Ever since Atlassian Intelligence was first introduced to us at Team ‘23, we know many of you have been eagerly waiting for it to enter general availability.
That time has now come.
At the tail end of 2023, Atlassian issued a statement: ‘AI [Atlassian Intelligence] capabilities are now generally available across Jira Software, Confluence, Jira Service Management and more.’
We’ve now explored this AI functionality and, most excitingly, begun to enable it for our clients.
In this post, we’re sharing some of our insights, guidance and use cases to help you make the most of Atlassian Intelligence.
Let’s embrace the future with AI.
What Atlassian Intelligence capabilities are available?
The first wave of available Atlassian Intelligence features include:
Natural language to SQL
Natural language to JQL
Generative AI in editor
AI-powered summaries
Natural language automation
Virtual Agent with AI answers
Request type suggestions
Atlassian Intelligence is currently Cloud only. Some features are only available in certain products at present, and a few remain in beta. For a more comprehensive overview, Atlassian has created this handy table, which outlines products, feature descriptions and more.
We won’t go through each and every AI capability in this post. Instead, we’ll focus on the ones we – and our clients – are currently the most excited by. We expect these features to deliver real-world benefits to your work and, ultimately, to transform your teams’ productivity, satisfaction and output.
It’s a bold claim. But it’s entirely possible with Atlassian Intelligence.
Which AI features will transform your work?
Out of this initial cohort of available Atlassian Intelligence capabilities, a few really caught our attention.
At this stage, it’s worth remembering that this is very new technology. These AI features will drive significant leaps in efficiency and quality, but some are still in their infancy. We have high expectations for how Atlassian will continue to evolve and enhance its AI offering.
For now, most of the features where we see the most promise centre on the Service Desk experience.
If you’re eager to start benefitting from Atlassian Intelligence, why not have a free consultation with us? We can help review your current Atlassian usage, provide guidance on how and where AI can add value, and talk you through everything from stakeholder engagement to team training.
AI Virtual Agent
Now, this was actually launched back in November 2023, ahead of the rest of Atlassian’s AI capabilities.
We’ve already begun to implement some functionality around the Virtual Agent offering in Jira Service Management (JSM) for our clients, and it looks like it’s going to be pretty powerful.
The Virtual Agent can be used to answer customer queries by pulling information from your knowledge base.
One of the notable things about Atlassian Intelligence, is that it draws upon your organisation’s own unique context in order to provide more relevant and valuable information. It’s continually learning, so over time you should see your Virtual Agent’s answers becoming increasingly useful.
Atlassian recommends that the Virtual Agent is best suited to customer questions that:
Can be resolved with simple information or instructions
Are included in your existing knowledge base
Don’t require escalation to a (human!) agent
When a Virtual Agent can automatically suggest the right knowledge base articles to solve your customer queries, you’re going to start seeing significant improvements to your service desk efficiency:
Agents will be free to handle more complex, high priority requests
Customers should benefit from faster response times
You’ll gain valuable insights into the relevance and value of your knowledge base – and identify where you may have content gaps
Cost-savings should arise from a reduction in manual processing and focus on higher-value work
Some of our clients are already embracing this functionality – and we’re excited to be with them on this journey!
Quick note: At present, the Virtual Agent can only provide support over Slack. Atlassian has confirmed that it will be available in Microsoft Teams in the future, too.
AI-powered summaries
This feature is available in both Confluence and JSM at present. (Jira Software and Work Management are coming soon.)
Put simply, Atlassian Intelligence can transform any text into a concise summary. Within Confluence, this feature could relate to any form of document: A marketing proposal, sales reports, meeting minutes, a new product brief… The list is endless.
This will undoubtedly save teams time. Instead of wading through words, they can easily digest a simple summary.
But what we’re really excited about is its application in Jira Service Management.
Here, the AI tool can quickly summarise JSM issue details. This could include comments, actions, and more, bringing stakeholders or new agents quickly up to speed.
We all know that when there’s an incident or a high-priority request, time is of the essence. We believe that Atlassian’s AI-powered summaries in JSM will help agents to collaborate and respond more efficiently, and may reduce the risk of human error, such as forgetting to include certain details at hand-over or escalation.
Generative AI in editor
This is currently available in most Atlassian products.
Again, we’re seeing real value for clients when this is used in a service desk context.
Atlassian Intelligence can take an agent’s response and then enhance it. An agent might ask AI to review it in terms of readability and grammar. Or perhaps tone; AI can tweak the wording to be more empathetic, reassuring or positive.
These small adjustments may help to improve the relationship between agents and customers, and could also be seen as a training tool for agents – helping them to understand how tonal shifts or rephrasing can enhance their responses.
All of this can contribute to an overarching culture of continuous improvement. Which, as Agile and DevOps geeks at heart, we rather like…!
How to enable Atlassian Intelligence
Atlassian Intelligence is available in the Premium and Enterprise editions of Atlassian products. However, it is not automatically activated.
Instead, you’ll need your organisation Admins to activate AI features. Once opted in, you won’t need to do so again.
Atlassian has explained this in more depth here.
What’s next for Atlassian Intelligence?
Forgive us for saying the obvious, but the general availability of Atlassian Intelligence is really rather exciting, isn’t it?
Over the coming months, we’ll continue to support and guide our clients in using this new technology. We’ll also be engaging with Atlassian to further understand how its AI offering will evolve, and bringing you all more information and insights when we can.
