Atlassian to chop 10pc of its workforce and embrace AI

The Australian-founded collaboration software program supplier needs to change into “an AI-first firm”.

Collaboration software program supplier Atlassian is to chop round 1,600 roles, amounting to 10pc of its workforce, its CEO and co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes introduced in a written blogpost yesterday (11 March).

Cannon-Brookes stated the layoffs have been essential to “self-fund additional funding in AI and enterprise gross sales, whereas strengthening our monetary profile”, with an intention to alter the way in which the Australian-founded firm works and reorganise to maneuver quicker.

He stated that though Atlassian essentially believes that individuals and AI create one of the best outcomes, and its strategy isn’t for AI to interchange individuals, “it might be disingenuous to faux AI doesn’t change the combination of expertise” wanted or “the variety of roles required in sure areas”.

“That is primarily about adaptation. We’re reshaping our ability combine and altering how we work to construct for the long run,” he stated.

Cannon-Brookes stated “a considerate and extremely thorough strategy to figuring out impacted roles” was used to make structural and organisational adjustments, with a give attention to retaining staff with the required expertise for “an AI-first firm” – particularly “robust performers, graduates”, and people “with transferable expertise”.

All Atlassian staff have been resulting from obtain an electronic mail replace on their particular person and regional statuses inside 20 minutes of the publish going dwell.

The CEO’s blogpost, which additionally included a video message to his employees, detailed the compensation preparations for impacted staff, that are topic to native legal guidelines and session necessities.

Syndey-headquartered Atlassian was based in 2002 by Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquar, who every have a present web value of round $7bn, in keeping with Forbes.

Its merchandise embrace collaboration, communication and undertaking administration functions corresponding to Trello, Jira, Confluence and Bamboo, and it has staff throughout 14 nations.

In a quarterly monetary letter to shareholders final month, Cannon-Brookes stated Atlassian was “constructing a bloody nice enterprise” and “had a implausible Q2”, and that he was “satisfied AI is nice for Atlassian”.

Headline figures from the letter famous that the corporate has 350,000 clients and income of $1.6bn, up 23pc year-on-year.

Nevertheless, its shares costs have been affected by the software program droop introduced on by the rising risk of AI instruments, as famous by Forbes.

To this point this 12 months, firms corresponding to Amazon and Block have made important layoffs in tandem with plans to spend extra on AI.

Lat September, Atlassian introduced plans to amass productiveness tech start-up DX and The Browser Firm.

Simply over three years in the past, the corporate lower 500 roles in a reorganisation transfer.

Don’t miss out on the data you have to succeed. Join the Day by day Temporary, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech information.