Show Notes
Check out Gartner Symposium: https://cxo.news/KGg8XY === Tamar Yehoshua is Chief Product and AI Officer at Atlassian, where AI agents are now direct users of the software her team builds. She led product at Google Search and Slack before joining Atlassian, and in this conversation she explains how the company designs products for both people and agents: the teamwork graph that gives an agent the organizational context it arrives without, who stays accountable when a chain of agents goes wrong, how Atlassian measures AI spending with its CFO, and why she never believed agents would kill SaaS.
YOU'LL DISCOVER
✅ Why an AI agent arrives like someone joining your organization with no background whatsoever, and how the teamwork graph (over 200 billion entities) supplies the missing context ✅ The result of Atlassian's A/B tests: 44% higher quality and 48% lower token usage when coding agents use the teamwork graph, versus MCP alone ✅ How Mercedes-Benz built a Rovo agent that cut manual bug triage work for engineers by 85% ✅ The 10x question Atlassian asks before automating a process, instead of settling for a 10 to 20% incremental gain ✅ How Atlassian measures AI value with the CFO: PRs deployed per engineer, features developed, and whether a growing token budget delivers more value ✅ Why vibe-coded replacements for enterprise SaaS "just don't last" at large companies: support, security, and enterprise readiness ✅ The accountability principle for agent chains: the human who builds the first agent stays responsible, with agents increasingly acting as guardrails for other agents ✅ Why Atlassian's AI gateway routes each job to the right model on quality, latency, and cost instead of locking into one model
⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Introduction 0:26 Building products for humans and agents 5:50 The teamwork graph and agent context 13:33 Human oversight and agent guardrails 18:26 Moving fast versus getting it right 21:56 Efficiency first, then new capabilities 26:25 Tokens, vibe coding, and SaaS survival 33:00 Agent accountability and the software lifecycle 38:53 Simpler interfaces and visualizing agent work 41:49 How AI reshapes leadership and hierarchy 48:07 Reimagining processes and the Forge ecosystem 50:44 Advice for CIOs and managing AI costs
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Show notes, transcript, and summary: https://www.cxotalk.com/episode/atlassian-chief-ai-officer-building-products-for-agents-and-humans
Episode 930 | Recorded August 28, 2026
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