Atlassian's Rovo AI Assistant Now Generally Available, Bringing AI-Powered Productivity to Teams

Atlassian's Rovo AI is now generally available

Atlassian first showed off Rovo six months ago. Rovo is what the company calls its "AI teammate" that combines smarter search and chat-based AI tools with agents that can help users automate some of their workflows in tools like Jira and Confluence. At its Team '24 Europe event in Barcelona, the company has now announced the general availability of Rovo. In addition, Atlassian also announced a number of additional new AI features that, like Rovo, are part of the company's Atlassian Intelligence platform. At the core of Rovo is Rovo Search, which combines data from core Atlassian tools like Jira and Confluence, but also allows businesses to connect a wide variety of third-party SaaS tools. Jamil Valliani, Atlassian's head of product for Atlassian Intelligence, told me that Search will support about 80 connectors in the next months. For now, it supports bringing in data from services like Slack, Figma, Google Drive, and GitHub, but the plan is to support all of the major SaaS apps that Atlassian's customers use. From there, they can then search this data, but also use Rovo Chat to ask questions about it. Now with the new Rovo browser extension, people can use this chat experience on any site on the web. As for Rovo Search, Valliani also noted that the company now takes social signals into account when ranking search results, based on data from its team graph, which allows it to know who you typically collaborate with. Beyond these core features, what got people most excited when Atlassian first demoed Rovo, was Rovo Agents. This is where the intelligent assistance concept fully takes form in the Atlassian ecosystem. The promise here is that these agents can handle some of the routine and repetitive tasks for employees and free them up to do more important work. There are about 20 agents available right now, ranging from a tool that can draft release notes, a bug report assistant, an OKR generator, a translator, and a trivia host (because why not?). The real power here, though, is that employees can build their own agents, Valliani said. "We really want to inspire people across the business on what is possible," he said. Over time, Atlassian plans to bring more agents and agent capabilities into its Marketplace, where it is already partnering with Appfire, Usertesting, Onward, and Zapier to highlight some of these capabilities. Not everybody inside a company uses Atlassian products, though, which could potentially limit the reach of a product like Rovo and Rovo Search -- and make it a harder sell for Atlassian as a number of other companies are also vying to offer similarly comprehensive AI-powered services. But as the company announced Wednesday, it is making Rovo available to non-Atlassian users at no additional cost. Atlassian Intelligence for developers Rovo is maybe the most visible part of Atlassian Intelligence right now, but as part of this release, the company is also launching a number of additional features, largely for developers and project managers, that will help them with time-consuming tasks that don't directly involve programming. Now, a new AI Agent will be able to generate code plans, code recommendations, and pull requests in Jira based on a task description that the developer writes, together with requirements and additional context from within the organization. "When a developer wakes up in the morning, half the time they are working on issues that are like 'this thing crashed,' or 'I have to go change this config.' All these different things that are in the way of actually building the next feature or doing other, more complex, work," Valliani said. With Jira and Confluence, Atlassian has a lot of context from inside the developer's company to look for issues and help developers fix and -- ideally -- avoid them. "We have this AutoDev agent look for issues it could help with, and when it thinks it could help, it just presents itself and says, 'Hey, AutoDev here. I can handle this for you.'" The agent, of course, won't act autonomously but will always keep the human in the loop and show exactly what it plans to do. Another new tool will speed up pull request reviews -- no matter the code management tool -- by automatically analyzing the code and offering recommendations for areas of improvement.

Atlassian announces general availability for Rovo generative AI assistant - SiliconANGLE

The knowledge discovery product for enterprise customers can extract data from a company's internal tools, help find information stored in them and act on it. The company announced Rovo in May alongside a closed beta for thousands of customers. It's powered by Atlassian Intelligence, a generative AI service launched a year ago that brought AI services and models to its products. Rovo includes AI search capabilities, a chatbot that is a go-to expert about a company's entire portfolio of knowledge and is context-aware and provides powerful agents. Rovo Agents, the company says, can act as "virtual teammates" that can be pulled into any workflow to save hours or days of work at a time. "Rovo unlocks enterprise search for your entire organization, and it connects to data across SaaS tools that companies use every day," explained Valliani. "Agents have a profile which describes what they can do, so users can make informed choices before they engage with them," said Valliani. "We're going to have a bunch of agents out of the box, at least 20 of them and more coming soon. We also have partnered with a number of marketplace partners." A few typical agents include a User Manual Writer, a Jobs Listing Assistant, a Bug Report Assistant, a Release Notes Drafter, a Global Translator and more. Users can also craft their own with code or without code to help them with their task generation or extend existing Agent capabilities to fit their needs. "Writing quarterly roadmap items used to take about an hour, and each person on our team creates up to five roadmap items each quarter," said Noemi Flores, staff program technical program manager at Procore Technologies Inc., an American construction management software-as-a-service provider. "With Rovo, we've been able to do the same thing in about 15 minutes."

Atlassian's AI Rovo is Now Available to All Users

Atlassian's CEO and Co-founder, Mike Cannon Brooks, says Rovo Chat will never get tired of your questions. Atlassian, an American-Australian software company, announced on October 9, 2024, that its recently introduced team-building AI, Rovo, will now be available for all users. The company announced this move at its Team'24 Europe conference in Barcelona. Atlassian customers will now be able to expand their subscriptions to incorporate Rovo AI, a comprehensive search engine, chatbot, and AI agents that are helpful to developers and business users alike. The company claims that Rovo can provide answers in seconds, providing personalised search results. Powered by Atlassian Intelligence, it adds a new perspective to collaboration between humans and AI. Its Rovo Search feature helps it find the exact information teams require from under a stack of data. It can generate relevant results across all data sources like Google Drive, Microsoft Sharepoint, Microsoft Teams, GitHub, Slack, and Figma. The software company also releases a 'bring your own data' (BYOD) connector that helps each person export custom data from their internal application into their teamwork graph. Rovo Search can then analyse this data to filter out information for customers. It learns and understands the company's data through tools like AI chat, knowledge cards (that answer your questions directly from first and third-party sources) and AI-driven data insights. Atlassian is starting to reduce friction across workflows for engineers by having AI assist in code completion and soon aiming to increase development speed and quality with their new dev-focused AI Agents. "We have joined the EU AI pact with fellow industry leaders to stay ahead of any upcoming regulations in all the geographies of the world," Brooks said during his speech.

Team '24 Europe: Atlassian Rovo now generally available, new AI capabilities, and a glowup for Jira

During its Team '24 Europe conference, Atlassian, a leading provider of team collaboration and productivity software, announced the general availability of Rovo, an AI-powered tool that enables teams to unlock organizational knowledge at scale, less than six months after its introduction.It was announced alongside a host of new AI capabilities across its product suite, empowering teams to unlock greater levels of productivity and collaboration. Atlassian also unveiled new features and a new look for its flagship product Jira that make it easier, more flexible, and powerful for all types of work.Mike Cannon-Brookes, CEO and co-founder, Atlassian said, "Rovo is one of the most ambitious and important products we've ever built. I'm thrilled we can get it into our customers' hands just five months after we first announced it in Las Vegas."Whether you're a dev team building the next big thing, a marketing team creating your next big campaign, or a service agent helping your customers solve a really big problem, AI is going to transform the way your work gets done. It's a huge opportunity for us, and most importantly, for our customers."Rovo: Unlocking organizational knowledge at scalePowered by generative AI and the teamwork graph, Rovo seamlessly integrates into the Atlassian platform, and helps speed up work by making it easier to access the information teams need. Teams are already saving 1-2 hours of time per week on average, with 75% of beta users saying Rovo helps them get work done faster and 80% say Rovo helps them find the right information at the right time.With the newly announced Rovo Search Connectors, Rovo Data Center Connectors, and the Rovo Browser Extension, these teamwork graphs become even richer as they get access to more sources. The search connectors also provide more knowledge to Rovo Chat, helping teams get the answers they need without switching tabs. Teams globally are pulling Rovo Agents into workflows to get better outcomes, while simultaneously saving hours or even days.AI-powered innovation across the Atlassian suiteTo improve collaboration and empower teams, Atlassian infused AI into all its products under the Atlassian Intelligence umbrella. The newest in-product AI features help customers reduce friction for developers, promote better collaboration across all teams, and accelerate service delivery and incident management. The key highlights include:Jira: The new AI capabilities automatically break down work items, generate tickets, and streamline project management.Jira Service Management: The AI-powered agents now assist with incident management, resource allocation, and post-incident reviews.Development Tools: AI assists developers with code generation, analysis, and pull request reviews, boosting velocity and code quality.A refreshed Jira for all teamsEarlier this year, Atlassian announced the next evolution of Jira - a shared place for every team to align on goals and priorities, track and collaborate on work, and get the insights they need to build something incredible, together.Today at Team 24 Europe, Atlassian shared a refreshed and improved Jira experience to empower all teams to collaborate effectively and achieve ambitious goals. Now, Jira is bringing more flexibility to support any team's work style, through a new customizable sidebar that simplifies navigation and brings AI-powered search front and center. There are also new background colors, images, and card covers to take personalization even further.To better reflect Jira's expanded user base to all teams, issues will no longer be the default name in Jira and teams can choose what to call their work (whether it's "task" or "launch" or "issue"). Teams can also create custom project templates with pre-configured workflows, automations, permissions, and more, to scale their ways of working while remaining consistent.For further details about the products, and updates please click below:AI blog: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/team-24-eu-ai-updatesJira blog: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/the-new-jiraEnterprise blog: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/jira-align/announcing-focus-atlassians-new-enterprise-strategic-portfolio-management-offeringAbout AtlassianAtlassian unleashes the potential of every team. Our agile & DevOps, IT service management and work management software helps teams organize, discuss, and complete shared work. The majority of the Fortune 500 and over 300,000 companies of all sizes worldwide - including NASA, Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Salesforce - rely on our solutions to help their teams work better together and deliver quality results on time. Learn more about our products, including Jira, Confluence and Loom at https://atlassian.com.

Team '24 Europe - Atlassian rolls out Rovo, refreshes Jira, launches enterprise strategy planner

Work management vendor Atlassian is celebrating the return of its Team event to Europe for the first time since the pandemic with a series of product announcements as the event opens this morning. Pride of place goes to the roll-out to general availability of its Rovo AI assistant, which was first announced just six months ago at the US edition of Team '24. There's the launch of a new product, Focus, which provides enterprise strategy and planning to complement the existing Jira Align product. Meanwhile, there are more new features and a new look for the flagship Jira work management tool, along with various updates to other products. Bringing Rovo live for customers is coming faster than many expected, as Mike Cannon-Brookes, CEO of Atlassian comments: We don't want to just give demos about it, we want to ship it. Two of the three customers I've talked to this morning were really surprised that Rovo is here. They expected it to be, well, a lot longer time. Rovo makes its production debut with a collection of 20 ready-made agents that perform tasks such as organizing issues in Jira, preparing release notes, or drafting brand communications. There are also preview releases of two more sophisticated agents aimed at developers, one of which automatically creates code, while the other reviews pull requests. Customers can of course create their own agents, using either a low/no-code natural language interface suitable for business users or the Forge serverless developer platform. Third-party agents can also be invoked via an agent marketplace which by early next year will have connectors to over 50 apps, as well as a connector to enterprise knowledge assets held in Confluence Data Center. As an example, today's keynote includes a demonstration of Rovo connecting to design platform Canva to automatically source an AI-generated image. The connectors also allow Rovo search to source information held in third-party SaaS tools such as GitHub and Google Drive as well as Atlassian products. This feature, along with the Rovo chat sidebar, has been a hit with early access customers, making it easier to collate information required to complete tasks in the flow of work. Both chat and search are now available via a browser extension, bringing Rovo to any browser page or apps such as Google Docs. Atlassian says that, while other vendors have focused on AI to help developers write code, Rovo is helping cut through all the other work that they have to do alongside that core activity. Anu Bharadwaj, President of Atlassian, says: There is a lot of focus on these code generation tools, which I think is interesting and important, but really, software developers spend about 10-15% of their time coding. A lot of their time is really spent on looking for the right information in the right place and working with design teams, working with customers, trying to understand what the problems are, debugging production incidents. At Atlassian, what we want to do is to make sure that not only the 10% of coding time, but also the 90% of collaboration time, finding information, how do we make that productive with AI? With Rovo agents... we've focused on, how do you really help developers reduce the amount of productivity loss through finding information and collaborating with others, and also address the remaining 90%? Rovo is able to be a rich source of information because of its ability to ingest and interpret corporate information and make sense of it with the help of the Atlassian teamwork graph, which brings structure to teamwork data. Cannon-Brookes goes on: Once you've got all the corporate knowledge in a structured data format, in a data graph, you can then use the LLM to read that knowledge for you and bring back the pieces that you need in various different forms. Rovo chat is extremely good. Customers using it are quite amazed, because they often have a huge amount of corporate knowledge but they don't have good access to it in the way that Rovo gives you in search and chat. Things like definitions just surfacing, constantly rewriting corporate acronyms for projects, etc. It's a very small but practical use case for customers. Obviously once you've got all of that knowledge centralized and in a structured format in the teamwork graph, then you have agents which take basically the power of the Atlassian platform and apply an AI brain into an application to create a virtual teammate... We've obviously done that with a lot of the early access program customers to go in, and ... they have this, like, child [on] Christmas morning kind of feeling when an agent does something for them. It's kind of cool to watch the CIO of a very large bank, who was like he was about eight, as we showed his internal framework and answered questions on it. Focus is a new product that helps enterprise leaders define and manage strategy, adding a new layer of management across all of the existing work management tools in the Atlassian portfolio. To be available at no extra cost for existing Jira Align customers, it complements the existing Align product, which focuses more on planning work across multiple projects, and aims to help define the strategy that informs and directs that planning. The product includes focus maps to help define and visualize strategy and then users can track how it's playing out, mapping goals, work, teams and funding against these priorities, with connectors into work tools such as Jira to provide visibility into what's going on down at the individual team and project level. AI-powered summary updates can surface information from subsidiary activities or sound alerts when projects and tasks go off-track, with notifications in Teams and Slack. Third party integrations into other work management tools will follow next year, while connectors into workforce and financial management tools in the likes of Workday and SuccessFactors are also on the roadmap. The new Jira, introduced at the US edition of Team '24 as a single platform aimed at general business users as well as Atlassian's original audience of software developers, gets additional updates to make it more attractive to business teams. Work in Jira no longer has the default name of issues, a throwback to its origins as a bug tracking tool, but users can choose from a selection of terms. The user experience gets a refresh, with the ability to add background colors and images, along with a new customizable left-hand navigation and a simplified top navigation that includes the AI search bar. Users can create custom project templates, while Atlassian AI can capture tasks from Confluence and Loom and convert them ready for use in Jira. Goals, previously in preview, are now generally available within Jira. And program managers get a new program board view of work in progress. These are the major announcements, with other new features coming to Loom, Java Service Management, Guard, Compass and Atlassian Home. The spotlight is on AI and Rovo, which Atlassian is putting in the hands of customers so that they can harness information and drive automations for practical results -- a very similar philosophy that we also saw at the recent Dreamforce conference from Salesforce, and an important contrast to other more toolkit approaches to AI. But I'm also intrigued by the launch of Focus as part of Atlassian's continuing quest to make digital teamwork more effective. I'll be digging into these and other announcements during the week.