My Day 1 at Atlassian Team '26: Rovo AI, Teamwork Graph, and some Fun
Halfway through Atlassian Team '26 and three things are already clear. Rovo is worth a second look, the Teamwork Graph is building context, and I'm still having fun. · Read more →
This week I’m attending the Atlassian Team ‘26 event in Anaheim. I’m right next door to Disney Land but unfortunately my wife and son said I’m not allowed to go without them.
I’m about halfway through the event and it continues to be a great gathering of productivity focused practitioners. The keynote Wednesday morning had some great announcements and the return of live demos. I’ve made nice connections with new people and caught up with old friends that have attended going back to when it was called Summit. It really is an awesome venue to connect and learn from a group of peers.
Three things have stood out to me so far
It’s time to dig deeper into Atlassian’s AI, Rovo.
Up to this point, I haven’t taken it too seriously. Every time I’ve tried to use it, it just did not do what I needed it to against the far more capable tools of ChatGPT or Claude. It’s clear Atlassian is working hard to improve this tool and place it at the center of their platform. They demoed breaking down projects into tasks, estimating Claude token usage to complete the build, and providing visibility into the agents work built into Jira.
Atlassian’s Teamwork Graph has gotten more capable.
They’ve spent a lot of time building connectors to pull information into Atlassian’s world. This capability helps them generate the context needed to power Rovo. I had many conversations with Atlassian’s team on the show floor to better understand how the connectors work, how they respect user privacy, and the organization’s permissions. Atlassian provided stats that by leveraging the Teamwork graph and the context across systems, it’s reducing token usage by 48%. That’s real value back by integrating with their tools.
Coding Agent integration is built-in.
They are already integrated with GitHub Copilot with Claude and Cursor promised in the coming months. Right now, a lot of this information is getting siloed within the coding agent world without visibility to stakeholders and others on the projects. This is a great move and I’m excited to see it in real client environments.
As a bonus, I did love that they went for it with live demos.
As curated and narrow as they were, it was fun to see the speakers working with the tools instead of playing a clip or moving through a slide deck. It felt organic and led to some real human moments. The idea that just maybe something could go wrong made it just a little more fun. I think it was a brilliant move to emphasize where the human fits alongside all the agent and AI conversations. Humans can be messy and it’s just more fun when things aren’t all polished.
The announcements were all very AI heavy and the token usage within Rovo was mostly glossed over. I’ll be curious to see in practice how all of this works with budget constrained teams. The bill is coming due for AI and the usage-based pricing makes another added cost a hard sell against the other leading options from OpenAI and Anthropic.
I’d have liked to see some focus on other angles of the products beyond AI. Maybe that is a Day 2 perspective. As I visited the different marketplace app vendors and the Atlassian product booths, there is a lot more going on than just AI. Improvements to governance & security, administration, platform apps like projects & goals, and improvements to apps like Jira Product Discovery.
I also think that paired with the AI changes, I would love to see Jira get simplified for the human side. With other AI-first tools like Notion coming in, Atlassian really should consider leaving some complexity behind. Maybe Rovo ends up being the answer for that but, for now, there is a lot in the way to make it easier for humans to jump into.
Some other fun things:
https://teamworkgraph.com/ is a site that lets you view your own graph within the products and it’s a great way to visualize what is happening behind the scenes and how your work is related to the people, tools, and work items within your environment. This view should help technical leaders showcase a view for non-technical people to demonstrate the value in feeding the teamwork graph. I suggest logging in and clicking around to see what it’s connected for you.
I was included in the Dia browser section of the Keynote!
Ok, probably not but still fun to see my name alongside AI enablement followups. I will be waiting for Josh Miller’s email.
Overall a fun day 1. It was a packed day full of good people coming together to learn and do good work while having a little fun along the way. I’ve always been a fan of Atlassian’s culture. From speaking with people at the event, they continue to have found ways to maintain their culture while growing. Something I love to see in any organization.
I’m excited to help teams figure out all the fun new things Atlassian has unleashed. For anyone needing help diving into the setup, enabling your team, and getting real value out of AI, I am ready to dive in with you.