The Australian-founded collaboration software provider wants to become ‘an AI-first company’.
Collaboration software provider Atlassian is to cut around 1,600 roles, amounting to 10pc of its workforce, its CEO and co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes announced in a written blogpost yesterday (11 March).
Cannon-Brookes said the layoffs were necessary to “self-fund further investment in AI and enterprise sales, while strengthening our financial profile”, with an aim to change the way the Australian-founded company works and reorganise to move faster.
He said that although Atlassian fundamentally believes that people and AI create the best outcomes, and its approach is not for AI to replace people, “it would be disingenuous to pretend AI doesn’t change the mix of skills” needed or “the number of roles required in certain areas”.
“This is primarily about adaptation. We are reshaping our skill mix and changing how we work to build for the future,” he said.
Cannon-Brookes said “a thoughtful and incredibly thorough approach to determining impacted roles” was used to make structural and organisational changes, with a focus on retaining employees with the necessary skills for “an AI-first company” – namely “strong performers, graduates”, and those “with transferable skills”.
All Atlassian employees were due to receive an email update on their individual and regional statuses within 20 minutes of the post going live.
The CEO’s blogpost, which also included a video message to his staff, detailed the compensation arrangements for impacted employees, which are subject to local laws and consultation requirements.
Sydney-headquartered Atlassian was founded in 2002 by Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar, who each have a current net worth of around $7bn, according to Forbes.
Its products include collaboration, communication and project management applications such as Trello, Jira, Confluence and Bamboo, and it has employees across 14 countries.
In a quarterly financial letter to shareholders last month, Cannon-Brookes said Atlassian was “building a bloody great business” and “had a fantastic Q2”, and that he was “convinced AI is great for Atlassian”.
Headline figures from the letter noted that the company has 350,000 customers and revenue of $1.6bn, up 23pc year-on-year.
However, its shares prices have been affected by the software slump brought on by the emerging threat of AI tools, as noted by Forbes.
So far this year, companies such as Amazon and Block have made significant layoffs in tandem with plans to spend more on AI.
Lat September, Atlassian announced plans to acquire productivity tech start-up DX and The Browser Company.
In 2023, the company cut 500 roles in a reorganisation move.
Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.
