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Mike Cannon-Brookes

Mike Cannon-Brookes

Co-founder & CEO at Atlassian

Co-founder and CEO of Atlassian. Advocates that businesses are processes, not filing cabinets, and that design is AI's biggest bottleneck.

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About Mike Cannon-Brookes

Mike Cannon-Brookes is the co-founder and CEO of Atlassian, the collaboration software company behind Jira, Confluence, Trello, and Bitbucket. He co-founded Atlassian in 2002 with Scott Farquhar from a Sydney apartment, growing it into a company serving over 300,000 customers globally.

In the AI era, Cannon-Brookes has been vocal about what he sees as the real challenges: not model capability, but design and experience. He argues that AI's power massively outstrips the UX to deliver it, creating a design bottleneck that determines adoption more than technology does.

Career Highlights

  • Atlassian (2002-present): Co-founder and CEO, built from a two-person startup to a public company
  • Teamwork Graph: Led development of Atlassian's organizational knowledge layer for AI
  • Rovo: Atlassian's AI platform that integrates agents into workflows across Jira and Confluence
  • Climate advocacy: Major investor in renewable energy and sustainability in Australia

Notable Positions

On Businesses as Processes

Cannon-Brookes challenges the "system of record" framing, arguing businesses are fundamentally process-based:

"Businesses are a set of processes. They're not a system of record. Your ability to coordinate a set of processes as cheaply and efficiently and quickly as possible is actually, in a knowledge business, your entire business."

On Input vs. Output Constrained Work

He distinguishes two types of business processes that need fundamentally different AI strategies:

  • Input-constrained (customer service, legal): Fixed demand, AI optimizes throughput and cost
  • Output-constrained (creative, engineering): Unlimited potential, AI amplifies output rather than reducing headcount

On the Design Bottleneck

"Give people a chat box that can do unlimited power and they're like, 'tell me a dad joke.' The underutilized capabilities are so big. It's almost trite now to say the models are far ahead of the value they're delivering."

Key Quotes

  • "The filing cabinet can do work." (on the paradigm shift from database-era software to AI-era software, 2026)
  • "The problem with having 50 interns is they ask you 50 questions a minute." (on the challenge of managing multiple AI agents, 2026)

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