SaaStr 881: How Atlassian's Head of AI Ships AI Across 20 Products and 5 Million Users

Sherif Mansour (0:01)

G'day, folks, all the way from Australia. Thank you so much for coming. Really appreciate your time. For those of you who I have not met before, my name is Sherif Mansour. At Atlassian, I run AI across our products, and I also look after the product management craft.

A bit of context about what I'm about to share today. Context is super important because these are the learnings that I've had for my time here. I've been at Atlassian 17 years, so thank you so much if you're an Atlassian customer or supporting my family. I appreciate you. You can probably blame me for most of your complaints about any of our apps. You can see me afterwards for that as well.

As I mentioned, I run AI at Atlassian as well as our product management craft. For a bit of context, we have about 450 product managers across Atlassian. What I wanted to share with you today is based on what those teams have learned and what we have learned implementing AI across, we have around 20 apps in our portfolio, more than 20 apps. The majority of them we've had for quite a few years, and about six apps are AI native. So six apps we've just built during the Gen AI era, and the rest we've had for a while. Across our apps, we have that number is all now well over five million users that are using our apps on a regular basis just for the AI capabilities, and that number continues to grow. So what am I here to share with you guys today?

Every single claim that we have read about AI and how to implement AI, I feel like there's been an equivalent claim that is the complete opposite that is also true. And so what I wanted to do is walk you through what we've been wrestling with at Atlassian, implementing AI in our SaaS products. So if you're implementing AI on your SaaS products, hopefully this is useful for you.

SPEAKER_2 (1:52)

You're listening to the Official SaaStr AI Podcast, brought to you by...

Hey everybody, starting a business can get expensive fast. Web site here, email somewhere else, business phone with another provider. Northwest Registered Agent gives you a complete business identity in one place, with free tools, resources and built-in privacy from day one. Get more at northwestregisteredagent.com and slash sastrfree. That's northwestregisteredagent.com/sastrfree.

S-A-A-S-T-R-F-R-E-E. Hey everyone, if you're listening to the agents, then you need to be at SaaStr AI Annual. We'll be back next May in 2027, the world's largest B2B and AI event, May 11th and 12th in the San Francisco Bay Area. But most conferences and content these days are about what's possible. As you know, from the agents, we're all about what's happening now. The latest and greatest, and that's what we do even more so at SaaStr AI Annual. See the actual work where we bring together 10,000 founders, revenue leaders and VCs plus 200 of the very best speakers showing you the playbooks of what's already running in production, behind the scenes, deep dive demos and so much more. Plus over 5,000 scheduled one-on-one meetings so you can actually meet the people doing all this, not just hear from them.

If you're a founder or revenue leader, or you're the one who has to make this all work with agents, this is where you want to be. You already know this from listening to the agents. That's SaaS for AI Annual 2027 Go to saasforannual.com and use our code the agents for a special discount on your tickets. See you there.

Sherif Mansour (3:30)

In particular context here is we're dealing with quite large teams and fairly big applications as well. I want to walk you through three contradictions that we have wrestled with, and we've often found the answer is not this or that, but sometimes it's somewhere in between.

So the first one, the claim that, hey, chat is the universal interface for AI and you don't need to build any UI for your product and all your products should be headless or the complete opposite that, hey, you should take the experiences that people are doing in chat and build dedicated SaaS apps for some of those use cases. Where do we wrestle between these two worlds?

An analogy I'll have to use on my teams to help maybe make it easier to work out where we're going is this old command line prompt. So maybe dating myself here in the crowd, MS-DOS, or Terminal, if you're a Unix user. I see one person nodding who remembers that era.

DOS was the universal interface to the operating system. For many years, it existed, and we used it for lots of different kinds of apps. You can play little games, you could actually do little calculations and spreadsheets in the terminal. You could do word processing. Over the years, the universal interface turned into a bunch of user experiences, dedicated UIs. We built Windows and we built spreadsheet apps and documentation apps and all that stuff. We built much richer games. Did DOS ever go away? Nope, it's still around today. In fact, it still is the infinite use case of all the things you could do. But we also have dedicated experiences that provide a much better experience. I think this analogy is super helpful as you are all building AI in your products. Because in the world of AI, chat is the universal interface. These large language models are conversational. And so chat is the infinite use case of how you can apply AI to your products. But there are probably lots of examples where you want to take some of those chat conversations and turn them into dedicated experiences.