Atlassian’s Mike Cannon-Brookes: AI agents need a name tag—and a human to blame for their mistakes

“That’s ChatGPT on behalf of Mike. Like, that’s Mike using ChatGPT. It’s not ChatGPT doing it,” Cannon-Brookes told Fortune on the sidelines of the Singapore Grand Prix. “The accountability is with Mike. It has to be with the end user, ultimately.”

On Oct. 6, Atlassian rolled out its “Agentic Multiplayer Protocol,” a control plane which stretches across Atlassian’s various platforms and turns AI agents into visible, governed members of work teams with distinct profiles and owner attribution.

In practice, an agent’s edits should show up in a document’s history the same way a colleague’s edits would. “You have to be able to see who did what when,” Cannon-Brookes said. A program might—incorrectly, in Cannon-Brookes’ eyes—say that Codex made an edit. ’ No, it didn’t—someone did that,” he affirmed.

A wave of personal AI agents, like Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots, is now hitting the market. To Cannon-Brookes, those products are “taking an agentic harness and change the interact to make it invisible, as to what it’s doing,” Agents are performing complex operations behind the scenes, even if what the user wants is relatively simple.

That might be fine in a consumer environment, but not in a workplace. “If you’re making something on Muse, it’s probably just for you,” he said. “In a workplace, there’s a lot of conversation around permissions, security, and compliance.”

An employee or AI agent given free reign to create content based off of privileged information could quickly cause problems. Cannon-Brookes cited one example: An employee using company documents to create a visual chart. “But if that’s based on [internal] documents, you’ve got to be very careful if you’re sending that to anybody, they can see the same focuments, and you don’t want to leak information.”

Worse, most AI interfaces are hard to understand. “AI can do amazing, crazily super-powerful things. Most people do very basic things because of the interface,” Cannon-Brookes said. “The experience is very poor.”

He drew an analogy with the word processor, perhaps the most ubiquitous piece of workplace software. “If you think about Microsoft Word with the toolbar, you learn how to use bold and italics,” he explained. “If all that disappeared and it was only keyboard shortcuts, everyone’s documents end up looking like plain text.”

In 2024, the firm launched Rovo, an in-house AI assistant designed to connect people, projects, code, and company knowledge across Atlassian and various external platforms. “We’ve had to invent a lot of new foundational design patterns that feel familiar,” Cannon-Brookes said, pointing to features allowing users to link their Atlassian accounts with third-party tools like Figma, Codex, or Claude, and seamlessly toggle between them.

Building from Australia

Atlassian made its name with the bug-tracking tool Jira and the collaboration platform Confluence. It’s become the standard-bearer for an Australian tech scene that now includes design platform Canva and payments firm Airwallex. 

The Sydney-based company generated $1.8 billion in revenue in the quarter ended June 30, trumping analysts’ average estimate of $1.7 billion, according to Reuters. (The firm also slashed its workforce by 10% in March—⁠a move affecting roughly 1,600 employees—as part of a pivot to AI and enterprise sales.)

“Australia has an amazing technology ecosystem,” said Cannon-Brookes. “We’re not going to build it all since we’re quite a small country… but we’re good at taking operating systems, databases and AI models, and applying them to problems to create economic value and GDP.”

“We’re roughly 1% of the world’s GDP. We need to be 1% of the world’s technology production,” he added.

Cannon-Brookes shrugged off concerns that distance leaves Australian tech firms cut off from U.S. investors and customers.

“In most Australian technology companies, you’re pretty global pretty fast,” he said. “Our first customer was in England, and our second customer was in Sweden…We don’t have much of a consumptive market in Australia so we’re big exporters and travelers, but also big makers of things since we have lots of great natural resources.”

Cannon-Brookes added that Australian firms also benefit from being “quite aligned” with the U.S. Atlassian opened its first U.S. office in 2005, and listed on the NASDAQ in 2015; today, it has employees in 49 of the U.S.’ 50 states. 

“I forget. I think it’s like Idaho or something,” Cannon-Brookes said, referring to the lone holdout. “I should keep updating that stat.”