Jason M. LemkinCEO, SaaStr · Co-Founder of SaaStr AI, SaaStr Fund, Adobe Sign

Atlassian Bolted AI Onto Jira Anyway

12 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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1:22

In this talk, the speaker reflects on being among the first SaaS vendors to embed AI agents into their platform about two and a half years ago. Uncertain of the market direction, they chose to "bolt" AI directly onto existing Jira workflows rather than redesign from scratch. This approach proved highly successful: customers quickly began creating complex, branching automation chains—such as a ticket-triggered workflow that hands off to a marketing agent that generates Canva assets, followed by a social‑media agent that posts the assets. The speaker emphasizes that SaaS products already have established human‑driven workflows and user bases, so integrating AI into those existing processes can unlock powerful automation and deliver immediate value. The core advice is for other SaaS builders to identify points in their current workflows where AI agents can be added, leveraging familiar user experiences rather than rebuilding entire systems.

Chapters

2 and a half years ago, we were one of the first SaaS vendors to add agents to the platform. And we were not sure where this would go. We wanted to learn as quickly as possible. And so this is a Jira workflow designed in automation here. And we literally added that square there where you can now use a Rovo agent to do something. So the playbook says don't bolt on AI in your workflows. That's exactly what we did. We bolted on AI in our workflows. Arguably, it's probably one of the best things we did. Because we didn't know where the market was going to head. We didn't understand where this would go. Now, all of you out there are building SaaS apps with existing workflows that you probably have today. And if you are, don't— you don't need to start from scratch. You already have users that use this every day. So work out where you can add AI in those workflows. And when we did that, we found very quickly that people started going crazy with agents in their workflows. They started doing branching and conditions. And so many customers have multiple agents going at a time. When a ticket happens, I want an agent to pick it up, and then I'm going to kick off a marketing agent to talk to Canva and generate the assets. Then I'm going to create a social media agent that'll read the assets and post to social media. And so by bolting AI to our existing workflows, we learned that customers are just automating a whole bunch of workflows that they already have. So your customers already have human-driven workflows, and adding AI to that workflow may actually be the best thing you'd ever do.