Jira, Confluence to Use OpenAI for New Chat, Coding Tools

Atlassian’s Jira and Confluence, often used for tracking product development or communicating with employees.

The new features, dubbed Atlassian Intelligence, will come at no additional charge, co-Chief Executive Officer Mike Cannon-Brookes said in an interview. (AP)

Atlassian Corp. unveiled new artificial intelligence features for its workplace collaboration tools, making it the latest technology company to utilize OpenAI's generative AI models.

Atlassian's Jira and Confluence, often used for tracking product development or communicating with employees, will add capabilities such as summarizing meetings, drafting tweets, responding to internal service requests and writing Jira code, the company said Wednesday. The new features, dubbed Atlassian Intelligence, will come at no additional charge, co-Chief Executive Officer Mike Cannon-Brookes said in an interview.

The large language models used come from OpenAI, the maker of the popular chatbot ChatGPT, Cannon-Brookes said. “It's really exciting what we can build for our customers that we couldn't before — it's like someone's given us a whole new set of art materials.”

Generative AI, software that can create text, images, or video based on prompts from a user, has captured the public's imagination and set off intense competition among tech companies to incorporate the tools. Alphabet Inc.'s Google has made responding to ChatGPT a top priority, producing a rival called Bard. Amazon.com Inc. has offered cloud customers its own large language models and created a marketplace for AI tools from other companies. Adobe Inc. is working to add image generation capability to industry-standard tools like Photoshop.

The accord with Atlassian is the latest for OpenAI, which also counts Microsoft Corp. as a technology partner and investor. The startup supplies its software to companies such as Salesforce Inc. and payments processor Stripe Inc. The agreement mandates that any Atlassian customer data transmitted to OpenAI for processing can't be kept or used to train models, Cannon-Brookes said. Trello, another Atlassian product, also will get new AI features soon, he added.

Atlassian's shares have gained 26% this year, rebounding after plunging by two-thirds last year amid a sharp downturn in the industry. The company, which has headquarters in San Francisco and Sydney, announced last month that it would eliminate about 500 jobs to focus resources in growth divisions, joining a wave of job cuts in the technology industry. The company has no further reductions planned and is still hiring, Cannon-Brookes said.