Fortune 500 companies are embracing AI, but few can measure a tangible return. Atlassian’s chief people and AI enablement officer says widespread adoption means little unless businesses redesign the processes around it.
The executive in charge of Atlassian’s internal AI tooling says the world’s biggest companies are struggling to see productivity gains from AI, and that mandating more AI use is not the answer.
As Atlassian reckons with AI, both in terms of how it uses it internally and how it sells it to customers, its chief people and AI enablement officer, Avani Prabhakar, says ranking success by how many people were using the technology was a key mistake.
“You can have 90 per cent of your workforce using AI, but still there is no AI transformation happening at the company level,” Prabhakar said in an interview with Forbes Australia. “What we learned along the way is just measuring adoption doesn’t really drive any transformation… that has been our biggest learning.”
Atlassian’s research on Fortune 500 companies‘ implementation of AI found that, while nearly nine out of 10 executives say AI is enabling teams to move faster, just 6 per cent of leaders said they could measure a tangible return on investment from AI spend.
Prabhakar says individuals using AI in their siloed work are unlikely to result in productivity gains that filter through a large organisation. Rather, companies have a better chance of seeing ROI if they use AI to automate or speed up processes themselves.
She points to an internal example used by Atlassian’s HR team, which built an AI agent called Nora to assist with onboarding new hires. She says Nora, designed to work through the whole onboarding process, is the most used internal AI agent within Atlassian.
“Most companies are not deploying AI into the process level, it’s still at a very individual productivity gains [level],” Prabhakar said. “Hence the ROI question is still outstanding.”
Scrutiny of productivity gains within companies is growing as the price of AI tokens has skyrocketed due to AI infrastructure being unable to keep up with demand. In May, Uber’s CTO said the company burned through its annual AI budget in four months. Meanwhile, OpenAI founder Sam Altman himself has conceded the technology has not yet yielded the productivity gains he expected.
Prabhakar says Atlassian’s internal AI costs are going up, but at a level the company expected. Unlike other companies, which pushed employees to use AI as much as possible, she says Atlassian never encouraged staff to “party with tokens”. Atlassian manages its AI spend by allocating a certain amount of tokens to each department.
Prabhakar, who has been at Atlassian since 2019 and became chief people officer in 2024, took on the additional AI enablement officer role in April following a March restructure at Atlassian that saw 1,600 people made redundant. The move was part of a push to self-fund investment in AI and enterprise sales, co-founder and CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said at the time.
Prabhakar’s remit now covers not only Atlassian’s HR function, but also its data science, data research and internal IT engineering teams.
“Inside the company right now, we are really doubling down on our AI roadmap,” Prabhakar said of changes within Atlassian since that March restructure. “We are also moving way forward and way ahead on AI fluency internally… And the third thing is we are researching heavily. Mike (Cannon-Brookes) always wants to make sure our research… is backed by our own experience.”
“We are experimenting heavily.”
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