Few Australian chief executives have faced a sharper question from investors this year than Mike Cannon-Brookes. If AI agents can write code, summarise documents and organise work, what happens to a company that sells software for organising work? Atlassian’s co-founder has spent 2026 answering it in two ways: with hard decisions inside the company, and with an argument that AI will create more demand for platforms like his.
From university friends to a global platform
Cannon-Brookes co-founded Atlassian in Sydney in 2002 with fellow University of New South Wales graduate Scott Farquhar. The company grew from a bootstrapped start-up into a Nasdaq-listed business whose products, including Jira, Confluence, Trello and Loom, are used by more than 350,000 organisations, according to the company.
For two decades the founders ran Atlassian as co-CEOs. Farquhar stepped down from that role at the end of August 2024 and remains on the board, leaving Cannon-Brookes as sole chief executive.
A difficult year inside Atlassian
In March 2026, Cannon-Brookes announced that Atlassian would cut about 10% of its workforce, or around 1,600 people. “We are doing this to self-fund further investment in AI and enterprise sales, while strengthening our financial profile,” he wrote to staff.
The financial results since then have supported his case. For the year to 30 June 2026, Atlassian reported revenue of US$6.572 billion, up 26%, and a small operating profit on a GAAP basis after a loss the year before. In the June quarter, revenue rose 28% to US$1.766 billion and cloud revenue grew 31%. Atlassian said it signed the largest enterprise deal in its history during the quarter.
“Multiplayer” AI
His central argument is that AI will make teamwork software more important, not obsolete. On 6 October, at Atlassian’s Team ’26 Europe event in Amsterdam, the company launched AMP, the “Agentic Multiplayer Protocol”, which gives AI agents identities, owners, permissions and audit trails within Atlassian’s tools. “Most AI adoption starts in single-player mode, with one person typing alone into a chat window on their laptop,” he wrote. “The real shift happens when AI becomes multiplayer, with agents working right alongside their human teammates.”
He has also been firm on accountability. “The accountability is with Mike. It has to be with the end user, ultimately,” he told Fortune in October, explaining that when someone uses an AI tool, the person, not the tool, is responsible. “You have to be able to see who did what when.”
In a Bloomberg interview on 13 October, he argued that making software cheaper and faster to build will lead organisations to create more applications, workflows and agents, increasing the need to connect and manage them.
Beyond Atlassian
Cannon-Brookes is also one of Australia’s most prominent climate investors. Through his private investment company Grok Ventures, he became the largest shareholder in AGL Energy in 2022 and led the successful campaign against its proposed demerger. In 2023, a consortium he led acquired Sun Cable, the company behind a plan to export solar power from northern Australia to Singapore. Those interests keep him in public debates about energy and climate policy.
The test ahead
The bear case on enterprise software has not gone away, and Atlassian’s share price has been volatile as investors weigh the risk of AI-driven disruption. But Cannon-Brookes has made a clear bet: that the value lies in context, meaning the years of structured data about how teams work that sit inside Atlassian’s products, and that AI agents will need that context to be useful. If he is right, Atlassian becomes the place where people and agents work together. If he is wrong, the 2026 cuts may not be the last.