Atlassian has launched a number of new AI-powered IT Service Management (ITSM)  capabilities for its Jira Service Management platform, designed to help deliver improved levels of employee and customer support.

In addition to the new platform offerings, Atlassian also announced its second acquisition of the month, the maker of IT data quality management technology, AirTrack.

Lots of IT leaders say that there's way too much bloat in the products that they're buying, said Edwin Wong, head of product for IT solutions at Atlassian, noting that according to Gartner, eight out of 10 companies have said they're overbuying when it comes to ITSM platforms and have ended up paying for features that they rarely, if ever, use.

"Were big about cutting bloat and helping teams take service management to all the different departments across their company, from HR to design and legal," Wong said. "We're pretty excited to really help lots of companies actually get better at improving visibility and make the experience more seamless for all employees."

Atlassian's new AI-powered virtual agent integrates with Jira Service Management to support teams within the collaboration tools they're already using and, during the setup process, teams can use the tool's no-code configuration capabilities to program the virtual agent to match the way they deliver services.

The built-in AI engine analyzes and understands intent, sentiment, context, and profile information to personalize interactions, while the technology learns from interactions by leveraging a Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine.

The virtual agent also uses generative AI to generate sources from withing the user's organization, pulling knowledge from internal articles, onboarding guides and FAQs.

If the virtual agent doesn't have a high degree of confidence in understanding the intent or it's not sure if the answer its giving is accurate or not, Wong said it will always pass it back to a human who can provide the correct answer.

AI-powered cross-organizational support

In addition to the virtual agent, Atlassian is also rolling out a number of other capabilities that are powered by the company's homegrown AI offering, Atlassian Intelligence - a technology that Wong said the company has been "investing heavily" in.

Atlassian Intelligence uses generative AI technology from OpenAI to create, summarize and extract information from content. These capabilities include providing agents with summaries of conversations and internal documents, generating and improving responses between agents and customers, and adjusting the tone of messages to make them more professional or empathetic.

Other AI-powered capabilities that will be available in Jira Service Management include the ability to surface past incidents to provide relevant context and potential resolutions; assign or recommend the right agent for requests; automatically categorize and prioritize incidents; group similar incidents; and identify potential conflicts across services, teams, and schedules.

"I think AI is going to play a very big role in our products and I think for all the products in this category in the future," Wong said. "We believe that service management is one of those areas which is very much ripe for disruption and where AI will have an outsized impact, given the more repeatable nature of some of those tasks that are covered in service management today."

Users have increasingly mature expectations about  what these AI capabilities should be able to do, said Will White, Forrester, adding that capabilities must not only be "smart" but anticipatory, avoiding asking questions the systems should already know the answer to.

"These capabilities will help Atlassian emphasize their strengths, like their integration into development pipelines and enterprise software ecosystems," said White. "They will immediately help with information collection, data normalization, and accelerating service fulfilment, while providing a good foundation to continue to grow the platforms intelligence."

Companies that  don't offer intelligence in their platform are at a disadvantage and are losing time to catch up, White added, noting that LLMs and generative AI have been great levellers, but the next phase of competition is much more subtle, and that's the enterprise ability to provide an effective data index.

The virtual agent capabilities will be included for no extra charge in the Premium and Enterprise editions of Jira Service Management, with a limit of 1,000 virtual agent assisted conversations a month -a limit that Wong says customers have yet to meet.

Atlassian acquires data management company AirTrack

Through its acquisition of Melbourne-based AirTrack, Atlassian believes that with the combined offering of the company's technology and Jira Service Management, enterprises will be able to better account for and track all critical assets, minimizing operational risks, costs, and attack surfaces.

As a result of the acquisition, organizations will have access to over 30 out-of-the-box data connectors that will allow for cross-organization data aggregation and cleansing, rapid data reconciliation capabilities, and greater visibility into critical service infrastructure and applications.

Adding AirTrack to the Atlassian platform allows for broader thinking about asset management beyond the traditional IT use cases, Wong explained, adding that acquisition will let Atlassian's enterprise customers to aggregate information related to all sorts of things.

"[This acquisition] means they can start to think holistically about security, compliance, inventory, building forecasting, planning, and so much more," Wong said.