Atlassian Says AI Is Expanding Software Creation and User Demand

In its SEC-filed shareholder letter, Atlassian said subscription annual recurring revenue reached $6.6 billion, up 23% year over year, while remaining performance obligations rose 44% to $4.8 billion. The company said customers adopting AI were adding teams and users to Jira and Confluence, including employees in human resources, finance, marketing, and legal.

Atlassian also reported that customers adopting Rovo completed 20% more Jira work items and created or edited 25% more Confluence pages than non-adopters. Those are company-reported comparisons between customer groups; they do not by themselves establish that Rovo caused the difference.

Business Insider reported that roughly two-thirds of Jira and Confluence users now work outside traditional software-development roles. Cannon-Brookes framed that expansion as more people building technology even when their job titles are not “developer.”

The evidence supports a narrower conclusion than the headline labor debate. Atlassian’s platform usage and recurring revenue grew during a period of rising AI adoption, and the company says AI users expand paid seats faster. That is evidence of demand for coordination, context, review, and governance around software work.

It does not establish that total software-developer employment is rising because of AI. Hiring depends on the broader economy, company budgets, task automation, and how organizations divide work between specialist engineers, business users, and agents.

For engineering leaders, the operational signal is clearer: faster code generation can move the bottleneck toward specifications, architecture, review, security, and cross-team coordination. Teams evaluating AI coding tools should measure completed outcomes and quality, not only code volume or seats. Atlassian’s results show a vendor benefiting from that coordination demand; the longer-term employment effect remains an open empirical question.