[Music] [Mark Cruth] All right. Well, thank you, all, for joining us today. My name is Mark Cruth. I work for Atlassian. My role at Atlassian is that of a Modern Work Coach. I get to work with a lot of our customers, the public in terms of ways of working. And I have the honor today to basically moderate a conversation with the one and only Annie Dean from Atlassian, who is our Head of Team Anywhere. We're going to have a great conversation talking a little bit about this idea, this idea of new practices, new things within our foundation of teamwork that will truly help you unlock your teamwork going forward. Now, before we do this, you've got to show the image of us. There we go. Got to make sure we do that. But before we get into this, I want to give you some prefaces of how this is going to go. I'm going to have a conversation with Annie, but we're going to have time for you to have questions as well, as well as I'm going to be asking you questions throughout the session. We're going to be using a tool called Slido for that. And so I'm going to have you, throughout the session, I've got a couple questions I want to get your opinions on. It'll lead to us having some more conversation. We'll go from there. So with that said, I'm going to see if integration with Google Slides works. We're going to give this a shot. So, I would like you all to go to this Slido link. And we're going to learn a little bit about everybody here. This is going to be our test run. It should bring you to a blank page. It should say it's not started yet, I hope. But I'm going to let you guys get there. I'll give you a second, then I'll move over and we'll see if this is working.
All right, all right. I'm going to give you a second. Of course, the QR code will be on the next page too. Let's go ahead and transition over there. Does it work? Oh, it does. All right. So I want to know how far away did you travel to get here? Las Vegas, Adobe Summit. Are you local? Less than 100 miles? Maybe you're a little bit further away, a little bit of 100 to 500. Maybe you're like me, I came out of Detroit and Annie came out of New York, so we're probably about that 500-2,500 miles. Or are you more than 2,500 miles? You're probably talking about it in kilometers at that point. So, let us know where you're at. All right, let's see here.
Oh, look at that. We got a good chunk of people here. Not so close. All right, 49. All right, we got a few people who are local. Nice. I always love seeing the disbursement of people in the room. All right. I've got another question for you.
Next question is how familiar are you with Atlassian? Do you use our products every day? Maybe you've used our products in the past, but it's been a while. Maybe your teams use our products, but you've never really done it. Or you might be wondering, "Who's Atlassian? Am I in the wrong session?" Which one are we? I really hope I don't get any of the last ones. But I know some ones out there is going to put it in there. I know someone's laughing. They already did it. They already did it. I know they did. All right. Let's see. I love it. I love it. See, there we go. We've got a lot of people using our products who have heard of it. You know, our experience working particularly in the marketing space, the consulting space is that you've usually worked with somebody who has that, maybe it's your tech teams that typically use it, maybe your operations. Our goal is to hopefully show you how you can integrate that all together and of course, we can have some conversations more about that down in our booth downstairs. Now, I have a really important question for you that this is all about really getting to know each other here. And I think this will really be a good lead in to the rest of the day's conversation. And it's this question. Is a hotdog a sandwich? Yes, no, maybe? I don't know. What do you think? So let's find out. Annie, what do you think? Is a hotdog a sandwich? - [Annie Dean] No. - No? - No? - No. See, I lived in Chicago for some time, and I feel that those Chicago dogs are pretty close. Ah, there we go. Hey, you know what? We got about a quarter of the room saying yes. So, there we go. I love it. So, all right. Definitionally, I understand how you got there. I get it. You put it together, it makes sense. But all right, all right. We had a little bit of fun. So, like I said, I wanted to just going to get you used to using Slido. We're going to be using that same link. I've got a couple more questions throughout the day that we'll get into. But without further ado, I would love to, again, get us to get to know Annie a little bit. Annie is our Head of Team Anywhere at Atlassian. And so, Annie, I would love if you could just share with us a little bit about who you are, what got you to this role, what does it mean to be the Head of Team Anywhere at Atlassian? And maybe a little bit about Atlassian and the process. Great. Well, thank you, everyone, for having us. And Team Anywhere is Atlassian's approach to distributed work. At Atlassian, we care a lot more about how people work than where people work, which is why we focus deeply on practices, which is the subject of today's conversation. I've been Atlassian for about three years, but I've been studying the future of work as a startup founder, as a leader at Deloitte, as the first head of remote work at Facebook, and now at Atlassian, over about 10 years. And so, I've really been on the ground watching this transformation happen, and I've seen it through many different phases, ranging from 2019 seeing that it wasn't a default to have calendar invites, Zoom links or video conference links in calendar invites or back in 2017 when we did research that showed that what people really wanted to do was be able to work from home a couple days a week. And so it's been fun to see the arc of that story unfold over the past decade. And at Team Anywhere, since our philosophy is that we care more about how you work than where you work, I, as my day job, help bring that to life across our real estate portfolio and our talent strategy. And what that means is that I'm the head of Real Estate and oversee all of our workplaces. We have 12 offices globally and people can choose when to come to the office whenever they like. And yet our offices are quite full, which I think speaks to the idea that if you create great places for people to gather and work in, then they can visit because it works for them, not because they're mandated to. I also oversee a team of behavioral scientists, which we'll talk about a little bit today, called the Teamwork Lab. And they study how modern work happens. And then I also see talent strategies like our onboarding program and something that we have called our Intentional Togetherness program, which is a way of keeping teams connected, even though they're not in an office side by side every day.
- So, yeah. - I love that. It's been a fun ride. Now, back in 2020, our founders, Mike Cannon-Brooks, Scott Farquhar, they had made that announcement saying, just like a lot of the tech companies out there saying, "We're going remote, and we're never looking back." And a lot of people have backstepped on that. We haven't.
This whole idea of distributed work has come out of that for us. What is that-- Why do you think they made that call back then? Well, first of all, I love the way our founders think. And I think they've always had an orientation to building a 100-year company. So thinking about what the world is going to look like decades from now, I remember being in conversations with them early when I joined the company, and they were just really clear. They were on a principles basis, the world is going to be more distributed, not less in 10 years, and so it makes sense for us to get this right. And one of the things that really inspires me as an ethos is the idea that we build the future of work for our customers by living it ourselves. I think one of the reasons why our distributed work policy has been so successful is because it's also how we serve our customers. It's core to our business that people can collaborate from anywhere. So that means that we have their endorsement, their support, their funding to keep doing things like researching through the Teamwork Lab. But in 2020, I think there was a hypothesis that there were three key reasons why we would embrace distributed. And one was that we would have faster access to talent. Two was that employees would be happier and more engaged. And three was that we would find ways to innovate in our product suite. And I think all of those things have turned out to be true. As we look at our metrics for Team Anywhere, we're getting 20% faster offer acceptance rate, two times the number of applicants. And I think our ability to push products like Rovo to market in just six months really speaks to our commitment to innovation. Oh. Yeah, it's been super exciting to see it unfold. Well, it's been amazing. I know, I've been in Atlassian since 2019, and even there to see a scale, we went from 2,000 people then to almost 14,000 people or something like that right now, some crazy high number. And for us to be able to scale with the right talent, it really took us trying to take that global distributed approach. Right. I always remind people who are new to the company, that in 2019, we were just 2,000 people. Right. We were just a little bit. And again, that's the thing, I think, a lot of organizations tend to struggle with is they're like, "Well, if it's easy for a little company to do it--" But the thing is, if we'd be able to demonstrate it as you get larger, and yes, there's things that has to change. But you evolve and you experiment. You know, you've used the word distributed versus remote and things like that. Could you tell us a little bit more about why there's a distinct-- Why do you distinguish between that? Great question and one of my favorite topics. So, I like to use the word distributed to describe the future of work because it's a word that describes how modern work happens from many different places at once, basically on the internet. Sort of non-controversial, this is how all teams are working. Remote is a word that describes a works relationship to the office. And there's so many offices involved. There are so many different places that people work that it just doesn't feel like the right word to describe the change that's happening in our enterprises and companies today.
And when I think about why distributed is so important, there's a norm now that teams are not co-located. So, one of my favorite stats on this or talking points is that in 2019, Microsoft had 75% of its teams co-located. That means that they basically lived in the same area and that they worked out of the same office. So, if you went to the office, you would encounter your working team or you'd be assigned a desk next to your working team. Now that number is 25%. So teams just are distributed. That's how work happens. And I think it's important that we design how we work to represent that reality. And I think if you think about many organizations, even if you're in a company that is back to the office, you may not actually be sitting with your teammates. You may be joining a Teams meeting or a Zoom call and joining them still, because they might be at different locations. So it's figuring out how you traverse that. And I think that's something that at Alassian, you and the team have done a really good job at helping us think of and how do we go through those challenges that happen as we scale? Right. And it's interesting because we have a-- As the head of Real Estate, I get to get all of these fun workplace metrics. And there's a stat that says that if people are more than 300 feet or something apart, some very small metric, then they are acting in a distributed way. So they don't-- Meaning that they're not going to take the call from around the conference. If you've got different floors of the building. Exactly. And so, again, work happens on the internet. Let's optimize for that. - Let's race for that. - Yeah. I love it. All right, so learned a little bit about Team Anywhere and how Atlassian has come about with this. I want to get into some of the experimentation and the practices, going back to the talk idea. But before that, I actually want to ask you all a question because I think it's important to start with the problems that we're dealing with and because that's where we start coming up with solutions. So, I actually want to do another Slido with you all. So, have your phones ready because I want to understand what are some of the challenges that you're dealing with in your teamwork world, especially your cross-team teamwork world. And so what I'd love to do is you're going to get a list of these. Select all that apply. What are some of the things that you're dealing with? Is it misaligned goals? Is that causing your teamwork to not be so effective? Is it lack of focus or excessive meetings? We've seen that. Let's see here. We've got no source of truth, redundant tools. So you have four tools that do the same thing. Too much information. I'm curious to see where that-- All right, so we're getting into communication silos. That one's taking the lead here. So, lack of focus, excessive meetings. It's like all of a sudden we get a bunch-- We've been in meetings all day long and at the end of the day we say, "What did we actually get done?" Well, this is fascinating. So I think this really lines it up well into where we're going to go in the rest of the day because I wanted to find out from you all where you're struggling because there's some practices that we follow that we want to share with you that will hopefully solve some of these, or at least give you something, as I like to put it, experiment with it. So speaking of that word experiment, Annie, I want to find out from you, when we think about problems like this in Atlassian, because folks, Atlassian has these same problems too. But what we do is we go out and we experiment with them. I'd love for you to share with us a little bit about how we experiment through the Teamwork Lab that you brought up earlier. Yeah. Because I think that's such a fascinating piece of how we work. So one of the things that's really interesting about Atlassian is that I do think that we pioneer new ways of working and as a company that was founded in Sydney that always collaborated deeply with United States, there was always a need to embrace asynchronous working, meaning work that happens digitally when people aren't together side by side. And that means that we have pioneered those ways of overcoming challenges. And as I was building my team, I thought there's some real magic happening here unfolding at Atlassian, and I'd really like to study it. I worked closely with our CEO, and he had this practice of page-led meetings, which I'd love to talk more about. And it was such a different approach because I had come from other corporate environments where you get into a meeting with the executive team, you present verbally, you are looking for people to match your energy and get the decision over the line. It might take 25 minutes for you to deliver your argument and then there's a time period for questions. But at Atlassian, you would get into a meeting with the CEO and it would be a silent page read. And your only tool for influence is writing and clear and concise thinking. That's a very different model of operating, but it saves so much time.
So, anyway, we could talk more about that specific practice, but what I was interested in was studying this type of thing. Was this a kind of working that was actually way more effective? And so we began to run experiments with 5,000 Atlassians testing in an A-B format, doing things like page-led meetings versus traditional meetings or disrupting people's orientation to how they design their calendar. The list goes on and on. And that allowed us to validate certain ways of working that we thought were worth sharing with the public and sharing out with our customers. And then similarly, we do research, that's market-facing research to understand what the general public and what our customers are really struggling with. And it's not surprising that we're seeing this response and we even just conducted some research on some of these very topics. In terms of, once you come up with these findings and things like page-led meetings, how do those manifest out then to the customers in the world? Because I think that's an important thing is we find things, how do we share that out? Well, we created something called the Atlassian Playbook many years ago. And I think that was something that was really important at the time of Agile and really Atlassian's first product suite. And we've continued to iterate on it over time over the past many years. But my team contributes to it deeply through these asynchronous practices in place. I'd love for you to tell us a little bit more then about some of your favorite practices. Because you mentioned page-led meetings, which-- I love that. Personally, that was something that blew my mind when I joined Atlassian. Joining in, one of the cool things they did is, anyone at Atlassian could join a Product Leadership Team meeting, which was basically the CEOs, the Product Leaders, everyone having this debate about an important topic. And I remember joining one, and it was quiet for the first 10 minutes. - Yeah. - I'm like, "What's going on in here?" And I realized they were all on a Confluence page, editing and adding comments and things like that. And then they got into some really deep discussion. And it was just such a fascinating way. And so, I'm curious, there's that kind of practice with page-led meetings, but what other practices have come out that you found that have been really beneficial for Atlassian's tackling problems like we saw before? Yeah, it's interesting too. I had a friend once watch me do a conference call who's an executive and he saw me being quiet. I introduced the meeting and then I was quiet for 10 minutes and he was like, "What is going on in this meeting?" Why aren't you talking? And I was like, "Oh, everyone's commenting and reading the page." But okay, so here's what a page-led meeting is by the way. Okay, our tool called Confluence, what I love about it is, it's extremely visual. So you're presenting written information in a way that's visually oriented, so you can have a call-out box that says the most important piece of information. And it was adapted from Bezos' six pagers, but now we focus on three to four-minute reads, which is much more concise. Versus six pages. Exactly, versus six pages. And what the goal is, is when you start a meeting, you open that meeting with a silent read of the three to four-minute page. It takes a lot more effort on the person who's leading the meeting to create that page, but it means that everyone who's participating gets up to speed in three to four minutes can comment on it and anyone who's not in the meeting can look at that page and get the exact same context that anyone in the meeting did which means that you don't really have to be in the meeting to know what matters.
And a real benefit of this, also which we'll talk about more deeply, is that also your AI tools and LLM can read it, a really concise, well-designed page, and then surface it, summarize it, get informed. I could quickly ask, "What's Mark up to? What's Mark and his team focused on in the next quarter?" And look at any pages and have our AI tools summarize that for me. So, it's a great way to manage the silo challenge that we see. 100%. Another really significant practice, and by the way, in our tests of page-led meetings, 85% of the meetings met their objective. That was versus an incredibly abysmal rate that was something under 30% for most meetings that were not your standard meeting that wasn't page-led. The last plug I'll say for page-led is that I love to tinker with this stuff. And I once timed myself doing a verbal presentation of page-led content. That was 17 minutes. So in a 30-minute meeting, I had 17 minutes of verbal presentation and the remainder of time to be able to ask questions. In a page-led meeting, you have five minutes upfront that's dedicated to absorbing the content and the remainder, which is more like 25 minutes, to more deeply discuss. So, you just get to a richer, more thoughtful discussion, and you can make decisions much faster. Such a powerful practice. And again, it goes back to the misalignment, the avoiding miscommunication, all those sorts of things. Right. All right, so I'm going to continue to shift us into new spaces. So one of the areas that you've talked about is the research done within Atlassian in your teams. You do a lot of research. I'm always curious, is there a favorite fact or a stat that you've come across in your research? Well, I love to say that I love data because it gives people access to their common sense. So, none of the things that I'll say to you are mindblowing but they are deeply felt.
- You'll feel seen. - Yeah. And it's a good influence tool to help us change culture and change the way that we work. So, one of my favorite stats from last year's State of Teams report, which is an annual report that we do on different matters affecting teamwork, was that 65% of knowledge workers surveyed said that it was more important to respond to a notification than it was to advance their priority work. And that just speaks to this culture of reactiveness, the fact that we don't have the ability to focus and do meaningful work. That was the number two thing that was on there, right? Right. Lack of focus, too many meetings, probably too many distractions. Right, right. So, yes, that stat I love to keep in my back pocket. When I saw it, my jaw dropped. I was like, wow, I knew it was bad but I didn't know that 65% of the people that we surveyed would even admit that. Oh, yeah, right. I mean, knowledge is half the battle. So, if we're aware of that, "All right, how do I make sure I focus in on your work?" All right, so you mentioned the State of Teams, which is-- I absolutely love this report that we do every year. And you can go back in time and see old reports and how they've evolved. But when was it last week, maybe the week before the latest State of Teams came out? Yes. And we've got some great data coming out around that. And I was just wondering, before we dive into the data, I was hoping-- I'll see if my clicker works. I was hoping you could just give us an overview of what the State of Teams is. Tell us about the research. How does it come together? What are you looking for? Things like that. When we do State of Teams every year, we take large survey sets. So in this case, it was 12,000 knowledge workers and 200 Fortune 500 executives. And what we're trying to do is observe problems that we see in our own landscape and form a hypothesis about what might be happening in the market because we want to better understand what our customers and what people who are at companies trying to get work done are experiencing. And this year, our hypothesis was that AI felt like a big opportunity for people, that people knew that it was disruptive, but they really didn't yet feel equipped how to use it. And we were looking for where the biggest opportunity might be. And what came back was really interesting. Interesting. Interesting. I imagine most of us in here are probably in that same boat with the AI. How do we use it? What do we do? All right, so, actually, before we dive too far into the data, you know me, I'm going to have another Slido question for you all. I want to get your ideas. So, I would love to find out how much time you think you spend searching for data. Because AI has a big play in terms of how we find information. So I want you to think about maybe-- Let me bring it over here.
Oh, there we go. I want to see-- I want you to think about how much time you spend in a week looking for data. Do you spend maybe less than an hour? Maybe is it two to six hours? Is it 7 to 13, 7 to 12, 13 plus? How much time do you actually spend looking for information? Because this is one of the questions, and this is probably my favorite data point out of the data teams. Yeah. And it will blow your mind when you think about this, which I hope it will, or you're just going to feel seen, like I said. So, let's see where we are. So we've got a majority of people are saying that it's two to six hours they spend looking for data, which is still a lot of time, right? That's a lot of time just searching. So, Annie, I'd love if you could share it with us. What did you all find when it came to searching for data? What did you see out of the 12,000 people that you looked at? Well, so what we found is that, again, we had this hypothesis that, one, is that AI and information were deeply linked, and that one of the most transformative ways to use AI in a company was to solve the information problems, get people up to speed instantly instead of having them wait for a meeting, that might be three days or two weeks in the future. And what we found was really interesting. We basically found that teams have never had more information, but they've never been less informed. They are spending a quarter of their work week, so about 10 hours searching for information. And teams know that AI is a way to solve this problem, but 96% of executives said that their teams are not yet equipped to build the solutions or to have the solutions to that problem. So it was really, really interesting to see. I think that's interesting. And it plays to a little bit of the room what we saw in here. So, you know we’re from two to six, but if you really start looking at it, I imagine you start finding more time where, again, whether it be looking for a record or an asset or something like that, you might find yourself hunting around or you find the wrong one, and then you've got to go back and find it again. Exactly. I think before we go into any more deeper findings, I'd love to find a little bit more about like why do you think this really came out that way? Why do you think that we're spending so much time looking for information? Well, it's funny because getting information online is a problem that's been around since the internet came and disrupted how work happened, right? But teams are more distributed than ever. AI is disrupting everybody's business model. I was in a conversation not long ago with 60 of our customers, and we went around and we were talking about ways of working. And as part of that conversation, every single person, these are top executives, indicated that their company was going through what they labeled as an existential transformation related to their business. So, there's so much transformation that's happening. So much information gets spun up from that. And yet-- I think it was something like 56% of people in the survey told us that the only way that they could get up to speed was by scheduling a meeting. And it's very different when you use AI as a solution as opposed to a meeting because, for instance, at Atlassian, we have a tool called Rovo, which sits across all of our surface areas. It sits across all of our tools, as well as all the third-party tools. So if Mark and I are prepping for this conversation, instead of speaking to my marketing person that sent me the document and we spoke about it for 15 minutes and then asking her to go pull it back up for me because I lost track of it, I can just ask Rovo, "Hey, where's that prep doc that Mark and I were collaborating on together? Can you summarize it for me? When, actually, are the session details? What are the session details? What time should I be there?" And AI can answer that instantly when I'm thinking of the problem, as opposed to asking somebody who will inform me later and then I have to pick it back up, and ultimately the task gets dropped. Well, I always think about even things like, you have instant messaging, but you ping someone, and that is going to take time, potentially. You're right. Maybe they don't know. So, again, can you have the stuff where the data is already there? It just needs to aggregate it and uncover it for you. - Exactly. - Interesting. All right, so as we think about some of this...
What do you think? I'm thinking of the questions that we've got, but I'm curious how do you think companies, what do companies need to do to help make their data more accessible for things like AI? Because one of the problems I think out there, and I imagine many of you have dealt with, is that your AI is only as good as the data that you've got, you know, garbage in, garbage out. How do you think companies, and, maybe even how have we at Atlassian started to approach making sure that we can make information more accessible from using AI? Right. And I think that the number one thing that we need to think about in our companies is that AI runs on digital information. So it doesn't know what's happening in the water cooler. It doesn't know what's happening inside conversations or what's in somebody's head who happens to be on vacation or slide six of the deck that is in somebody's email.
But what it does do is it can instantly read and digest anything that is available and accessible to it in the cloud. So, getting all the corporate information online and accessible to AI means that you can significantly unlock how you manage information as a company.
And that is really interesting to think about because I think we forget that getting our information online is a dependency to be successful at AI. And yet, once the information is online, it's not that hard a change to make because all you have to do is just ask in plain English for AI for help, and it does the heavy lifting for you. So, that's been really interesting to think about. And at Atlassian, we have an ecosystem where everything is that way, which helps us, I think, be ahead of the pack. Well, let's say, even that default to blogging and to writing things out or looming, things like that, all these things are getting integrated into that search. So that way, all of a sudden, I search for something and it will say, "Hey, you mentioned this in a Loom video that also references this Confluence page." And here's what you need to know, because it was all integrated together. Right. It's fascinating. I love it. I love it. Now, one of the other things that we found in this report is around cross-functional teams. And I think this has to do with the fact that in a distributed world, we're continuing to-- Teams are needing to do way more with less, they're having to work with each other way more than they used to. What have been some of the things you found around cross-team collaboration? Maybe some of the struggles, maybe some of the opportunities? So, I know most of the folks in this room are marketers. And I think when you think specifically about marketing and cross-functional collaboration, it's like you've got to be aware of what's happening on the product team. You've got to know what's happening on the sales team. You've got to make sure you understand budgets and what's happening with finance. And I think that is endemic of what's happening in most business teams across companies today. Teams are just far more cross-functional than ever. I think our research found that something like 98% of executives said that cross-functional collaboration was crucial and that half of their work required input or approval from another team. - That's very significant. - That is. And one of the things that we see as we try to manage the change around cross-functional collaboration is that there's information silos. So I was joking the other day, I was talking about how-- I was in a marketing meeting and they were talking about how we needed to push TWC so we could get SOW and drive, PEUs for the EAP-- For this campaign they did. And I was like, "Guys, tell me if you have," you know? And what happens is that teams need to have a shared language. I think, when you think of the-- What do we call it, on social media, everyone's in their echo chamber. Oh, yeah, yeah. But in corporate, we just call that information silos. And actually, AI is an incredibly useful way to breakdown information silos because, again, you can get information instantly so I can understand what the marketing team is doing. I can understand what the people team or the finance team or the product team is doing, how the sales team is trending on whatever it may be. And yet 98% of executives in our research told us that their teams aren't yet positioned to use AI to breakdown information silos. So I think that's, again, that's why information is at the crux of a lot of the challenges that we have. One, because it enforces silos. Two, because it slows down decisions and progress. And three, because it sucks up all of our time. So if we have to spend six hours a day in meetings getting informed, that's six hours a day that we can't spend being creative, doing hard work, progressing towards our highest priorities. I think that's such a-- And again, it goes back into if we can prioritize getting the information out there, all of a sudden, it becomes easier at the end of the day. Right. Right. Actually, this leads me to another question out for you all with this. And it goes back to AI usage. Because again, to that point, if you're not using AI, it's not learning and it's not bringing stuff in. So I would love to hear from you all about your usage of AI. And I'd love to find out-- Oops, I got to go one more. I'd love to find out how often do you use AI for the work you do? Do you use it daily? Is it something you're often doing? Is it something maybe weekly you're spending some time in, a couple times a month, or you're just simply not allowed? I know some people who-- They purely just don't have access because maybe their organization hasn't allowed it. I'm curious where you're landing. All right. We've got a lot of folks in here using it daily. It's great. The thing is though is we've still got a good, about a third of our group here, it's still something brand new for them. It's still something that we're trying to figure out. And I think this is fascinating. I bet if you ran these numbers this time last year, when we had Adobe Summit last year, I bet we would see it probably much more than weekly, much more than monthly, because I think teams are still trying to figure out a little bit about how do we use it. Yeah. What have been the things like-- What are some of the things that you've started to see teams do to try and learn how to become more avid AI users? Well, maybe I'll try my own poll. Yeah, yeah, do it. And maybe I'm wrong. I'm genuinely curious to know, how many of you that are using AI are using it in a consumer-only context, meaning a ChatGPT app to schedule things? So, no one. Everyone who's using AI is doing it for an enterprise reason.
- Yeah. - A mix of both. It's interesting because my hypothesis is that a lot of the adoption for AI will come from consumer use cases. And I do think that AI is becoming increasingly more available in our tool sets that we're using in our companies. So we can use them more readily. Of course, there are industries that are regulated that are not making AI as available. But I think, one, just playing with AI and experiencing the magic of it, you can see-- I remember having a DOS computer. And then I remember what it was like when we got Google, and it was just like I remember what that moment was like and we were like, "Wait, you can look for anything?" And I remember what it was like when we first got Facebook. Even just getting on the internet, right? - Right. - Remember? I hid from the screen. I was like, "Oh, can my cam boyfriend see me?" Yeah. And now I think AI is like that. It still feels magical. And I think there's a lot to experience to play with it because on the consumer side, you can play and then recognize areas where you'll never go back. You're like, once I've solved that problem for myself personally, I would never waste my time doing that the hard way when I can use AI. So that's one thing. And then the second thing I would say is we did a study, actually, through the Teamwork Lab about AI mentality or mindset. And we found that a lot of people had the mindset that AI was about task automation and about using AI as a tool to do certain low value repeatable tasks. But what we found was that super users and people who were wildly effective with AI and who really enjoyed using it were treating it more like a strategic partner. So really, instead of just make this outline for me, more like voice, opening up the voice and saying, "Hey, I have this idea. I'm not quite sure how to structure it, where am I wrong?" And getting one of my favorite examples recently as I was getting up to speed on a new skill that I didn't have, and it's something that I would have had to call friends who are executives to get them to explain it to me. Probably have to make 3 different phone calls of 45 minutes each, and then I would be passable. And I just asked ChatGPT to spin up three case studies for me and test me. And then I gave it my answers and it raided me, and by the end of 30 minutes, I had a new skill. And so, it's just about figuring out what you can ask it and use it for and really treating it as a partner to augment yourself like a teammate as opposed to-- - A tool. - A tool. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I think that's it. And I think I can't emphasize enough that playing around with it, and even just like your personal life, you might find using like an image creation tool, creating some crazy stuff. And then you might be like, "Maybe I can use that for some ad stuff I'm building or some stuff I'm doing for work." Right. And so I think those are things that, again, it allows you to think about what's possible. Right. I'm curious now, when you think about your team in AI, so I would love-- Again, AI is still and will be the hot topic for a while. Yeah. When you think about what we're learning about AI and how it's applying it and what you came out of the research with, are you doing anything different in your team about how you're applying it, any tools that you're using, any practical things around your usage of AI that could help inform our audience? We're really focused on agents. So, at Atlassian, in our Rovo tool, you can make an agent pretty much instantly. You could create an agent within 20 seconds. And sometimes people do it live. It's like make an agent that speaks in an Australian accent and it's next level hilarious. We do have that. But I own our onboarding program. And so we're redesigning our onboarding program. And a lot of it has to do with the content and that kind of thing. And my team members who are all non-technical, I thought this was so interesting, started, created something called Nora, the new Atlassian onboarding robot agent. And they built it completely from two weeks. So the complicated thing about building an agent is just defining its knowledge base. And with something like onboarding, you want to make sure that you have a really succinct, clear knowledge base for it to call from. And so it took them about a week and a half to do the knowledge base. And then they built the agent with its rule set and then instantly released it to the next cohort of folks that were onboarding. It was about 275 new Atlassians. And within the first 2 days, she had 800-- I don't know how to call, It's like what pronouns do you use with AI? I find myself changing it all the time.
There were 800 different conversations that were initiated, and that grows by about 100 conversations every day. So it's really interesting to see how fast you can move to creating something valuable in a place where we would have never had technology to disrupt how new hire onboarding happens. - I love that. - Yeah, it's fun. And again, those are the simple wins, especially for new people joining in who have no context. Right. This is giving them a little bit of that safety net. And how easy it is for a team that's non-technical to build that. Yeah. And I think, again, it's the way you get prompted to put it in, all the parameters. It is. It's very plain English. - It's like where's the data? - Super easy. Who am I? It's like giving an actor a role. Right. I always think one of my favorite agents that we have is our performance review agent. We go through our yearly or half-yearly performance reviews, and we have a certain style you got to put it in. And so, I actually ended up using it back in January for mine. I had got all my achievements and things like that. And I was like, all right, I don't want to figure out how many characters I need to do or any of that. I threw it in there, and it gave me everything I needed. And I spent maybe 10 minutes fixing some things, but it saved me like four or five hours of what would have been me sitting over a page being like, how do I word this? So again, it's again going back into saving us time at the end of the day. All right, so I know we're getting closer to opening up to everybody else here, and so, I just want to wrap things up on that State of Teams with two final questions on it. So, the first one I have is, was there any bits of the data that really surprised you, that when you looked at that State of Teams from 2025, you're like, wow. Well, it's like your bit of data you talked about earlier around searching for knowledge and things like that. I guess there are two. One is that employees said that finding information was their number one barrier to being able to move fast, which again feels like one of those common sense things that helps us feel seen. Oh, yeah. And the other, I love when there's strong consensus on things. And so 92% of executives told us that they believe the future requires a different way of working. And so, I do think that that shows that it's worth investing in these things that can feel disruptive but actually unlock a lot of progress for companies and just feels better for people. Oh, yeah. 100%. All right, now as you're looking at this year's worth of research, you're starting into the process again. What are you interested in looking at next? What are the problems when we think about the issues, the new foundational things we need to be changing? What are some of the problems that, maybe, you're interested in looking into next? I am interested in the idea of measurement. So, hopefully, you can tell through this chat that I love data and I love researching things. And I'm interested in how AI is going to make everything infinitely measurable and how we could get really distracted by that. So I'm very interested in two big areas which is, one, I don't think it's time to measure AI yet in terms of its efficacy. I think we should measure it in terms of our exposure to and engagement with it because it's like we're in the startup phase of using AI, and we want to preserve creativity as opposed to dial it into discrete efficiency objectives. And the other is that when it comes to measurement of how teams function, I think it's going to be really interesting as we get to a place where we can see every single email somebody sends and every single interaction they have and what nodes they're connected to in an organizational network and how that rolls up into a picture of collaboration and productivity and efficiency, but we have to remember that what teams do, that is great, is creative, and you can't put your finger on why a symphony sounds spectacular. And so we have to remember that there-- We have to keep room for that really deeply human creative experience. And I know everyone says that, that it's all about being human, but let's not forget what everyone can come into a group and create. It's like the whole is bigger than the sum of its parts, so let's not measure down to the most distilled individualized metric and expect to get to clarity from that. It's not all about efficiency. - Right. - It's not all about that. I wouldn't want that. All right, so we're starting to wrap things up here. But I'm going to bring us back to this first slide again, talking about the foundational practices. I would love to just hear from you as we think about some practical things people can do, like these new practices. We talked about the Team Playbook a little bit around things like the page-led meetings, some of these practices that we're using in Atlassian. What would be three practices that you'd recommend anyone in the audience go out there and maybe try and experiment with to help them unlock some of this high performance environment that most organizations are striving to achieve but just can't grasp it. - So definitely page-led meetings. - There you go. The other thing is about spending your time differently, so only use meetings to get work done together. Don't use meetings to share information. Ooh, that's a really good philosophy too like keeping that in the back of your head. It'll save so much time. And then it feels so good to get into a meeting and leave that meeting with something done. It often means your meetings need to be longer, so a 90-minute meeting versus five 30-minute meetings in a day.
I think that experimenting with new forms of connecting with each other, so whether it's a voice note on Slack or it's Loom, which is our video recording tool. I'm so happy we acquired Loom, by the way, because I was always talking about how amazing it is and now we get to, you know-- - Has anyone heard of Loom? - There. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Honestly, if you make a Loom, it's like make a Loom and play with AI are two of the most fun and disruptive things you can do with your team because they feel so different that I think it really communicates a different way of working. And then the last thing I'll offer is being super concise and focused in your written communications, whether that's page-led meetings, 4 to 5-minute read, or it is a Slack message that is expertly designed to be consumed in 20 seconds or less by the reader. And there's a great framework for that called Smart Brevity, which I highly recommend using. Yeah, and then, again, it's all about thinking about how can I communicate in a way that it can be truly received, so information can keep spreading across the organization without me being a blocker to it. I love that. And I think a lot of this is like, again, it's that mindset, it's that philosophy. It's like you start with that almost asynchronous first. You start with trying to be a little disruptive in your stuff. And you start with that, how do we communicate more effectively? More efficiently and effectively. Absolutely. When you're communicating effectively, it drives efficiency. Ooh. I love that right there. Awesome. All right, so I do have one set more questions, one more question or set of questions for you. But this wraps up this major portion of today. Before I get to questions from you all, one thing I want to let you know of is that I do a web series called Atlassian Lightning Talks. It is something where I get to-- Actually, this isn't my first time talking with Annie. I've talked with her on several occasions there where we get to dive into things like ways of working, new things of work, all those sorts of things from Atlassian's perspective. And one of the things I like to do as part of that is I like to keep my guests a little bit off their seats, a little bit, a little bit off kilter. And I do a little bit of a lightning round. So these are rapid fire questions. I've got six of them. Annie has not seen them. - That is purpose on purpose. - This is my favorite. I want to get Annie's raw response. And you all will get to experience that with us at the same time. So, Annie, are you ready for your lightning round? - I'm ready. - All right.
Poker, blackjack or slots? No idea how to do any of those.
- You're like, "Pass." - Yeah. All right. Favorite practice from the Atlassian Team Playbook? Ooh, definitely page-led collaboration. Page-led collaboration. What's worth spending money on to get the best of? Ooh, anything that saves time. Anything that saves time, anything in particular? Oh, I feel like I'm-- Yeah, nothing in particular. - Nothing in particular. - All right. I know earlier we were talking hotel rooms. - Hotel rooms. - Yes. Yes. All right. Let's see here. Best thing that happened to you last week? Ooh, last week we were at South by Southwest. And I read this book over the winter called Notes on Complexity, which is absolutely fabulous. It looks at complexity theory as a unifying theory for how all groups function, whether it's ants or cells or organizations. And the author, Neil Theise was also speaking, so I got to spend three hours with him. Oh, that's cool. And talk to him about his philosophy and science. Oh, I love it when you get that little serendipitous moment like that. - Oh, it's so great. - Oh, it's fantastic. Favorite life hack? - Oh, my gosh. - Non-work related. I have so many life hacks. I organize everything in systems. So, as an example, if you open a drawer in my house, like nothing is-- And you need a spoon, like the spoon has one home. You know, there's no-- You will always know where something is. Yeah. Exactly. The spoon will not be in a different place. The spoon lives in the spoon home. I love that. And then everyone knows where the spoon is. I love the spoon home. But then the problem is if people try to disrupt your system and not put the spoon back in the spoon home, so you gotta make it very simple. You know how you can get to Annie right there, right? - Yeah. Exactly. - Exactly. You'll throw her right off. All right, last question for you. In regards to ways of working, future of work, what's one thing that you've changed your mind about over the last three years? Great question. When I joined Atlassian, like I said, I was coming from these corporate contexts, I was so used to making my point with verbal presentations. I'm an attorney by background, so I spent lots of time writing all the things that I thought and felt and I started working with our COO at the time who had hired me and who's now our President, and she kept saying to me, "Annie, you use too many words." And it took me a minute. I didn't get it. And now I look back at the work I did three years ago and it just-- We're in such a simpler place. And I also think that that has to do with figuring out how to transform organizations. Simplicity is everything. It goes back to a little bit of that brevity you talked about. Yeah, exactly. - Exactly. - Right. Awesome. I think I've got one minute left, so I will end it here. The thing I'm going to point out on the screen, we have a QR code. This goes back to that State of Teams report. So if you're interested in learning more about that report, check it out. It's got all the details there. If you would like to go into more detail or have more conversations about how Atlassian works, these practices, the Playbook, any of these, we are down on the show floor. Right when you enter into the expo area, we're going to be on your left-hand side. Great little experience. We're having Lightning Talks. We've got different product demos going on, but we'd love to chat with you. So come see us. We have raffles we're going to be doing today at 5:30, and then tomorrow at 3:30 and 5:30 for iPads, Apple headphones, all that good stuff. So come and join us. And with that said-- What's that? - I want one. - I know, right? That's it. Thank you, all, for your time and enjoy the rest of the conference. Thank you. Thanks, guys. [Music]
