Atlassian brings AI agents into Jira to reduce workflow chaos

On Wednesday, enterprise software company Atlassian announced a new feature called “agents in Jira.” The update is currently available in open beta, which is a software release phase where the product is made available for public testing. This feature allows teams to assign and manage work for digital agents—AI-powered software entities capable of performing tasks—from the same dashboard they use for human employees. By integrating these digital agents directly into Jira, Atlassian’s project management software, the company hopes to help teams work together more effectively. Under this new system, enterprises can assign tasks and tickets to AI agents just as they would to human employees. The platform also tracks the progress of the work, sets deadlines, and monitors other metrics, while allowing users to loop in AI agents during the middle of an existing project.

The update is designed to give users visibility into the work their digital agents are performing, according to Tamar Yehoshua, Atlassian’s chief product and AI officer. According to TechCrunch, the update is intended to help teams produce “10x the work without 10x the chaos.” Yehoshua explained that the company has spent decades developing collaboration software to help people get work done. With digital agents now performing a significant portion of those tasks, Yehoshua noted the importance of coordinating workflows between human employees and AI. She acknowledged a growing sentiment that digital agents can create more work and chaos for teams, asserting that Atlassian’s expertise lies in bringing order to that chaos. Yehoshua emphasized that keeping all tasks within a single dashboard is key to preventing automation from creating additional work. Ultimately, she framed the release as an important step in a long journey to integrate AI into existing workflows, enabling people to work more productively.

By tracking the performance of digital agents alongside human output on the same dashboard, the update provides a unified view of project progress. This capability could help enterprises evaluate the performance of agents versus humans on the same project. Consequently, organizations could use these insights to determine where to deploy digital agents and which tasks should remain human-led.

Why it matters

This update addresses the “chaos” of AI adoption by integrating digital agents into existing project management workflows, giving managers visibility into both human and machine output.