How to get your team using AI | Avani Prabhakar, Chief People & AI Enablement Officer of Atlassian

Christian (0:07)

Hello, everyone, my name is Christian. Welcome back to TNW. I'm here today with Avani, the Chief People and Enablement Officer at Atlassian. Hey, it's a pleasure to meet you.

Avani Prabhakar (0:15)

Thank you for having me.

Christian (0:16)

First of all, for anybody that doesn't know it yet, what is Atlassian and what does the company do?

Avani Prabhakar (0:22)

So for those who don't know Atlassian, so we are a company and we build teamwork collaboration tools for all knowledge workers.

Founded in Australia, but we are a global company. We are also one of the biggest company which works from anywhere. And what I mean by that is like we are fully distributed across more than 3,000 plus cities. And yeah, and we have a very unique and ways of working.

Christian (0:44)

I think the first thing that comes to mind when it comes to this conversation is the role. So it's not just the people, shift people officer, but also the AI enablement.

How do you make sure that you enable your people inside your organization and what will be your advice to companies to make your people use AI?

Avani Prabhakar (1:03)

I would say most of the companies who are on this journey, my only advice would be first of all, start thinking about AI as a people transformation and not get caught into the tech transformation part of it.

We all have seen in last 12 to 18 months. I think deploying AI is the easy part. People using AI is also kind of the easy part in terms of everyone loves it. It's fairly intuitive technology. I think where if you're a big enterprise and you're getting into a lot of trouble, are two accounts. One is the security and the governance of it, and secondly, also the cost part of it. So you have to do it, you have to enable it, or you have to deploy it in a responsible fashion. So make sure that you have set the ground really well, and not just in terms of compliance or training, but more in terms of how do you. So I'll give you an example. So if you are a marketer, and if you're doing a product research, how do I know what part of my job I can use AI for and where I cannot use AI for? So you have to sit down with every team, every craft and explain them like, hey, this is our AI working agreement, we call them internally. To say if you are a product researcher, you can't use company information and it's not safe for you to put it out there asking in that domain. So example like that, if you are a recruiter, you need to tell them like, this is the decision making that you will be doing versus AI will be doing. So it has to drill down. So that's one thing in terms of responsible use of AI.

Second thing around cost, I think everyone is struggling. For those who just went out and partied last 12 months to say like, hey, here are the tokens. They're learning. So we have a more responsible innovation approach where you give everyone a specific AI wallet to spend. And we all know once you get your pocket money and then you start using your money more wisely. And to think, so similarly about AI wallet, you have to be like very prudent in terms of how do you use it and you spend it and people get more creative about it. The other thing I would say in terms of, lot of people are saying, how do you get people to use it, right?

Based on our experience, what we have seen it is like few things. One is the technology is changing so fast on a weekly basis. Rather than focusing on how people are quickly using it, you should kind of build and build a skill where people get used to the pace of change to say, okay, fine, I worked on this. I have to try another loop, try another loop without feeling like, oh my God, this is overwhelming. I think that's the skill one should focus on.

The second thing what we've seen is, you won't have all your 100 percent employees who will be AI native or AI super user. So we have come up with a very specific AI super user definition over the past 12 months, which is if you are using AI and the most sophisticated feature of AI more than 40 times in a week in your role to drive a change in a workflow, then you are a super user. So that's the definition. And we are tracking and what we've seen is like, instead of expecting you and I both to be using AI and becoming super user is if you drop a super user in a team of about five or seven people, the overall team's AI adoption and usage goes up by 56 percent. So that's another way of kind of thinking about expanding it rather than hoping that everyone starts using it and becomes like an AI super user.