First and foremost, I am one of these people that sees AI as an improvement to our working environment and not a threat. YES, life will change, some jobs will be made obsolete, but alternatives will be born from those ashes.

If we look back over our history on this small little blue and green marble, there are few things that are inevitable, but technology & change are. As humans, we are inherently lazy as a race, always looking for the quickest and easiest way to complete a task. While this may lead to other challenges, what it has allowed is for total creativity and creation for automated products that can save us mere humans some time. Of course this then naturally extends to business and money. If businesses can save time and money for their resources to put them to use elsewhere, it is a simple win.

AI in general

Leveraging AI & automation in general can remove the mundane tasks from our day to day lives, freeing us up to complete what would not only be more complex, but more interesting and why we actually come to work in the first place. Visier completed a study earlier in 2023, which showed that on average, everyone would gain 1.55 hours a day back through automated AI tasks equating to 390 hours over the course of the year. But they weren’t the only ones. Oxford University did their own study showing how 40% of all our day to day mundane tasks are becoming automated within the next 10 years, both at home & work. While I do wish we could magically create additional hours in a day, having hours given back to us is the next best option. From a business perspective, having the hours better spent on more complex issues, can create a better customer experience with more incidents resolved quicker, more employees doing the work they enjoy, all inevitably leading to better customer and employee experience.

AI in Atlassian

Okay so AI has been huge for so many companies, Atlassian is no different. Last year at Team23 we saw them launched AIntelligence. The news was huge. This year at Team24 we saw them extend AIntelligence’s features to automation, search, summarising, SME recommendations and so much more, but of course the largest area is into Rovo, the newest product from Atlassian.

For all information coming out of Team, take a look at all the blogs from this year.

How is AI streamlining my day?

But of course, how does this actually change any of my day to day factors? Where am I as an Atlassian architect gaining back my time to better spend? To answer this properly, I’ll split my day into major buckets.

Request handling:

This I would say is a weaker area in terms of AI helping with the day to day job entirely (making changes to configuration), especially since supports and incidents can be so varied, but it certainly is helping. Using things like Assist, JQL generator & more recently the AI in automation, we have been able to push more people to knowledge articles or even online help before involving us, as well as giving users a true opportunity to trial things by themselves before coming to us.

Of course no generator is perfect by any means. Using better more suggestive language, making sure syntaxes are okay etc. Let alone the fact that any LLM (large language model) takes time to train in a way for each companies nuances but it gives team members a place to start learning without always immediately turning to me for help. It allows admins to focus on areas of greater importance or on support tickets where they have trialled something and it is easier for us to see the end goal.

Project work

AI has definitely improved my day here. While I fully understand the value and importance of good healthy & quality documentation, no one really enjoys writing step by steps, troubleshooting guides or even release notes. I am still not trusting what the AI engine (in this case ChatGPT) creates, but using is merely as a great building block to start from. So where have I been able to make some time savings?

Communication plans
For me, this is one of the more easier things GPT can save you time on. Comm plans are simple, informative notifications to a group of users about an upcoming change. Telling chat GPT, the date, the group of users, how it impacts them (without telling it all the details for sensitivity reasons) & a schedule so it can write them all, means I save myself some time quite easily. If they aren’t quite right, it is easier to tweak then to do from scratch.
Project plans - RACI etc.
Again project planning documentation is crucial. Setting out the how and the why, with Jira tickets and rough plans etc. I myself know what I want but I struggle with putting pen to paper. Having an AI engine provide a list of things I should include to make it go from good to great as well as even having it put things in a solid order enables me to fill in all the gaps with detail. Having something like AIntelligence then give summarises at the tops of pages etc. are all little ways of saving the time or procrastination I can often find myself in when it comes to writing.
Researching
This for me is the best place for AI. Having the ability to ask it about a topic and keep diving in to understand more is invaluable when it comes to technology. We live in a rapidly changing technology world and because of this, it is entirely impossible to be able to know everything on a single topic. When you find yourself needing to build, change or develop a platform, having a huge pool of knowledge I can ask human like questions to and gain useful responses back is where I have had the most fun with ChatGPT. From here being able to turn this into support docs, project plans, Jira issues and more is easily a big area I have improved as an admin.
Image & video generation
This I’d say is an area I least use AI but still definitely something that is incredibly useful. Whether it is for a more visual piece of documentation or something for the blog, being able to generate imagery of have edits to your video made, AI has made this process much quicker for me. Again not perfect, it takes a fair amount of tweaking on prompts, but this is as much of my prompting skills as it is the AI engine I’d say.

*What would be your prompt to get these images for an AI generator?*

documentation in general:

Throughout my splurg on the digital page today, AI, whether it is ChatGPT, AIntelligence or anything else, I have said it is helping but not perfect. I stand by that whole heartedly. It is not replacing but enabling me to work faster and more efficient. It is writing the chunks of text, creating the base of images or cutting videos together to the main bits, faster then I ever could. But as always, proofing and double checking is key. We wouldn’t ever allow a single user to push code into production, we have checks and balances in place to enable well written code is pushed. It works the same with anything generated with AI.

marketplace apps

What I will also say is that there are some brilliant Atlassian Marketplace apps out there that have also paved the way for specific areas of improvement. I have had the chance to use them and its brilliant. If you want to see what apps exist, click HERE.

refined.ai - The ability to make tone specific release notes based on your actual work is brilliant. If you and your team are working with release and have to summaries them. Check out this app.

Nutshell - Documentation can come in many forms. However one thing I will say is that I hate sitting through long videos to understand a topic. Nutshell analyses the video and provides summaries to help users digest. & if you use Zoom, then of course Zoom has its own AI that helps with this exact same topic and definitely something our team are starting to leverage more and more.

What does it leave me with'?

Everybody has parts of their day they enjoy the least. It’s just human nature, we don’t like everything. I want great documentation, but I fully admit that I can procrastinate in creating it. So using AI to enhance the day to day work has left me, well, with the building & the fun. I am a tinkerer at heart. Understanding how & why something needs to work the way it does. Wondering how teams can save time, energy & money while not affecting moral is what I love. The hard questions that take time to learn and analyse. That is what I am left with.

AI right now cannot pull out the WHY. The most valuable question of all, understanding and breaking down the business needs in a way that we can them digest the best option. Why can’t it? Well to start, ChatGPT even says, don’t put secretive or personal information into the tool, so there’s that. Secondly, while it is great and understanding pure logic. Not all decisions are all logic. There is a perfect middle ground between logical and emotion when it comes business decisions.

AI is not fully there. It’s enabling us to do more and get us to focus on the bigger more important things. I have said this before and I will say it again. It is enabling us to be better & we should embrace it. Automation and therefore AI is like change. It is innevitable. Humans over history have tried to restrict how but it only ever negatively impacts them. So if we can learn to live with AI in the rapidly changing world, & govern while not fully restricting I think we may just do alright.

How AI is improving me as an Atlassian admin