Atlassian CEO on the SaaS Apocalypse, AI Agents & What Comes Next

Corporate mumbo jumbo word salad. TLDR nobody knows shit about what the future will bring. Save yourself 1 hour of fluff and watch something else.

I think he’s right that edge cases are the are the catalyst of ai coding, but he has it backwards. The reason businesses will vibe code their own solutions is because their edge cases aren’t being serviced by the off the shelf software solutions that are “in the wild” currently

btw Jira sucks

i dont care what any CEO has to say who stands to benefit from this. they fear monger in hopes that we surrender and allow AI to "take over" all the while true ai doesnt and may never exist. its more power grabs. what do you get the man that has it all? more power. disgusting

Where Intuit excels at is their user experience if you read the the book Voice and Tone Strategy: Connecting with People through Content by John Caldwell, you will see the whole secret behind it. What makes intuit the leader in the market is that they took a process that is public and complicated and confusing with the most obnauseous forms and requirements and made it painless, simple and straight forward.

I agree with the point about customization happening on top of SaaS products. However, when you extrapolate the downward trajectory of development cost for setting up battle tested open source alternatives (which are getting better by the day through ai assisted coding) then the break-even for organizations to set something up themselves goes in the low double digit seat pricing for most products. As a trend this might take many years to mature and SaaS products aren't static. Still, we see how strong fully integrated businesses can become when looking at what Elon Musk is building for instance.

Great discussion

The big threat in the AI era is that switching cost will be very low. I can recreate my small business records with a new AI vendor much more easily. I can just ask Claude to use the browser or API to got though all pages of the current system of record and migrate to the new one. I request if A16 can address this issue in the next podcast

BS - tokens costs are issues for scale. Saas costs to add the second 1000 users is close to zero. With AI each user adds token costs.

Interesting timing — Atlassian just announced a 10% workforce cut this week to pivot around AI, right after this was recorded. The 'records to processes' frame is smart, but the real test is whether established vendors can execute that self-disruption before an AI-native competitor does it cheaper and faster.

What is a SaaS company? You guys sure you know what you are talking about or fear mongering?

"Jira?! Where we're going We don't need Jira!!!"

Was listening to this a couple of days ago and today Atlassian decided to cut 10% of its worforce to pivot around AI

That example about the locksmith misses the point why that customer is pissed: 1 the locksmith didn’t tell him beforehand what it’s gonna cost him and 2 if indeed it’s a job that takes in average 30 second to any reasonably competent locksmith then yeah, this is overcharging.

I hate jira with a passion. Agents writing the code and doing the tasks will finally kill the beast.

The discussion around shifting from records to processes really resonates. At Lifewood Data Technology, we’ve found that integrating AI agents into well-defined workflows, rather than just overlaying them on existing tools, is key to building trust and driving measurable enterprise impact.

Wow. Reaaaly good information here

This podcast should just be the intro

Getting advices from the guy behind Jira? 😂

I clicked this accidentally thinking it was a krazam video

i love how the AI thinks Mike's ear is a lion...

Less Alex more MCB please!

AI is great and it is a revolution and there's no going back.

Comparing a human fetching a file manually in the 1950s to the Computer and Information Technology revolution is wild. The 60s-2000s saw unprecedented growth in revenue, GDP, and productivity, and quality of life largely driven by software. In these aspects, the jury is still out on AI.

Great developers are not going to go away and in fact one can argue they are more important than ever as the leverage of human to machine and machine code goes up dramatically.

What will get hit hard is knowledge workers who used software to solve problems and now an AI agent will replace those human functions so either they will be laid off or upskilled.

We have already seen this occur. Nobody is hired to just send out faxes. Email replaced that work.

Love him

Everyone will vibe-code their own replacements from open-sourced well-spec’s prompts bespoke to their business.

Specs to prescribe best practise and avoid common pitfalls.

No compromise that comes with SaaS trying to cater for thousands of businesses. Bespoke well-specced and tested apps.

A fraction of the cost to build and run. Running better for their business. With lower risk.

Bet.

I like that they think there’s a secret handbook at a consulting company and that the tax code is clear enough to just be downloaded and read by the robots. Oh engineers…

Remember if you are an Accounting Firm Intuit is a key part of your enterprise, you have all your client’s prior returns. Your staff know the tool well. The cost of ownership is relatively modest for the firm vs their revenue, so magically vibe coding save you an insignificant sum vs their revenue. On the other hand a few small errors in the vibe coded replacement could sink the whole firm

They talk like politicians: all self-interest, I leaned nothing. Can you say pager, phone booth, flip phone?

Within 5 years, one prompt will build jira.

Why aren’t any of the speakers introduced or identified at the beginning of the video, and why are two people being interviewed if this is titled as an interview with the founder of Atlassian? Who is the second person relative to the Atlassian CEO?

Alex ?

In summary:
SaaS companies have had 2 moats, 1) technical complexity of building it 2)lessons learned while in business for many years. 1) is now gone. 2) remains.
Saas Pricing will change because humans (who pay to use) no longer run software, software runs itself.

The layer that's missing from this conversation is the one that collapses all the others. Tailor-made solutions will eventually make dashboards and interfaces unnecessary. Not because they get better, but because they become redundant.
I see a future where AI orchestrates flows directly from raw data, inferring contextualized information on a per-need basis. Workflows stop being a set of instructions. They become the intelligence itself, knowledge applied to data in real time.
That's not a dashboard. That's not a BI tool. That's the business thinking for itself.

So silly and a bit sad whenever I hear folks say: "This ___[fill-in-the-blank]___ will never happen."

... like when I hear on this podcast this wild, naive take: "Nobody gets rid of Salesforce."

... oh, really? That feels like the beginning of the end, especially when they said it so confidently. The presumption is that we really don't know how this is going to play out but I'm certain that it will and must necessarily change. Probably all of it.

You can vibe code as much as you like.But I personally feel it takes a software engineer to understand what is really going on under the hood otherwise we are looking at maintenance nightmare

This was an amazing episode

well, about salesforce, you should not be paying if you don't use it .. for example, where I work, Salesforce is used for a very particular process so only the employees involved in that process have accounts/licences