Atlassian launches program to embed AI engineers with customers

Atlassian Corporation (NASDAQ: TEAM) said it has launched its Forward Deployed Engineering program to help customers scale enterprise AI transformation. The program places senior applied AI engineers directly with customers to build production-ready AI solutions. Those include enriching the organisational context behind the Teamwork Graph, creating custom Rovo agents and automations, and streamlining workflows across technical and non-technical teams. Atlassian said the program is aimed at bridging the gap between AI adoption and business impact.

In its latest report, 'Leading with Context: Lessons from Atlassian’s AI Journey', the company said 85% of knowledge workers use AI, while only 6% of executives can point to clear, organisation-wide ROI. Atlassian said engineers can bridge the gap between AI models and complex operational needs by acting as highly technical, specialized AI engineers who turn those needs into working systems. Chief People and AI Enablement Officer Avani Prabhakar said the company is embedding Forward Deployed Engineers directly with customers and putting engineering expertise and a builder’s mindset at the center of its work on complex business problems.

She said the company is seeing 50% higher AI adoption in engaged accounts as a result. Atlassian said AI becomes more effective when it understands an organization’s knowledge, work, communications, code and assets, and that its Forward Deployed Engineers are designed to connect that context with workflows. In testing, Atlassian said grounding AI agents in the Teamwork Graph produced answers that were 44% higher quality while using 48% fewer tokens. Atlassian Forward Deployed Engineers work directly in Atlassian’s codebase, allowing improvements to be made to the platform itself and extended across all customers.

Atlassian says each engagement feeds a product flywheel, with code contributions, product fixes, reusable agents and connectors flowing back into the platform and reinforcing the Teamwork Graph. Expedia is using Atlassian Forward Deployed Engineers to scale AI-powered content operations across Confluence. Atlassian says the work has archived 600000 pages and saved about 3200 hours a year. The engagement also improved search quality and click-through, while engineering teams now run more than 10000 agent invocations each month across 50 live projects.

Reddit is working with Atlassian Forward Deployed Engineers on its enterprise AI transformation and on AI-enabled ways of connecting knowledge, improving how teams work and streamlining enterprise operations. Atlassian says Reddit is using its AI capabilities, including Atlassian Rovo and Teamwork Graph. Atlassian said the program is designed to help customers use AI more effectively across unified enterprise apps while simplifying IT operations. The company said Reddit is working with Atlassian on solutions aimed at helping its teams work more effectively and focus on serving its global communities.

Himanshu Singh, engineering manager at Expedia, said Atlassian helped turn an ambitious idea into real business impact, and that working side-by-side with Forward Deployed Engineers allowed teams to simplify critical workflows, move faster and build lasting confidence in how AI can improve work. Atlassian said its Forward Deployed Engineering program uses a collaborative model in which customers contribute engineers alongside Atlassian's team. The company said the arrangement helps Atlassian identify high-impact use cases that can be applied more broadly across customers, while customer engineers gain experience building with the Teamwork Graph and AI capabilities.

Atlassian said customers leave the engagements with deployed use cases and internal teams able to keep building on its platform. Forward Deployed Engineers are usually assigned to 12-week engagements and can support a range of services. These include building custom AI agents for team-specific use cases such as IT helpdesk, HR support, component routing and reporting. They can also connect Jira, Confluence, GitHub, Google Drive and other systems to help teams find and synthesize information faster.

Other uses include automating bug triage, sprint support, stale-work detection, routing and backlog cleanup for Jira-focused teams. Atlassian also said it is releasing The Atlassian Forward Deployed Engineering Playbook, an enterprise resource based on lessons learned from its Forward Deployed Engineering program and offering practical advice for those interested in embedding Forward Deployed Engineers into their organisations. Atlassian says its collaboration software powers more than 85% of the Fortune 500 and over 350,000 customers worldwide, including NASA, Rivian, Deutsche Bank, United Airlines and Bosch, who use its products to move work forward.

The company describes itself as a leader in software development, work management and enterprise service management software, and says its AI-powered system of work is designed to connect business and technology teams and improve productivity at scale.