Australian tech figure Mike Cannon-Brookes’ fortune has been stripped of about $1bn as AI from Amazon and Anthropic threaten flagship software at Sydney-based Atlassian.
Atlassian’s share price was smashed during Tuesday trading on Wall Street, falling 8.4 per cent on fears Anthropic and Amazon’s in-development AI could make more white-collar jobs obsolete – amplifying concerns that led to the Australian software giant cutting a tenth of its global workforce (1600 jobs) earlier this month.
The Australian-American company’s share price has tumbled 70 per cent over the past year. Mr Cannon-Brookes and co-founder and former chief executive Scott Farquhar have seen their combined fortunes fall $35bn this year. Each owns 20 per cent of Atlassian and both have slid out of Australia’s top-10 rich list.
These latest investor jitters have been sparked by Amazon Web Services building an AI agent for sales and business development tasks.
Users of San Francisco-based Anthropic’s Claude AI can now also let the agent take over their computer, open apps, surf the web, fill in spreadsheets and complete other tasks.
Mr Cannon-Brookes pointed to Atlassian’s adoption of more AI agents earlier this month as reason for the 1600 lay-offs.
While Atlassian would use freed-up cash to invest in AI, the company’s troubles are set against the broad concern that AI will make software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies like Atlassian obsolete.
Senior ex-Atlassian staff have been speaking online about the roughly $US230m ($A323m) redundancy round.
“After 13 years my journey at Atlassian has skidded to a halt,” former engineering senior vice-president Andre Serna posted last week.
“I have taken the decision to leave the company – admitted (sic) accelerated by being laid off.”
The former Atlassian staffer was collating a spreadsheet of sacked staff to help them find new jobs.
“You are all awesome and companies should be tripping over themselves to hire you,” Mr Serna said.
Atlassian chief technology officer Rajeev Rajan also lost his job and posted online that he was “deeply grateful” to Mr Cannon-Brookes and Mr Farquhar.
“I’m excited by the current technology landscape – especially with the rapid acceleration of AI – and the opportunities it presents. Stay tuned for my next move,” Mr Rajan said.
Atlassian’s main software tools include workflow management system Jira and collaboration workspace Confluence.
