AI Isn't Magic. It's Plumbing. Lessons from Deploying AI Into our Worksflows for 3.5M Users with Atlassian's Head of AI

With Sherif Mansour, Head of AI at Atlassian If you've been sold on the idea that AI is a magic button - wire up a model, bolt it onto your product, watch costs drop and valuation skyrocket - you're not alone. But that's not how this works. After building AI trusted by more than 5 million users inside Atlassian, the real wins came from something painfully simple: integrating AI into the most boring workflows they had. Not moonshots. Not shiny demos. Just the unglamorous loops where humans and AI work together inside the tools people already use. In this session, you'll hear what actually worked - and where they flat-out got it wrong: •Why they started with triaging bug tickets and flagging blocked work, not "AI strategy decks" - and how boring work builds trust fast •Why you can fake any AI feature in a chat prompt, and how watching power users told them which ones deserved a real, dedicated experience instead •How they redesigned roles, not just tools - pairing AI-native juniors with senior "taste" •How they fought "AI slop" by encoding each team's voice and definition of good •Why your customers climb an AI maturity ladder, from asking search questions, to drafting and summarizing, to full workflow productivity, and how to build for the rung they're actually on You'll walk away with: •A framework for picking your first 3-5 "boring but high-ROI" AI workflows •A checklist for designing AI as a teammate in a workflow, not a chatbot on the side •A hiring and coaching lens for the AI-native org