer service function. Legal and customer service are input bound.

I if I deploy out an AI, I don't suddenly get a lot more contracts, right? Like the number of contracts coming in. If I'm looking at NDAs or leases, or trying to, uh, understand the company's legal position in certain areas, I can process potentially that work faster with AI. And through systems, you know, I, I can be more efficient in how I do that. That is one set of roles that you can look at almost everything in a business process and say that's input bound.

I'm gonna manage that differently than things that are output bound. If I think about marketing or engineering, unless I run out of roadmap items, which I've never heard any engineering team in my history of twenty five years of doing this. Where they're like, actually, we've reached the end of the roadmap and we'd like some more ideas of what to do next, please, right? Said no one building software ever that has a large customer base. Their output, their creativity, is not is bound by their own initiation and their ability to organize groups of people and processes and everything else, which is what the Atlassian platforms do.

That is their limiting factor. It is not the human ability to create ideas. And so it may be that you have less input bound functions and areas as a proportion of your total employee base, and you have more creative output bound functions. You know, how much is this human ingenuity and creativity and imagination, right? Um, a a possibility. I I think that's likely the way things shift and trend over time. I think that's gonna take much longer than people think.

We're big in technology. Next year, everything will be like this, and it takes ten years to happen, but it will happen. Um, I think I I'm very fond of this term. I I keep meaning to put up a a rant online about it. I think we used to talk about information asymmetry, and I'm stealing another friend's quote here, but we used to talk about information asymmetry and how much certain people know things, and that is their source of power or advantage.

I do think we're moving to, he, he said it, and it really hit me like a bolt. We're moving to imagination asymmetry. We're moving from information asymmetry to imagination asymmetry, where your ability to create and think is going to be far more important as a competitive advantage for your team, your job, your business, than your access to information, your control of information, your understanding of information. That part is going to be cheap. That's what LLMs are really good at.

What they're not good at is imagining things, right? They didn't decide to start at Atlassian. They what what business has been started by an LLM? Zero in the world, ever, right? They got made of control.

But hey, Anthropic has run a failed vending machine for several years now. Come on, that that business is losing money every day.

But it required a human to say, you know what we're gonna do? Let's fail at running a vending machine today, right? They were probably sitting in front of a vending machine, cursing the thing when it didn't drop their candy bar. And they said, Hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this better with AI, which is probably the way that most of those companies think about every single problem, right? As they're staring at a vending machine. It required a human being to say, let's go do this, and it required them to write a bunch of stuff to go create the vending machine operation code and try it.

And, uh, you know, we we all learned a lot as a result of this scientific experimentation.

Support for the show comes from Ingin. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard. But if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. Ingin is the fastest growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes, earn up to 10% back on hotels. And in 2025, Ingin customers saved more than $300 million on travel with zero booking fees, no contracts and no BS.

More than a thousand businesses join Ingin every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at Ingin dot com slash Vox.

Support for the show comes from CrowdStrike. AI is already fundamentally changing how companies build products and run their businesses. If you listen to the show, you probably already know this. But while AI drives innovation, every new model and agent also creates new cybersecurity vulnerabilities. That's why CrowdStrike built AI detection and response, or AIDR. AIDR helps organizations discover where AI is being used, monitors AI activity at runtime, and helps teams detect, investigate and respond to threats involving AI systems.

As companies adopt AI, security has to be built in from the start. More than seventy of the Fortune one hundred trust CrowdStrike to protect their businesses. Now, CrowdStrike is helping secure the AI era. You can learn more about AI detection and response at CrowdStrike dot com slash decoder.

Support for the show comes from ServiceNow. AI was supposed to handle the parts of the job you hate. Instead, it just describes them, suggests what to do about them, and then leaves you to do it. That's not help, that's homework. ServiceNow's AI specialists are different. They're not a tool. Think of them as digital teammates who actually do the work from start to finish. Cases get resolved, requests get processed, loops get closed, and most importantly, no extra work for you.

Because when you can truly delegate to AI, you can get back to the work only you can do. The work that requires a person with ideas and judgment, and, you know, a pulse. To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit ServiceNow dot com.

Let me ask you the other decoder question, and then I wanna apply all of this to to what is broadly happening to enterprise software and SaaS. The other decoder question I ask everybody, how do you make decisions? What's your framework for doing that?

I would say I make decisions by talking a lot. That's what people internally would truly say. Um, I find the need to discuss things from different angles very important. I like to let other people talk. I like to get all the information together. I do believe there's obviously a time where we need to say we need to stop and and just uh uh, move in a certain direction. I think the more important part for for me, that how I make decisions is I really like to explain decisions to people.

You know, at Atlassian, we're we're uh, we have a value, we open company, no bullshit. And I tell people all the time that does not mean transparency. We don't owe you as an employee all of the details behind every decision. We don't wanna all the sausage making is not useful. It's overwhelming to people, it doesn't help us move fast. We do owe employees clarity on why we are making a decision and an explanation of said decision.

And I think that's one of the most important things managers can do for training, for helping their talent grow, is not we're going left, but hey, we thought about it. We looked at the different options, we considered straight, right, left, here's the pros and cons, we're going left. This is the reason why we're going left. Often people don't do that because people don't like the decision, right? And I say that all the time. When you you talked about our, um, you know, talent mix changes in March, we have to make a lot of hard decisions to run this business.

I want to make sure that we are always explaining those decisions to people in the clearest and simplest way we can. Why we've made a decision and what the decision is without any dressing. And I'm I'm really don't like these corporate emails where I read the whole thing. I'm like, So what are you saying exactly? Like, you've got a lot of words here. I'm like, here's what we're doing. We need to change our skill mix. Here's why.

You should have the right amount of empathy to explain decisions of, you know, especially hard ones, but you also should not expect people to necessarily like it. Like we make a lot of hard decisions where I'm sure 60% of the company, 70% of the company, think it's a great decision, 40% think it's a terrible decision. We build trust as leaders by explaining our decisions and being clear about why we've made it and how we've made it, and hopefully we improve decision making across, right?

I always say decisions get to my desk when they're presidential decisions. I think it was Obama that called it that, where it's fifty one, forty nine. That's why I've made it to my desk. If it was 90% certain what we should do, it should not have made it to my desk in the first place. I only get hard decisions. That's that's that's a well operating company. I think any leaders should be in that situation. If it's an obvious decision, why did it make it to you?

So that then requires more thought and more explanation about those decisions. I think that's probably the most important part than any sort of framework we use to make them.

So let me put all of this under some pressure. You've described Atlassian as a platform, a lot of an organization's decision making and data and capabilities in that platform. What are we gonna do next? How are we gonna do it? Is it working? The entire point of the SaaSpocalypse was well, we don't need your beautiful user interface, we don't need your design surfaces or, uh, congruence of design across products. What all we need is your data.

And if I unleash codex upon your data store, it won't even matter that it's the same platform. You can have fifteen different vendors, and the AI will create itself some middleware and read and synthesize all the data, and that'll be great. And like, actually, your business can leap ahead in in meaningful ways. I think my favorite example of this from a previous era was I always had Daniel Dines from UiPath on the show. And instead of modernizing your healthcare billing system, he would just build robots that would use Windows 3.1 for you, right?

And this is like a very early version of what I think every AI company is selling right now, which is instead of modernizing your backend and spending all that money in a, uh, on a migration, our robots will just use your horrible old databases and present to you a new user interface. That's one version of this SaaSpocalypse. I I see it coming for a lot of businesses. How do you expect to change all of Atlassian against that?

Because a lot of what Atlassian sells is upgrade, right? Upgrade the whole platform, use one product, then use all the products, use the whole platform, modernize your entire business. And the other answer is, well, it's like $200 a month and you can just token max your way into the future.

You're talking about the headless sort of world, I guess. Um, I, I say the headless is brainless. Um, it is literally the same thing. Uh, it is submission in slow motion if you're a software vendor to to do such thing. And I say that very carefully, cause again, it's one of these answers that requires nuance. We have one of the most used MCP servers in the world. We've just shipped a giant upgrade to it, rewritten it from scratch.

It is massively used on a daily basis by millions of people, and it's amazing. MCP servers, we've shipped three or four CLS that are also used incredibly heavily. The ability to have interoperation of tasks is very, very important for customers to get jobs done, and I totally agree with that. However, and people who use our MCP server and our CLI, they actually grow faster, they create more issues in Jira, they grow their seats faster. We've said this publicly on earnings calls.

I think it's like at least 5% faster. They grow their ARR at twice the rate of customers who don't use our AR, our, uh, CLI and MCP servers. So the customers using these things are growing their Atlassian spend faster than they have before. So that world I totally believe in. When I hear the word headless, though, I think that is the only world that we're going to exist in. Like, we just sell an MCP server.

That is the brainless part about it, because then your software really has no value. If you truly just have a database, fine. If your interface sucks, and I think a lot of enterprise software has horrible, horrible, horrible interfaces. This is why I And they don't want ask all the enterprise to use it.

C E Os if they use their own products. It it it's really, just how bad does your interface suck? Yeah,

Ooh, I'm a big fan of recording the loom and being like, guys, this doesn't make any sense. And I believe if you do that, that yak shaving over and over again, you end up with amazing interfaces. And that's why tens of millions of people wake up to our software. The investment in design and experience that I talked about is the antithesis of that. I actually think the world is very different than those views. We'll see in a few years time who's right.

The way the Atlassian platform works is not to be a single platform. I am probably the only C E O that goes into customers, massive, large scale customers, and says, do not centralize everything on my platform. I do not believe that is a viable strategy for a C I O. I don't think it is. Our platform is highly connected. It always has been. One of the things that Jira, Confluence, Trello, the service collection do is they interact with many many other applications.

You look at any work item in Jira that's been going for a while, it is full of links. Links to Workday and Salesforce and ServiceNow and Figma, links to source code, links to, uh, Google Drive and Teams. Links are what build our context graph, right? The reason we have the best context graph in the world is because we have a lot of links to start with. And we have had a ten-year history of having to understand how to be collaborative with other applications, right?

Our applications are by nature highly connected to the rest of your I T world, the rest of your technology world. We don't wanna be a control tower. I think it's a stupid analogy. I think every C I O has been told, just trust us, we'll deal with all the problems. It's never worked. I don't think it ever will. The reality of technology is well, you're gonna have once you add AI more.

to the mix, maybe it'll it'll work this time. I mean, this is the this is the thing that is being sold, right? Is you have now a powerful, intelligent orchestration layer that will finally realize the stream.

Three parts snake oil, two parts bullshit. Um, I think the reality is it will help all the applications, if built well, to work better with each other. There's no doubt, like, uh, look at Figma and and Atlassian, we have a we have a deep partnership, we use each other's MCP servers a lot, and we can build better solutions for marketing teams and designers and technology teams between the two platforms than we ever have been able to before.

Because we can understand each other's data in ways that we never have been able to before, and we can solve workflows on different ends. If you're sitting in a deep design, you're sitting in Figma. It's a visual experience. If you need that to be tied to work and then understand how to find that, that that moves back into our world, and we want to make those journeys as seamless as possible. We wanna be not a control tower, we wanna be, uh, a subway station that is highly connected.

We wanna be Union Square, we wanna be Town Square, we wanna have a lot of lines going through us, and we wanna make that experience for our customers the best that they can. So I think it's 98% was our stat on the earnings call. More than 98% of people using our MCP server also use the user interface, and that is not changing, right? The ability to do work faster doesn't mean I just stop using it.

If you invest and have a good interface and experience, and you're solving higher level problems. Um, if you look at the features we're shipping around agentic uses, right? So how do these harnesses, Claude Codex and everything else, work inside the Atlassian world and vice versa? Now, one world is I open up Claude, I say, hey, go work on this work item. It uses our MCP server to go and get the work item. It uses our teamwork graph to go and get all the context around the work item that is necessary and and related, and that gives it the best chance of doing that job the cheapest possible.

That is certainly a way that people are gonna work, and Claude's gonna move the work item along to the next stage. Awesome. There are a lot of other people who start in Jira and will say, hey, send this work item to Claude. And then on the board, it tells them the work item's running and going. They're in a interface that is built for the task, back to the saw and hammer and sort of screwdriver analogy. It's built for the task they're doing.

It needs to understand, hey, Claude needs your attention inside of Jira. You can open Claude, say you need to send it off. Most people don't use Claude. Most people don't use Codex. Every company, company customer I go to has a whole bunch of harnesses running. They're gonna have internal ones they built, they're gonna have, you know, two, three, four vendors. Most people aren't making a choice. Um, they're all amazing, they're all over leaping over each other in progress.

Our job is to bring all that together into a coordinated surface. To understand your agentic sessions, your human sessions, your work, to connect all of your enterprise applications into a giant graph, and to give you phenomenal answers across the whole thing. That requires a lot of interface investment. That is hard. That takes time. That takes great design and experience folk. That takes taste oriented product managers and engineers. That is a non-trivial challenge, and I do think a lot of people are avoiding that challenge.

Uh, and I don't think it'll end well for them. I don't think the world is gonna live in a C L I as an end tool. I think

You don't think that chatbot it's a marketing is the final, final user interface?

tool. I don't think chatbot is the final answer. No, I think, uh, we learned this in 1970 with, uh, with the C L I. Um, we don't know. We're we're all learning what the future interface is. It doesn't mean that chat's not gonna be a part of it. It's just where does this sort of, uh, world work? Um, you know, you talked about DIA. DIA is a good example where we're trying to build a AI driven experience for knowledge workers that is based in the world they understand and still magical and different, not based in a taking them out of the world they understand to a a chat based interface.

so DIA is the the browser. You acquired a company called the Browser Company, uh, I think, for a little over 600 million. That was a a year ago. We spent, uh, a lot of time with the browser company when they were working on their products. And, you know, at first they were building a a consumer product. And then the notion that what they were building was more like an operating system came into focus as we covered DIA and their and their product strategy.

And most of those conversations, and most of that coverage, most of which was done by my colleague David Pierce, was happening simultaneously with Google search traffic dropping, right? And the very notion of the browser as an information document viewer was changing in big ways. If you think the homepage of Chrome opens to Google and that's gonna take you to a bunch of web pages, well, actually, Google has a lot of ideas in between there that is changing traffic on the web.

And yet at the same time, the web is an application environment. Is a thing that can make AI agents vastly more capable because the applications all live somewhere that they can go address them. It was it was just obviously explosive at that time. You and I are talking, it's like a week or two into Meta launching Muse, and the power of Muse is that Mark Zuckerberg has given everybody eight gigs of RAM and eight gigs of storage in the cloud with a web browser.

And now you have a a an agent that can just go use a web browser for you. And this is like very powerful, and Amazon is furious about it and has blocked this web browser. Do you have DIA because you need to control the application layer, or is it something bigger than that?

I think two, two things are important to understand. When you get technological disruption, one thing that happens is we've all moved up the interface stack a level, right? Not a lot of people competing about D O S or operating systems anymore. In the modern internet world, one way to move up the interface stack is to move towards the browser. Features that were inside of applications move to being inside of the browser as we increasingly learn and operate that way.

I think second, the biggest thing that's changed, and you know, usually people's habits change is what happens. Knowledge workers, yourself, myself, everybody. We spend 80% of our lives in a browser, but we're not reading articles all the time. We are sometimes. We're not reading web pages, we're using applications. We're using Gmail and Google Calendar, where we have Slack open, uh, we're using the Atlassian platform, all of our applications and Salesforce, and, you know, our, um, we're watching videos like like Loom, and we're interacting with those videos back and forth.

That set of tabs is no longer a set of web pages. It is a set of documents and applications that have massive power underneath them. We're trying to rebuild the web browser in a totally new form for knowledge workers who live in applications, who have their browser open eighty, 90% of their day as their front surface area and want a better way of managing those applications and getting work done across those applications. The browser has some incredible power to be able to do that.

It requires us to understand S A S S apps very deeply, which we do. It requires us to understand enterprise security very deeply, which we do. It requires us to not chase the consumer audience. Chrome, Safari are built the way they are because they have to cater from five-year-olds to hundred-year-olds who are doing less work-related knowledge tasks and are doing more browsing and entertainment and other tasks. That doesn't mean that someone who's a knowledge worker in a corporate job isn't looking at YouTube or Facebook sometimes, but it's not the purpose of their job.

So we believe we can build a better browsing experience, a better work experience, right? Um, one of the pitches we had for the product is we're not building a browser, we're building a doer, right? It's a totally different thing. We're helping you do things. We're not helping you browse passively. And hence why tabs and split screens and pin tabs and groups and AI and dynamic tab groups, live tab groups as we have of the documents you have is a great example, right?

Our documents live tab group in DIA shows you the documents. It will automatically open and close tabs if you want to think about it that way for you across any content application, Google Drive, Confluence, SharePoint, any application you use that has documents. If someone comments or shares a document with you, the tab automatically gets opened by your web browser. And if you're done with it somewhere else, it automatically gets closed by your web browser. Because that is a set of documents I'm currently working on.

Same for pull requests or anything like this. Then we add A I over the top. A I lets us change how we use these knowledge applications in insane ways. The browser has your entire history of what you've done. It has skills, it has an ability to run A I. Like, you can use D I A to make minesweeper, and you can use D I A to make minesweeper out of the tasks that you did in the last week.

And it'll go start a computer underneath the browser. It'll run a bunch of code generation, it'll create an application for you that plays minesweeper based on the tasks you have completed in the last week. Now, I don't think that's a very useful application, but the fact that it can do it is amazing. When you apply that to what you can do, so the most popular feature of DIA is the morning brief. People are blown away and often suspicious about how we can understand what you need to do today with a fidelity and a design quality and an experience that makes it a joyful experience when it pops up every morning.

Mine opened, uh, about forty five minutes ago. That is a design challenge. That is an amazing team of designers that are thinking about our most used application surface area and reimagining it for knowledge workers and for the A I era simultaneously, with access to every SaaS application that you have open on your computer, in a way that corporate security is going to say, this is a good idea and I trust it. Um, and that is the mission we embarked on a year ago, browser company embarked on three years ago, uh, and it's usable today.

It's coming out of Windows any day now. It's in beta on Windows G A's very, very soon, um, and it's used on the Mac by a huge number of people on a daily basis and only increasing.

let me just push you a little bit on moving up the stack to the next level of user interface. You could argue that already happened with web browsers, right? Windows was disrupted by the very presence of the web browser. The iMac was only successful because the the most interesting thing you could do with a computer at that time was go on the web. And so the presence of the web browser on the Mac allowed a bunch of applications to move away from, uh, Windows binaries to being web apps and then cloud apps and now productivity apps in the cloud.

The web as an application environment is probably more vital and important than ever before, right? It is, it is the thing you're describing. It's where all the applications live, and a custom web browser designed to do work is very important. At the same time, I, I would just say, like, didn't that already happen? Are you actually moving up the stack, or are you just building a more custom web browser? Or is AI changing that in some other way?

Uh, a a I is changing that. A I is giving us the ability to help you understand what work you have to do, not just your browsing history, right? One of the most powerful things about A I that I think people don't broadly understand is an L L M's ability to generate content is kind of well known. I can say, tell me a dad joke, and it spits one out, right? It, it streams out tokens. What is more important, I think, for application vendors like us, people who are trying to make tools and products and solutions for customers, is the ability to read text, not write it, but read it.

Because we can understand meaning for the first time ever. We can understand what a page or a comment or a piece of text is about. Then we can make application level choices, which we never could do beforehand. Word didn't know what document you were writing. When it said it looks like you're writing a letter, it was like really shit house, and it was a terrible experience. Now it can actually tell with super high fidelity. Are you writing a letter, a PhD, is it a high school essay or a university essay?

And it can adapt and change its interface. The ability of DIA and AI is to understand what it is that you are browsing, what it is that you are doing, to be able to reach into applications to get content and to pull it back to give you tools to manage your day. So the morning brief looks across your calendar and your messaging tools and your document tools to tell you what it is you have today in a very intelligent manner, the way it would be if you gave me all your content and said, spend the days.

Now it reads millions of words in order to generate that, and it has a lot of smarts to give you a very simple experience of the most important things you need to do today that are totally different from anybody else on the planet. That requires a lot of A I to do, and it requires connections to all of your S A S S apps. The browser's logged into all those apps, so it can do that, right?

And it happens locally, it happens in on, it doesn't happen in the cloud, it happens on your machine. That is something that we could never do before to understand. Hey, of these ten documents you looked at yesterday, here's the one you need to do today. Because I know in your calendar, you got to do this tomorrow, you got to do these things, right? This is the most important thing for us to do today. And let me help you get started on that task.

Let me draft some notes for you. Let me help you with that document. Let me help you do things. That is something that was never ever possible beforehand. Um, lastly, it understands the people you interact with. People are left out of so many of these conversations and equations. You can think of DIA as having a mini C R M that is constantly updated based on your browsing habits. It's a weird analogy, but it's effectively what it's doing.

One of the things, many things it's doing inside the browser, which is why its answers are so good. It knows that you and I don't know each other very well. It knows I know my head of engineering extremely well. So if that person asked me for something, because it's maintaining a constant context graph of people relationships across every single one of your S A S S applications into duplicating and normalizing and using A I, all of that helps to understand what tasks are actually important to me, right?

It can look at LinkedIn and see who you are and say, man, that interview prep you've got to do today, you should put that up your stack. Bill has an important person. It it it does all of that for you. Can you put Can help you.

that in the DIA system prompt so people know when they come to talk to me? Just hard Well, we'll, code that in we'll see if there. You gotta

we we know some people. prioritize me. Yeah, Um, it's hard, and the experience, none of that should need to be known by somebody using DIA. The experience should just be a beautiful, joyful way to start your day. We want to leave you with more sense of calm, control, uh, uh, comfort about your day, not stress about A I, right? Leave that to us to do really well, and we just give you the answers that you need from your tools and applications.

It also does not mean you use less of those tools and applications, right? I don't use DIA and stop using Slack, I don't use DIA and stop using Confluence. It's helping me understand which thing do I need to do next by understanding what's inside those things, right? By cross referencing with my LinkedIn and my Salesforce and my Microsoft Teams conversations and meeting transcripts. But it's doing that all for me in the morning and during the day to be able to say, here's what you have to do next.

Here's the most important thing, and providing an interface to allow me to organize and group those tasks. Um, in ways that hopefully are are bordering on joyful. And I say that they're beautiful and simple experiences, right? And there's so many lovely touches in DIA that just make it a joy to use, uh, uh, every day. So we're we're pushing that mission really hard.

it seems very obvious to me that you have a very clear view of how A I should work in the enterprise and how work should get done using your tools, your tools enhanced by A I, your tools expressed in your browser. There's focus there, and I appreciate that. On the other side of the house, on the consumer side, my argument has been, well, the reason people hate A I and they're mad about it is a little bit.

Because, you know, the doomers have said there's 10% chance we're all gonna die and all of our jobs are going away. But there's also no great products, right? There's not as much coherence and focus as I'm hearing from you in the enterprise context. Do you think that there's some great consumer A I product in the offing that has the kind of focus that you have in enterprise? Because that seems like the the missing piece for me.

Yes, if you look at the history of technological disruptions, the products that came through the disruption often aren't linearly related to the disruption. If you think about the smartphone era, and we all pick up our smartphones a hundred times a day, don't tell me you don't. When the iPhone came out, we were all excited by little bits and pieces. We did not think, man, that camera thing's gonna lead to this Instagram phenomenon. We did not think the GPS is gonna lead to Uber, and so I can take transportation, right?

The products that came as a result of the technology shift. The iPhone is an amazing business, don't get me wrong, but the the services and changes to life didn't come from the iPhone. They came from the apps that it enabled, like Uber and Instagram and whatever else you like on the mobile phone. It can be a game, it can be anything. Those take a while for people to play with the form factor, to understand the bits, right?

Uber didn't come along until the iPhone six. Um, because it all needed to kind of get better, right? And and like, then someone's like, wait, we can take a car with a phone and it'll just show up. And yeah, we can show you where the car is, and we can build enough trust, and we can build a whole service layer. So I suspect one part of it is in A I. We need to keep playing and Muse, I I know the Muse team pretty well.

That's an amazing example of an application. There are many, many more of these things. Uh, there's a company that one of my kids loves called, uh, Talon, I think, which makes these sort of Hollywood, AI, agent, chatbot things with personality. That someone from technology is like, ah, that's just OpenClaw with some skin on it. And kids are like, this is a character that I can interact with, right? Like, it's an amazing psychology, Hollywood game character. These side of applications we're just starting to see.

It's gonna be an incredibly exciting five years of those sets of applications, right? And I suspect it takes way longer than we think to understand, get to G P T six, get to understanding of memory and harnesses and putting all these things together. And it probably won't be open claw, it'll be some version of how an agent surfaces in a certain area of life. Um, so yes, the products are still coming in the consumer space. Secondly, I think the no part of the answer is that A I is not a product, it's a technology, it's a piece of technology.

If it just makes everything about your life a bit better, you won't even notice you're using A I, and actually, that's the beauty of it. You can use DIA all day long and not realize how much A I it's doing. Just like, oh yeah, the morning brief thing, it's really good. I I look at it every morning. Um, it's one of the most highly engaged features we've ever built. And it just tells you, here are the three things I think you need to do today.

Here's what your day looks like. Want me to help you prep for this thing? You're like, Yeah, help me prep for that thing. You don't need to know it's A I. We don't tell you it's A I. We're purposefully not trying to hide it, not secret, but we're also you need to have a great experience. You don't care. There's an L L M and tokens and gateways and massive amount of technology going on behind the scenes.

You just want to know what are the three things I have to do this morning? And if you build trust in it, that's great. The hard part, when you mentioned the data centers and stuff, is people want those experiences and they're gonna be very joyful and very contented and more calm and happy about the experiences they're getting. They're just not gonna be using A I, right? Uh, I I tell this to to people here all the time.

Every time you take a photo on the iPhone, there is an insane amount of A I processing going on to make that photo look good. Insane amount. And photos look amazing on my phone compared to what they did ten years ago and twenty years ago. Do I need to know that? Nope, I want to point at my kid, snap a photo, and I want it to look good. That's great technology. When it disappears, that that's what it should be in the enterprise or for consumers.

There's no reason people in the enterprise should put up with shitty technology. Um, I think that's consistent, but it's not gonna be necessarily knowable that I'm using A I. It's just gonna be an amazing product experience that says, D S says, Hey, here are the three things you got to do today. Even beginning to describe the conversations I've had with the Apple camera team about the use of A I on those photos is a full other hour of this show that we do not have time for.

Mike, this was a great conversation. What's next for Atlassian? What should people be looking for? We have a massive set of announcements in, I'm scared to say, a bit over a week, ten days. Uh, we have a biannual conference, our team, twenty six, E U in Amsterdam, uh, in ten days time, uh, announcements in every collection. You will no doubt see lots of A I features that are magical and disappear. You don't need to know that you're using them.

Uh, D L launches, team collection launches, um, a lot of fantastic loom features. We haven't talked about loom, massive in the A I era, so we have so much on loom's agentic use, some of which has been online. Kudos to the partnership with the cursor team have built some amazing cursor and loom features. Um, so really exciting stuff coming up in the next in ten days time. Well, we will have to have you back very soon to talk about what happens with enterprise software in just one year's time, because I I'm confident it's gonna change.

Thank you so much for being on Decoder. Thank you for having me. Thanks, man. I'd like to thank Mike for joining me and thank you for listening to Decoder. To get new episodes every Monday and Thursday, subscribe to our YouTube channel at DecoderPod and find us on TikTok and Instagram under at DecoderPod for more fun stuff we put out almost every day. If you enjoy this episode, please send a link to it to someone you think you might like.

It really helps us grow the show. You can also subscribe wherever you get podcasts. Decoder is production of Verge and part of the Vox Media podcast network. The show's producers are Greg Ott, Kate Cox, and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Ursa Wright. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster. Cylinder. Support for the show comes from Engine. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard, but if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think.

Engine is the fastest growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes, earn up to 10% back on hotels, and in 2025, Engine customers saved more than $300 million on travel with zero booking fees, no contracts, and no B S. More than a thousand businesses join Engine every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at engine dot com slash box.

As soon as autumn rolls around and you swap your iced lattes for pumpkin spice, that's your signal to start thinking about the holidays, the decor, the gifts, the shopping lists, but more importantly, the holiday treats, cheesecakes, cookies. Is there anything better? And when the recipe calls for cream cheese, there's only one option Philadelphia, the original cream cheese, made with fresh milk and real cream. This holiday season, whether you're going all out or keeping it simple, make it really Philly good.

Find your favorite holiday recipe at cream cheese dot com. You're either all in on this model, or maybe you're building with another. You're either speed or is it security? Or your a w s a i, don't pick a side, pick them all. a w s a i is how.