3247: Atlassian's Sanchan Saxena Talks ROI, AI, and the Future of Teamwork

[00:00:04] What happens when you combine Jira, Confluence, and Loom, and then power them all with AI agents? Agents that are built to understand exactly how your team works best. So today I want to find out more about Atlassian's brand new Teamwork collection, and I'm in the perfect place to do just that. I'm here at the Team25 event in Anaheim, where Atlassian isn't just showcasing new features, it's spotlighting a reimagined way of working.

[00:00:34] A way of working where AI doesn't replace team members, it amplifies them. And my guest today is going to walk us through how Atlassian is making collaboration more seamless, outcomes more measurable, and the adoption of these tools less daunting. Even if teams are currently navigating cultural friction or digital fatigue.

[00:00:55] So if you're a leader looking to drive real change, or a team trying to simplify your stack without losing your creative spark, this episode will give you a front row view of what Atlassian's latest innovation is all about. And also, why it could redefine how your people connect and create. But enough scene setting from me. It's time to officially introduce you to today's guest. So a massive warm welcome to the show. Thank you for stopping by today.

[00:01:25] Could you tell everyone listening a little about who you are and what you do? Happy to be here. And thanks for having me. My name is Sanjian Saksena. I'm the senior vice president and head of product for Confluence, Trello, and Loom. Awesome. And I've got to ask, it's such a big event. There's a real good vibe here. Great atmosphere. Real community feel to the show. But what are you most looking forward to to this year's event? The thing that I'm most looking forward to is connecting with our customers. We host a lot of customer briefings.

[00:01:55] And it's amazing to get in front of the customer, see what we are building and how it resonates with them. And take their feedback back to the team and say how we can improve that. So these customer moments are the most precious moments. 30, 45 minutes, but deep conversations about the passion they have for our products and things that we can improve to make their lives even better. And you're not only talking to people like me, back-to-back interviews. I believe you're also doing a few keynotes, sessions, etc. So what's going to be taking up your time here or most of it?

[00:02:23] I think the customer calls followed by some super sessions. So we also host super sessions where we go deep into a topic. So we have some for Trello. We have some for Confluence, some for AI. And that's where we'll be spending a lot of time going bare metal, if I may. You know, go to the specific details and how these tools are helping our customers and can improve their lives. And one of the things that has caught my eye this year is Atlassian's newly unveiled teamwork collection,

[00:02:49] which is a curated combination of Jira, Confluence, and Loom. But here's the kicker, supercharged with powerful agents. And it is the year of agents this year. So can you introduce everyone listening to what this collection is, how it's evolving, and how it's designed to help teams as well? Yeah. I mean, over the last year, we've done a lot of research with our customers. And one key theme keeps emerging. As an executive of a Fortune 1000 company, I want to move faster.

[00:03:18] But the reason why I can't move faster is because my teams are overwhelmed for many reasons. It could be unclear goals. It could be teams are working in silos and they don't see the big picture in the big context. And last but not the least, it could be the teams are spending more time in meetings than actually doing the work. I mean, you can probably imagine how many hours we spend in meetings, right?

[00:03:39] So we believe teams should now start to focus beyond individual apps and instead should focus on a collection of apps that help them solve the job that they have at their hand. And that is what teamwork collection is. It is a product collection for all teams to go across Jira, Confluence, Loom, and if it's powered by AI, but focus on unleashing and breaking down those silos, helping teams get the same context, and use AI to become more productive. So I'll give you one specific example.

[00:04:09] I mean, Jira is very powerful. Confluence is very powerful on their own. But the magic happens when you can go across these products seamlessly. So I'll give you an example. You can actually record a loom about a status update for your project. And you can then use AI agents to then ask them, hey, what was the summary of this loom? It's a five-minute loom. Maybe I don't have time to catch them on everything, right? Maybe I need a two-minute summary. It'll capture those things. But not only that, once the summary is done, you can say, wow, that was a brilliant idea. I want to track it.

[00:04:38] You talk to the AI and say, can you create a Jira ticket for it so I don't forget? Now, all of this stuff, if you remember pre-AI war, was copy-paste. I go to a meeting. I get an action item. I copy-paste it into my notepad. And then I go into Jira and copy-paste the same thing again into there. But with AI, now it's all very seamless. So you can go from Confluence and Loom directly into Jira using the power of AI agents. And we are shipping a bunch of these agents standards.

[00:05:04] So when you get Confluence, Jira, and Loom, you get 20-plus agents out of the box. So things like a Jira ticket creator or a brainstorming agent where you go to Whiteboard and tell it, hey, I want to brainstorm how to do a marketing campaign based on last year's marketing campaign. And it'll pull out all the information from Confluence, Jira, et cetera, and showcase it all to you, right? And these are all shipping within the collection. Last but not the least, you can create your own agent too in pure English language.

[00:05:32] I tell everybody, English is the new programming language, right? You should be able to prompt and get everything you need in creating the agent. And that's what this does. So you can go to Confluence and you can start talking in the chat interface and say, I think I need a performance management agent because I've got 15 direct reports and I want to manage their performance, right? So I've got their performance writing, performance review stuff, and the agent can be created using English language prompt and can parse that information at the performance review time. So those are the powerful agents.

[00:06:01] And so much of what you said there will resonate with people listening all around the world, especially the fact that their teams are so overwhelmed and so much going on, not to mention cumbersome software where you're flipping between four or five different windows and copy paste. So there is a big change there. But are there any other real world examples or maybe use cases on that kind of measurable differences that it's making to teams or can make to teams? There are many. I'll give you one specific example, which is my favorite.

[00:06:28] And we are announcing that a team, which is the AI agent for Loom meetings. Now, many people have used Loom for asynchronous communication. You record a video, you send it to your manager or your team, and it's async. But we are introducing an AI agent for Loom meetings. Now, what does it do? Well, I got six hours of meeting today, and I don't think I need to attend all six hours. You know, maybe in the fifth meeting, I only need to attend for five minutes because that's the thing that really is all about my area. But your calendar is blocked now. You've got to go to those meetings.

[00:06:58] Well, instead, very soon, starting this team event, you'll be able to send a Loom AI assistant to your meetings. It'll summarize the meeting, capture the action items, and record that meeting for you in a Confluence page. So you can go over there and look at it and say, look, at five minutes mark in that meeting, something was discussed about my area, and this was the action item. You click on it, go to the Loom recording, watch that five-minute section, and that's it.

[00:07:26] So the countless hours that we are saving from people not having to go to the meetings just because they have to be there to actually making them actionable is very powerful. Now, to be clear, there are some meetings that are very critical, right? There is some value in doing meetings live. But for a vast majority of cases, all you want to know is what was discussed, was it relevant for my area, and if there were any action items for me. And the Loom AI agent can extract all that information for you and provide you in a very succinct, easy-to-digest form.

[00:07:55] And that is very powerful because we believe that's going to save you hours and hours of meeting time and meeting overload that you have today. Personally, for me, I have many meetings in the day, and it's been a lifesaver. Does that mean we can finally retire the saying of walking out of a meeting room saying, there was another meeting that could have been an email? That is exactly our hope, you know. And that email could be a confluence page with all the summary and saying, aha, that's all I needed to know. Thank you very much. And what would you say to leaders and teams that might be struggling

[00:08:25] with the more cultural aspects of adopting new tools and all things AI, those teams that are feeling overwhelmed, they feel like there's not enough hours in the day as it is, but they've got to learn something new. How do you get over that learning curve and ultimately increase adoption in these tools? Yeah, you're absolutely right. I think AI is introducing both a technology paradigm as well as a behavioral change paradigm. The way we used to think about things before AI and after AI need to evolve. And we want to help our customers do that.

[00:08:55] So we are going to launch some out-of-the-box agents so you don't have to start with a blank slate. Example, you're in the whiteboard of confluence and you're trying to brainstorm an idea. The agent pops up right there and says, I notice you're doing something. I can make it better for you, right? And that's the change in behavior and mindset that we're trying to educate our customers on. Now, we want to give them some out-of-the-box capability so they see value immediately. So time to value matters for us.

[00:09:22] So when you get the AI in your confluence or Jira, how can we reduce the time to value that you get from AI is the priority. So hence why we are shipping out-of-the-box agents that will come with confluence Jira. Plus, in addition to that, we're also going to do a lot of training, coaching, and case studies to say, how are other companies benefiting from using AI in the same context as a customer so they can also learn from others and see how that's benefiting as well. So it is show, not tell.

[00:09:52] That's the plan. And one of the great things about any tech conference is sharing ideas with businesses and people. You wouldn't normally get that FaceTime. If you combine that with all the people that you're speaking to on a daily basis and businesses all around the world, I'm curious. You create these tools with a certain use case and think this is how people will get the most benefit. Are there any examples of how businesses have come to you and, well, we want to use it this way and has maybe made you think differently as well? Yeah, absolutely.

[00:10:21] There have been many such incidents. I think when you build innovative products, you start with an assumption or a hypothesis about how customers should use that product. As the customer goes and uses that product, you also learn that they are modifying it, hacking it, doing differently, right? And that feedback loop is very critical for us. So we start with a very strong hypothesis. So when you see Confluence and Jira, you're going to see some agents out of the box

[00:10:46] because our research, our understanding of customer needs suggests that those are the most in-demand, in-use agents that we should ship. Having said that, we're also seeing feedback coming from our customers as they start to use it. An example of this is workflow management. So let's take an example of a product manager that typically would do the following. They'll go on a customer call to research the customer's need. They'll then record that meeting. Then they will scribble out the notes from that meetings. Then they will write a conference page or a Google Doc.

[00:11:15] And then they'll send a Slack message to somebody else saying, here's what I learned. And in the end, they're going to write a PRD or a spec saying, this is what I'm going to build. Now, that's a typical workflow of a product manager. Now, there is no one agent that can solve all of that stuff. What we're observing is that people are constructing these agents together to make that workflow easy. So example of that would be, you have an agent that summarizes the loop. Then you have another agent that sends out a Slack message from there, right?

[00:11:45] And all these agents working together is what we're learning how customers want to use agents in a workflow fashion. So we imagine a future where customers will have an army of agents, just like they have an army of employees, right? And just like employees need to work together with each other, we imagine a world where agents need to work together with each other. And facilitating that orchestration between agents and humans is the way Atlassian wants to go to the market.

[00:12:09] We believe agents versus human is more powerful than human alone or agent alone. And that's the pitch we have for them. And that's what we want to enable for them. And that is a message that has been lost a lot over the last 12 months, especially with job redundancies, etc. Absolutely. And look, there are lots of tedious parts of my job, everybody's job, where you have to collect the data, synthesize, write it in a summary, etc. Those are not value added piece of the value chain, if you think about it, right?

[00:12:37] Tribbling down the notes from a meeting is not the value add part. The decision you make based on the notes and the things that were discussed in the meeting is the value part, right? And we want humans to do that part, while agents can do all of the stuff to summarize looms, summarize meetings, take action items, create Jira tickets, and transfer or keep the superpower of humans, which is strategic thinking, how to plan the work, etc. at their level. And together, humans and agents can do magical stuff.

[00:13:03] And on that topic of value add, I think there is an increasing focus on ROI, measurable results, on every new tool, whether it be AI or any tech project there. So what would you say is the ROI of the teamwork collection for any business leader or a concerned finance director? Yeah, I mean, there are two dimensions in which we measure this. One is the dimension of hours saved. So we have customer case studies.

[00:13:29] And I talked about, Angela, I was talking about Rivian in the previous thing. Can I mention them in the podcast? Is it a customer? Okay, cool. So we're seeing tangible results coming out from customers who are trying TWC. Rivian is one such customer. And what they do is they use TWC teamwork collection, along with, of course, other tools like JSM. And they're seeing over 750 plus human hours saved per year. Now, that's productivity gains that those humans didn't have before.

[00:13:58] Every hour saved is redirected to actually producing the work that really matters, right? And taking away those hours from the thing that are behind the scenes and don't really add that much value. The other example is cost saving. So when you save these many hours, you consolidate on certain tools, you also, as a company, are saving dollars as well. And Rivian is seeing those as well. So on those two dimensions, productivity increase and cost savings, customers are realizing value at TWC.

[00:14:23] And I think we've seen so many changes over the last five years from working at home at scale to hybrid working and now AI. So if we were to look even further ahead, maybe ask you to look into a virtual crystal ball. How do you see the future of work as we continue to see further progress in AI and human collaboration and understand how much more can be achieved with that collaboration?

[00:14:45] Yeah, I think our future crystal ball is that every human will become more productive and more impactful with the power of AI. And that thesis will play out over the next two to three years. Now, anything beyond that is hard to imagine in the world of AI because it's changing so fast.

[00:15:00] But at least for the next two to three years, our bet is how can we introduce agentic AI, which is a buzzword for humans and agents working together, agents and agents working together to accomplish business outcomes. So that is a big bet for the next two years or so. And that's why you're going to see whether it's Confluence, Jira, Loom or even JSM.

[00:15:23] All of these products will have standard out-of-the-box agents because we believe moving business value forward, delivering business impact can be achieved faster, cheaper, better with agents and humans working together. So the interfaces will change. In my mind, two things you can expect. The user interface of B2B apps will change. You know, when I go to the app today, it's just content or tickets. Well, I will see agents that I can deploy for doing those things.

[00:15:49] These agents will be working 24-7 behind the scenes to accomplish the job. So while I go off after 6 p.m., 7 p.m., these agents are still parsing the data, processing customer feedback, etc. So in the morning when I come back, that work is ready for me. Now, that is a fantastic increase in human productivity that was not possible before. And presumably businesses that are intimidated or nervous around AI that sit on the fence for longer and longer, their competitors are going to be moving faster, working faster. That's right.

[00:16:19] I think there is a phase in every technology where it's experimental and it goes from experimental to essential. I think we're entering the phase where AI is no longer a luxury to experiment with. It is critical and essential for your business to succeed. And we're noticing every company trying to experiment one way or the other with it.

[00:16:38] I mean, there are some stats where developers are becoming more productive, you know, and there are companies that are coming out, startups mostly, and bigger companies as well, that are using developer AI tools and seeing 30, 40% increase in productivity. So when you see those kinds of gains coming around, it's almost impossible to ignore the impact of AI and still keep it in the experimental bucket. Right. So I believe the next few years are AI is essential for success.

[00:17:06] AI is essential for driving business outcomes at a faster pace. And as I mentioned earlier, the pace of business innovation is changing. So if you want to keep up with that pace, you've got to augment your human force with agent force. And that combination is lethal. It's amazing. It's very impactful. And for any business leader that might be listening to this podcast and they're unable to attend, what is the key message that you're delivering and driving here, especially from all the conversations that you hear on the show floor as well?

[00:17:35] Yeah, I think there are a couple of key messages we want people to take away. One of which is your human capital is your asset. And how can technology be the enabler for breaking down the silos between teams to drive work forward even faster? So we believe in tech forward organizations, especially the tech teams and the business teams have to work together to get the business outcomes possible.

[00:17:59] And we need to get employees moving away from individual apps in different tabs to actually using a unified experience across apps to get the outcome. You know, one of my favorite things is when someone presents in a Zoom, I look at the browser window and I see the number of tabs that are open. You got to get to a world where that tab count is reducing rather than increasing. The cost of context switching is way too much. And those apps are not talking to each other.

[00:18:23] So we are building for a world where Atlassian products that are powered by Teamwork Foundation Graph have all the context, all the metadata, all the relationships that we understand about your work. And then we can make recommendations and suggestions to improve the productivity of your employees through those tool collections that we talked about. So we are excited about that message and we want to encourage customers to try out AI. And one other thing I want to highlight is AI is now bundled part of Confluence and Jira.

[00:18:53] So you don't have to buy something separate. It's already there. You bought their license, you might as well give it a try, right? And try it out and see how that goes for you. So that'll be the call to action for the audiences. You have Confluence and Jira and Loom, give it a try and you will see the benefits manifesting to the AI agents that we're talking about. And for yourself on a personal level, when you're reflecting on every single conversation and everything that you've seen and heard on the show floor, on the stage, etc.

[00:19:21] Here at Team 25, what will you be reflecting and thinking about on that plane ride home? Anything you're going to be thinking about and taking away from this yourself? Yeah, I mean, I think the two things that are top of mind right now for me after talking to a lot of customers. One is, as I was mentioning, behavior and mental model changes for customers. So we believe we're not just in the business of providing technology solutions, but making sure our customers can bridge that gap from the past to the future.

[00:19:47] So one of the top of mind thing for me is how do we share that best practices, that new way of thinking about the workflow in there? So we're going to solve for that and we're going to make sure customers understand that, that there is a tool, but there's how you use the tool in the best possible way. And the second one is, there was a customer quote that I listened yesterday and he said, you know, my biggest problem is I've got 10,000 employees who are not working together well. Then very soon you're telling me I'm going to have 10,000 agents that are not going to work very well.

[00:20:16] So how do I make sure that agents and humans and agents and agents work together? And that's a very thought provoking scenario, you know, any large organization struggles from breaking down silos between humans. Now you've got agents working across different tech stack, et cetera. How do you break down those silos? So I'm very excited about creating that world where agents are interoperable, where humans and agents can see the broader context and continue to work on that. You're making the first few steps with TWC launch, but there's a lot more work to do on that journey ahead.

[00:20:44] Wow. So many big takeaways and thought provoking points there. But for anyone listening, that's maybe not here, maybe even if they're not currently an Atlassian customer, they just want to learn more about this teamwork collection that we've been discussing today. Where would you like to point everyone listening? All the information will be available at our website, which is atlassian.com forward slash collections forward slash teamwork. Give it a try. You will see demos over there. You'll see videos over there.

[00:21:11] You'll see a lot of information over there. And I'd love to hear from your audience and how they like it. Well, I will add links to everything in the show notes so people can find out more information more easily. And especially for Atlassian customers, I think the message you delivered a moment ago around, you're already paying for the license. You already have it. Play with it. Experiment with it. And I think that's a powerful moment to end on. So thanks for joining me today. Thank you for having me. So a big thank you to my guests for taking the time to unpack the vision behind Atlassian's teamwork collection.

[00:21:41] And I think one of the things that struck me most is that balance Atlassian is aiming to strike between automation and, most importantly, human connection. And that balance between flexibility and structure and between tool sprawl and integrated simplicity. And for anyone feeling overwhelmed by the pace of change in collaboration tech, I think today's conversation was a great reminder that the future of work, it really isn't about replacing your processes overnight.

[00:22:10] It's about helping your teams ship smarter, communicate clearer and move faster. And with tools that feel less like an overhead and more like an extension of how you already work. But as always, let me know your thoughts. Tech blog writer at outlook.com. X LinkedIn Instagram just at Neil C. Hughes. And I'll return again tomorrow with another episode just like this one. So if you enjoyed yourself, come back and speak with me again tomorrow. I'll be here. Speak with you then. Bye for now.