Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes: AI-native clients spend more

Atlassian has built itself into a $48 billion company while keeping its headquarters in Sydney and listing on Nasdaq, a structure its co-founder and CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes describes as both a source of frustration and differentiation. In his telling, the city's mix of banks, insurers, manufacturers and grocery companies makes it a useful testing ground for ideas that originate in California's Bay Area, filtering what actually travels beyond the strip between San Francisco and San Jose.

That positioning has not insulated Atlassian from US investors' mood swings over whether AI will hurt or help software companies. Its stock has leapt 230% from an April low on stronger-than-expected earnings, yet remains 60% below its late-2021 peak. Against that backdrop, Cannon-Brookes offers his own read on where things are heading: the most AI-native customers, he says, are the ones expanding fastest for Atlassian, which he takes as evidence that heavier AI use will mean more spending with the company rather than less.

For other CEOs, his advice is to place multi-year bets on AI rather than reacting to each model release, since first-principles thinking about the business is hard to do without a deep grasp of the technology. Whether that counsel holds up will likely hinge on whether the spending pattern he describes actually shows up in Atlassian's reported results, and on how far customers are willing to absorb tools faster than they can change their organizations to use them.