Another trip around the sun, another Team event – Team ’23!

G’day to all who are joining us either virtually or on the ground in Las Vegas. We’re grateful to all of you who return year after year to this event, and delighted to have so many people joining us for the first time. Buckle up, because we’ve got a lot of good stuff to share with you. Here’s a quick taste:

Stepping back to look at the bigger picture, we all find ourselves in a wildly different economic climate compared to a year ago. Teams everywhere are being asked to do more with less. To be more productive in shorter timeframes. To dream bigger than they ever have before, despite constraints. It’s a big task, set against challenging circumstances.

The good news is that tough times don’t last. But tough teams do.

Last night in the opening session, we heard from famed movie director James Cameron, who talked about how our hardest moments often prove to be our best moments – at least in retrospect. Those are the moments when the collective genius of a team really shines. As we step into Team ’23, we are reminded that no matter what obstacles are in the way, no matter how far out of reach a goal may seem, it’s possible with teamwork.

That’s why our Team ‘23 theme this year is Impossible Alone. Throughout the event, we’ll be unveiling a host of experiences that show some of the ways teams have made the impossible possible through teamwork. From the Giving Tree (a tap-to-donate virtual fundraiser that proves money can grow on trees) and the Dream Keeper (a text-to-image AI platform that shows your dreams do turn into reality), to the Earworm Eraser (an aural “palette cleanser” that proves you will get that song out of your head), these projects bring Impossible Alone to life, proving that innovation truly is a team sport and that together, teams can solve otherwise impossible challenges.

So with this in mind, we encourage each and every one of you to embrace teamwork as the way to turn challenges into opportunities. And of course, Atlassian is innovating to help your teams seize them. Here are just a few ways we’re doing that.

Introducing Atlassian Intelligence

Embracing AI technology has huge implications for how useful our products can be to teams. That’s why we’ve been using AI in our products for years, whether to surface relevant work to you in search or embed quick replies into our products. But today we’re taking this a step further with Atlassian Intelligence – bringing the power and magic of AI to even more of our cloud products.

Atlassian Intelligence provides your team with a new virtual teammate that deeply understands how they collaborate to accelerate work. With more than 20 years of data reflecting how millions of software, IT, and business teams plan, track, and deliver work, it has a unique understanding of teamwork with a Teamwork graph tailored to how your teams work together.

Leveraging AI through internal models and our collaboration with OpenAI, Atlassian Intelligence is built into the Atlassian platform, the common technology foundation across all of our cloud products. We believe Atlassian Intelligence will dramatically accelerate your teams’ ability to make the impossible possible. Just some of the features we’re introducing:

  • An always-on, virtual teammate in Jira Service Management that automates support workflows to save teams time and money. Combined with our powerful chat feature, the new virtual agent brings together historical request data and AI to deliver instant support that’s both conversational and comprehensive, right from within Slack and Microsoft Teams.
  • Ability to generate new content using natural language prompts, such as a press release based on product specifications in Confluence.
  • Helping teams summarise and extract information from content, enabling teams to accelerate work.
  • An on-demand glossary, dictionary, and knowledge graph that is automatically created from your data, bringing a shared context around teams, projects, acronyms, and unique, bespoke language.
  • Support for natural language questions, which helps teammates access the company’s institutional knowledge and policies in Confluence, generate insights using data from multiple sources in Atlassian Analytics, and unlock the power of Jira Query Language (JQL) to find issues across all Jira Cloud products.

Read more about Atlassian Intelligence here: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/unleashing-power-of-ai

The Atlassian platform goes from strong to stronger

Speaking of the Atlassian cloud platform, we’re adding even more wind to its sails with new capabilities that bring teams, information, and workflows closer together. Our goal is to supercharge data-driven decisions across your ecosystem of work through offerings like Atlassian Analytics, which is now officially in general availability and included with Enterprise editions of Jira Software, Jira Service Management, and Confluence.

We’ve also been improving our enterprise-grade platform with developments like Beacon, our intelligent threat detection engine (currently in beta), expanded data residency options, enhanced information protection, and advanced centralised admin – all in service of giving your teams peace of mind that the security, privacy, and compliance of their data is in good hands.

Read more about Atlassian platform updates here: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/analytics-general-availability

Confluence is having a moment

Born in 2003, Confluence 1.0 was our second product. It’s undergone many iterations since, and yet again we’re reinventing Confluence with new content types and capabilities that extend beyond knowledge sharing. Your teams can still take advantage of Confluence’s most loved features, but some new things are on the way:

  • Whiteboards: This digital whiteboard tool is a step ahead, helping teams connect their thinking to their doing. Confluence whiteboards make ideas actually happen by seamlessly converting all of your unstructured brainstorms into deliverables like Jira issues and Confluence pages, within seconds.
  • Databases: We are introducing database capabilities to provide teams with a more powerful way to connect and track work. Confluence databases are structured dynamic tables that help your team connect and organise information like Jira tasks, Confluence pages, owners, due dates, statuses, and more in one database table.
  • External collaboration capabilities: Now you can move work forward more efficiently by adding guests to their Confluence space and sharing view-only Confluence pages with anyone using public links. Most excitingly, Atlassian has partnered with our Atlassian Ventures portfolio company, Hypothesis, to enable collaboration everywhere. Our new Chrome extension lets Confluence users comment in browser windows just as they would inside Confluence.

Read more about Confluence updates here: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/confluence-new-ways-to-collaborate

But of course, a fool with a tool is still a fool (only faster)

And this is why we continue to invest in equipping teams with not only the tools but also the practices needed to succeed. With our Ways of Working offering, we’re codifying and shipping the lessons we’ve learned about modern teamwork – the bad and the brilliant. We’re making our Modern Work Coaches, the Atlassian Team Playbook, product templates, practices-focused Atlassian University courses, and more available for free and accessible to any team – customer, or not. All in service of unleashing the potential of every team. Read more here: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/introducing-ways-of-working-modern-work-coaches

Phew! We’ve had a big year. And that’s not all – but you’ll have to tune into the keynote to hear the rest of it.

Before we wrap up: a huge thanks to all of our customers and partners. We’ve found ourselves many times in the last few months saying to ourselves, and our teams, that we only exist because our customers choose for us to exist. It’s true. Thanks for backing us on this journey, and we’ll keep pushing to bring you the best.

Welcome to Team ’23!