Six weeks ago, Mike Cannon-Brookes was the billionaire whose company had become the cautionary tale of Australian tech.
Atlassian’s shares had plunged 70 per cent in 12 months to $US57 as investors feared its products would be replaced by AI-made alternatives while its ultimate customers, software engineers, were being laid off in droves. The Sydney-based software giant had been bumped from the Nasdaq 100 list of companies. He and co-founder Scott Farquhar had paused their regular sales of shares. And in March, the man who once preached Atlassian’s warm, irreverent culture, made headlines for cutting 1600 jobs by video message.
Then came the quarter that, as high-profile US technology industry analyst Dan Ives put it, “throws the software bear thesis out the window”. Atlassian’s cloud revenue shot up 29 per cent, sending its stock up 25 per cent in a single after-hours session and 50 per cent in three weeks to nearly $US90.
This week in California at Atlassian’s major annual conference, Cannon-Brookes will try to convince enterprise buyers, sceptical investors and his own staff that this rebound is the start of a turnaround, rather than the dead-cat bounce that some critics still suspect.
“The only thing you can do is just have a steady hand on the tiller,” Cannon-Brookes said in an interview ahead of the conference. “Don’t get too excited on one side or the other … We have a lot of work to do. We have a fantastic business, and people are going to judge that.”
The judging will begin in earnest this week, as Cannon-Brookes embarks on the most consequential product launch of his career as solo chief executive.
The headline announcement is the opening up of what Atlassian calls the Teamwork Graph – a tool that lets companies pipe the data inside their Atlassian software and connected systems like Salesforce and Workday into AI agents and third-party tools. Built up over eight years, the graph maps the relationships between people, projects, documents and decisions inside an organisation, giving AI a working picture of how a business runs.
Customers attaching the graph to AI applications, Cannon-Brookes claims, will be seeing answers “30, 40, 45 per cent better in quality” at up to half the cost of other processes.
Alongside Teamwork Graph’s expanded access, the tech boss will also announce that AI agents in project management app Jira are out of the testing phase now and available to the public, letting companies assign them actual tasks that humans used to do. There will also be expansions to Atlassian’s Rovo AI assistant, and a new command-line interface for developers and the AI agents that increasingly work alongside them.
‘I am a personal believer, an optimist in AI. I think we are going to see many more jobs created as a result. The “easy doom” narrative is pretty premature.’
Mike Cannon-Brookes
It is a product wave engineered to convince enterprise buyers that Atlassian – long mocked as the Australian software company that has not posted an annual profit in a decade – is not just AI-proof, but AI-native.
Lewis-Ethan Healey, a principal design technologist who has been at Atlassian for three years, said the company felt sharper than at any point in his tenure. “From exec-leadership all the way to the IC [individual contributor], it feels we are working on the right things at the same time, and delivering faster and faster,” said Healy.
Jade Jiang, a lead product designer of more than five years who Atlassian made available for interview alongside Healy and Cannon-Brookes, said the company felt like it was at the centre of the AI zeitgeist.
“It feels like a defining moment to be in the tech industry, and it’s exciting to be at Atlassian while we’re right at the heart of it,” she said. “The culture here has real intensity and openness … You’re surrounded by incredibly talented people who genuinely want to collaborate and push each other’s thinking.”
But the job cuts in March left wounds that are still raw. Some senior performers were let go; some staff barely four months into their roles were cut without warning. Former employees who previously spoke to this masthead described a process that felt arbitrary and opaque.
“There was zero visibility on who is specifically cut aside from searching individual people’s names,” one said. “A senior [colleague] in my team who had exceeded expectations in the last performance review … has been let go, whereas there are newly joined team members with less than three months tenure who have not been affected.”
Asked about culture, Cannon-Brookes said his job was “to make the hard decisions”. “That doesn’t make the decisions easy to make. It doesn’t mean they’re not made. A lot of empathy, a lot of challenge for the effects on people.”
He paused. “Our culture is always evolving. I would say our culture is pretty resilient. We want to be a winning company. We want to be a great company. To do that, you have to meet the bar of where the market is in terms of what great means as a software company.”
Pressed on whether AI agents would mean Atlassian’s headcount would continue to fall, Cannon-Brookes went to the Industrial Revolution.
“We’ve seen everything from the steam engine to the cotton gin to whatever it was, right? … I am a personal believer, an optimist in AI. I think we are going to see many more jobs created as a result. The ‘easy doom’ narrative is pretty premature.”
Cannon-Brookes is now nearly two years into running Atlassian without Scott Farquhar – the school friend with whom he founded the company 24 years ago. Anonymous sources have claimed in other outlets that the relationship has soured – Cannon-Brookes pushes back on those reports – and the degree to which the 46-year-old can steer the ship solo.
“Whenever we hang out he’s very fit and tan,” he said of Farquhar. “It’s been an accelerated two years in anyone’s terms. With these sorts of transitions, you always get it like 80 per cent correct. But there’s inevitably things where you’re suddenly, like, ‘Man, this is a week where I wish Scott was around.’ We’ve had a lot of those.”
Cannon-Brookes would not give a timeline for reaching GAAP profitability, a key benchmark for investors and the company more broadly.
“We continue to move towards that stage. We want to continue to be a growth company. We need to be a profitable company at the same time,” Cannon-Brookes said.
“Managing those two together is part of the challenge.”
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David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.