20VC: Atlassian CEO on Why Agents Won't Replace Interfaces | Why Enterprises Won't Trust Chinese Models | Why The Jury Is Still Out On The Benefits of Specialised Models with Mike Cannon-Brookes

Mike Cannon-Brookes (0:00)

If you're giving up on your user interface, if you're giving up on evolving your experience for a customer, I think that's a brainless bet. I don't think agents will replace all the interfaces. For the first time in a long time, we're solving foundational design challenges again. There is certainly some customer pushback in some places to quote unquote Chinese models. There is not customer pushback to open models. The jury is really out on the benefits of building specialized models at the moment. Right now, the production of technology is faster than the consumption of technology. We're moving from a world of information asymmetry to imagination asymmetry.

Harry Stebbings (0:36)

This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. So in today's show, we sit down with Mike Cannon-Brookes, founder and CEO at Atlassian, to discuss what happens to traditional software in a world where agents are able to extract information from databases. Do they still carry value? Where is enduring value in a world of agents? How does Atlassian think about building the context layer that will power enterprise AI agents? And what does this mean for the next generation of enterprise software? This and so much more in an incredibly revealing but also just awesome discussion with Mike. I've known him for years. He's an incredible dude and this was so much fun to record. But before we dive into the show today, Base 44 is one of those products I used and I just thought straight away, man, I wish I had this when I started 20VC with $50 and no contacts in venture. I wanted to see what it could do. So I built a guest research hub for the show. Upcoming guests, company notes, previous interviews, sponsor contacts, follow-ups, all in one amazing location. I described it in plain English. A few minutes later, I had the product open in front of me. Database, login, backend and hosting already handled and just all in one. It made it so easy and that's what I loved. I didn't write a long spec. I didn't stitch five different tools together. I built the thing and I started using it. For any founder listening, that's the point. The faster you turn an idea into something real, the faster you launch apps, dashboards, internal systems, AI agents, whatever you need to build, Base 44 gets you there. Go to base44.com/20vc, that's base44.com/20vc.

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Mike Cannon-Brookes (3:05)

You have now arrived at your destination.

Harry Stebbings (3:08)

Mike, dude, I love our conversations. They are always my favorite. So thank you so much for joining me today.

Mike Cannon-Brookes (3:13)

Oh, thanks for having me back, man. It's pretty sure to get invited back. I must give those interesting answers. I saw you a little rant the other day. I loved it.

Harry Stebbings (3:20)

You give honest answers, which I don't always get. The thing that I really want to start on is we see a world of agents and agents remove a lot of human need and interaction with data providers or data sources.

How do you think about a world where value shifts as agents retrieve and do tasks for us and the potential for an Atlassian to be a data provider, not a doer?

Mike Cannon-Brookes (3:45)

I think there is some premise of the question that's slightly incorrect.

Harry Stebbings (3:49)

Go on, hit me.

Mike Cannon-Brookes (3:50)

I think, look, I can see for certain tasks that is the case. Where the tasks are very functional, that is the case. Where the tasks have a lot of taste and interaction and collaboration involved, I don't think that will be the case, certainly not in the same way.

So it's very hard to give an answer across all types of tasks. One might ask, there are certain types of shopping. If you take a consumer task, not something that we do obviously, so a previous safe example, there are certain types of shopping, I just want to get the thing and move on. If I'm buying, I don't know, charging cable off Amazon, just give me the charging cable. I don't care, I don't need anything. If there are other types of shopping where I may enjoy the experience, I may want to go to the store, I want to do a lot of research, I want to do it myself, there's going to be a whole range of things. And so, yes, for some tasks, it's going to get rid of the pedestrian, I just want to get the thing done. But in the enterprise collaboration world and in the business workflow world, agents are going to help and are already helping, I would argue, in a lot of cases, move the work forward to let people honestly focus on higher value, creative parts of the job. I think that will change a lot of jobs, but I don't think it's necessarily negative, nor do I think it's bad for Atlassian, I think it's great for Atlassian. So we want to help be a part of that agentic world, but the experiences of how we do that is a long way from solved and settled in enterprise software.