How Tempo builds fast, accurate AI agents with Rovo Studio

Challenge:  Tempo wanted to empower business users to solve complex problems faster and to reduce reliance on technical experts.

Solution: Using Rovo Studio, Tempo built a collection of Rovo Agents within days – all without writing one line of code. 

Impact: Rovo Studio enables anyone at Tempo – from marketing to product teams – to build agents that work faster and smarter.

Keeping Tempo with Rovo

Since launching Timesheets, the most popular time tracking app for Jira, in 2009, Atlassian Marketplace Partner Tempo has expanded their solutions to cover the breadth of strategic portfolio management. They work with more than 30,000 companies around the world, including one in three Fortune 500 companies, on their mission to help customers adopt Atlassian tools to stay on track, on time, and on budget with all their projects. Rovo is the latest tool Tempo has embraced for internal teams and external customers – and the opportunities are limitless.

After getting early access to Rovo and seeing how it can help team members quickly find the right information, make sense of it, and take action, Tempo jumped on the opportunity to start building agents. Using Rovo Studio, Tempo has created a collection of agents that help employees across the organization – from product teams to marketers and portfolio managers –  work faster and smarter. With their first batch of agents, technical and business teams alike are already enjoying up to 30% time savings, fewer data errors, and making more informed decisions.

Wanted: trustworthy AI that quickly generates ROI

As a long-time Atlassian Marketplace Partner, Tempo’s teams have been early adopters of new Atlassian apps and capabilities over the years. When Rovo was announced, they couldn’t wait to roll it out internally so they could learn how to use it themselves before supporting their customers with adoption and enablement.

“Many companies are hesitant to use other AI tools that train models with their data,” says Principal Product Manager Nidhi Patel. “When we saw that Atlassian was going to protect our data in Rovo and had all the important certifications, like ISO 27001 and SOC2, that was really exciting and gave us confidence.”

As Tempo’s teams started experimenting with Rovo, they were particularly intrigued by the ability to build their own agents with Rovo Studio. They took a solutions-oriented approach to identifying how Studio could help them create agents that would provide the most value. Nidhi says, “Everybody talks about AI, but implementing it is challenging for many teams. We wanted to use Rovo first so we could find easy, yet impactful ways to get started with it.”

Making advanced capabilities and agent creation more accessible with Rovo Studio

Tempo started by using Rovo Studio to build two agents without coding: the Structure Formula Assistant and the Sprint Performance Assistant. “Rovo Studio makes it easy for anyone on our team – even people who have no technical expertise – to build personalized agents that supercharge their work without writing code,” Senior Director of Product Marketing Evelyn Watts says.

For example, before, only employees trained in building custom formulas for Tempo's Structure PPM app could use advanced features to aggregate and report on project data. But with Rovo Studio, Tempo created the Structure Formulas Assistant Rovo Agent so almost all Structure PPM users can make formulas on their own, which reduces bottlenecks and supports requests.

With the Structure Formula Assistant agent, portfolio managers and other business employees can use natural language to pull Jira data in a spreadsheet-like view and create visualizations. The agent instantly generates a formula to run queries in Tempo’s Structure PPM tool for Jira. For instance, users can tell the agent, “Show me all tasks completed in the last week” or “Add up the total story points for all subtasks in the ENG123 project.”

The creators then built the Custom Chart Assistant to take the same outputs from the Structure Formula Assistant – or any data from a Jira dashboard – and generate custom charts in seconds.

“You can be in a meeting, write what you want into a Rovo Agent using plain language, and the results automatically show up,” says Senior Product Marketing Manager Chris Chappelear. “With these agents, you can keep track of the projects you’re working on, see the number of tickets by status, customize the data for other stakeholders and leaders, and even make custom charts on the spot. It makes meetings a lot more productive, saves hours on searching and reporting, and helps us make better decisions.”

More agents, more value: 3x efficiency and better, easier reports

Rovo Studio also came in handy when Tempo wanted to create the Structure View Builder agent to quickly customize views in Structure PPM for Jira, which make insights clearer and project management more efficient. Chris says, “Since creating the Structure View Builder Rovo Agent, our teams are tailoring views 3x faster than we could without it.”

Another Studio creation that has been helpful inside and outside of Tempo is their Sprint Performance Assistant, which they built to help product managers and Scrum Masters spot trends across sprints, break up bottlenecks, and improve outcomes in the future. 

Nidhi says, “There's so many different reports to sort through in Jira, so we thought, ‘Let’s create a Rovo Agent as a conversational interface rather than having to find your burndown chart or velocity report, or going into individual tickets to find that information.’ We didn’t need technical expertise to create the agent, and it’s been super helpful for our teams at Tempo as well as our customers.”

A simple solution for creating agents that improve accessibility, value, and joy

As a Marketplace Partner and Platinum member of the Atlassian Ecosystem, Tempo is already seeing how adding Rovo to their Atlassian platform is amplifying their Marketplace apps. So far, team members are completing tasks at least 20-30% faster on average with Tempo’s Rovo Agents, while making capabilities and insights more accessible to everyone. In turn, more people are using Jira and Tempo’s apps, increasing the value they get out of those tools and the Atlassian system of work. 

Evelyn says, “As a product marketer, never in my entire 20+ year career have I been able to so easily connect my work with the product team's work so that we can plan how we go to market together. Now with our Atlassian system of work elevated with Tempo’s apps and Rovo, we have more control, visibility, and collaboration. It makes our work better and life so much more joyful!”