ACE - Team 24 Wrapup event at ahmedabad.

Editor's Notes

1. Hi, I am Maitrey Patel, a Ahmedabad Atlassian Community Leader and my goal today is to give a high-level overview of the Team-24 event and announcements that you can catch on-demand on the Atlassian Website.
2. Since, there is a lot to cover, the goal here tonight is to cover some of the main announcement highlights and also my personal take on what was interesting. And, thus the focus will only be few products only – Jira, Confluence, and the AI announcements which will be of interest to the majority of you. I will also highlight Loom, a recent acquisition, and Rovo, the new AI product that was announced. So, let’s get started.
3. I think this quote from Atlassian co-founder MCB which sets the stage of what we are dealing with this in the new Gen AI era and how Atlassian is promising to keep their tools and us up-to-date with it.
4. And, how is Atlassian planning to help it’s customers? Can some one here mimic an LLM and fill in the blank of the final token in this sentence? Any guesses?
5. Yes, cloud. So, when I go through the various products & features, they are all cloud-only! Sorry, data-center folks!
6. This 'mic drop moments' list is from a recap email Atlassian sent to the attendees after the conference. I wanted to show this as it showcases what they thought were their important announcements. And, I will only touch only on a couple of these tonight.
7. The first big announcement is that Atlassian has now combined the two separate products, Jira and Jira Work Management into one single product! Their idea is to bring the best parts of JWM and Jira into one project management solution for all teams. This is whether you are a software, IT, or a HR or Finance team. I will now run through a spattering of various feature enhancements announced.
8. Users will be able to create goals in Jira’s list and issue views to visualize how each task maps to a higher objective. And in the future Atlassian will introduce new ways to easily view and track progress towards goals: 1) A goals directory where every goal can be viewed and tracked, And 2) Goal progress charts in summary view where goals can be viewed in the context of your projects.
9. Atlassian is integrating the ability to easily embed videos, via the Loom acquisition, into a Jira ticket. We will talk about Loom a little later, but the point is that Atlassian wants to encourage multi-modal ways of entering a Jira ticket.
10. Each team prefers to visualize and organize work differently, according to their needs – so Jira is getting list view to all projects. I am not familiar with JSW, but this was a very popular feature/view that they want to bring to Jira as well. This allows you to make in-line edits, and allows bulk edits in the list when multiple tickets need to be assigned to the same person or associated with a new goal. You can even create and configure a custom field right there!
11. AI to help with rote tasks.  Starting soon, AI work breakdown (currently rolling out to Jira Premium and Enterprise users in beta) will make suggestions for breaking epics into issues, or issues into sub-tasks so you can spend less time breaking work down and more time moving it forward.  AI automation: Explain any requirement or action you want to automate in everyday, natural language, and Atlassian Intelligence will create an automation rule for you. Natural language to JQL: Power users know Jira Query Language (JQL) is the most effective way to run complex searches in Jira. Now, anyone can do it. Just ask the question using everyday language, and Atlassian Intelligence will convert it to JQL right before your eyes.  Generative AI in the editor: Create, summarize, and improve content in Jira’s description or in comments. A marketer might ask AI to brainstorm ideas for a new campaign, or a frustrated developer might use it to mellow out their tone when leaving a comment. AI summaries (coming soon): Sum up issue comments so you can get up to speed or wrap your head around another team’s work quickly.
12. And, finally, a really cool AI feature in Jira is the ability to create an automation rule by typing in your task/goal in plain English. You then click this "Create with AI" button on the screen, and the system will automatically build out the rule. This highlights how Atlassian is bringing in AI in small doses by embedding these new capabilities, driving by AI, throughout their products. You will see how they have this "AI button" in various screens across their products based on context to accomplish different tasks mostly built on a GenAI based models.
13. Confluence started of as a simple wiki to capture and store information for your software teams. It has grown to a system to create shared knowledge via different content types - pages, whiteboards, and databases. As teams grow, projects grow - how do we continue to create shared knowledge and make shared congress while breaking out of these silos? Atlassian states that the mission of Confluence is to really set knowledge free from silos, making it available to every team across your organization.
14. For the Confluence product new features, we will start by showing the AI features. And, we will start with how a fictious team would begin a brainstorming and ideation in a Confluence whiteboard. Speak about: 1) Start by typing in a question 2) System would query the existing Jira, Confluence and JSM systems to answer that question and create a set of sticky notes in response to the question. 3) Sets the stage for brainstorming session
15. Speak About: AI feature to request the System to automatically group and create categories
16. Speak About: System has automatically created this categories - User Education, Market Expansion, etc.
17. Next, you can look at your priority items and request the system to automatically create Jira ticket items from the whiteboard. Speak About: (No picture/slide on this) And, you can create a confluence page organizing all this content into a wiki page!
18. Speak About: And, once you have that long and comprehensive Confluence page, do you really have to read it? There is a "catch-up" feature that will summarize the page! And, what I found really cool, was that it can also summarize the comments too!
19. There is a large and wide variety of AI capabilities being embedded in Confluence.
20. And, they announced also a large set of "regular" enhancements in the product as well. Speak about: Smart links in the left hand navigation bar to link external sources; which Atlassian now calls the "Content Tree“ Speak About: (No slide): And, they finally completed one, if not the top, requested feature in Confluence. Can anyone guess what it is? Yes, Unified Search across all Atlassian products and a few 3rd party SaaS products. And, in the future, an API to integrate your own proprietary database/knowledge source. E.g. Pharmaceuticals company database of medical related information.
21. I will quickly cover some of the other major announcements.
22. To highlight how Atlassian is also moving fast with product enhancements, they mentioned a few numbers
23. Guard – new product announcement. We will look at the video to understand its capabilities
24. Before we dive into Rovo, let's set the stage with a few definitions as I found it confusing. Atlassian Intelligence - AI, no, not that general AI. I am sure they thought it was cool term, but now I find it confusing when I see the term AI within Atlassian documentation on which AI they are documentation referring to! Rovo takes human-AI collaboration to the next level by integrating contextual information, conversational AI, and agents into workflows. Teamwork Graph is the “secret sauce”. Underneath it all is Atlassian’s teamwork graph, which connects and organizes data from your Atlassian products, Marketplace apps, and connected third-party SaaS tools. With over two decades of experience and the contextual information in your instance to draw upon, Atlassian can enrich AI, collaboration, automation, and analytics for you like nobody else. Rovo Agents – Your new AI teammate
25. Using a "Jobs to be Done" framework to understand Rovo, I liked how Atlassian grouped the features in to three major functional areas.
26. Speak About: For the “Search” Job, Rovo allows for: 1) Enterprise & Unified Search capabilities; uses “Semantic capabilities” 2) Respects enterprise grade permissions of the content
27. For the "Find" Job, you can now easily highlight a term you don't understand the AI will help you define it.
28. But, what's really cool, is how they take it to another level: 1) You can define the term 2) It will prompt you with related questions that you probably will ask next 3) Provide a "conversational interface" for you to go deeper 4) And for the answers provided, provide links to the relevant source used to help hopefully reduce the GenAI hallucinations & incorrect answers we keep hearing about.
29. And, lastly for the “Act” Job, it is realized by a Rovo agent. The Rovo Agent defined by these 4 features. Speak About: Goals – Knowledge Character – The ability to infuse company culture into your agent. Actions – The tasks to be accomplished;
30. Atlassian doesn’t just envision one agent, but a whole set of agents focused on achieving different goals. (Comparable to Open AI's custom GPTs (?)) There are currently 20 built-in agents from Atlassian And, an first round of agents built by marketplace vendors And, in the future, the ability to build your own agents (confirm it's on Forge?)
31. Here’s an example of an Atlassian built Rovo Agent.
32. And, a pretty slick example of the Agent: Invoked within “a context” of a Confluence page Ability to Call the agent Ability to review & approve the changes Give feedback as well
33. Wrapping up, a summary of Rovo’s AI features across search, find and act “jobs”
34. And, off course, Rovo will be a part of the core Atlassian foundation platform. Per the FAQ, pricing is to be unique per user, per instance – so it is going to be a product, and an additional cost to the firm!
35. Some - and unfortunately, not all - of the presentations at Team can still be accessed on the Team'24 website under the 'On Demand Sessions" sections. Speak About: Note here how Atlassian organized the various tracks under 6 categories. I always find this fascinating to understand what Atlassian is focusing on and also how they name the tracks to highlight the different topic areas of interest. I will just quickly mention two sessions that I found really interesting and you should definitely take a look at.