Atlassian gussies up Confluence for the AI era

Helps employees present data in Confluence in various ways

Atlassian is modernizing Confluence for the AI era, testing tools and agentic capabilities that give users the chance to turn their written notes into graphics and their ideas into software applications.

Each product is in its early stages and is being tested with a small group of customers before a wider deployment, an Atlassian spokesperson said via email. It is part of a strategy that means IT teams have to deal with fewer bespoke requests and security risks, since in each case the AI is being brought to the data inside Confluence.

For employees, Remix with Rovo – Rovo is Atlassian's AI assistant – gives them several ways to present the data that they have housed inside Confluence, the company's team workspace for managing projects.

“They can turn static docs, tables, or unstructured data into the format or workflow they need, tailored for the right audience or altitude — without leaving Confluence or opening a ticket,” the spokesperson told The Register. “Our data found that Confluence pages with visual elements are nearly two-times as likely to be read by a wider audience compared to pages without.”

The product appears to work like Google’s Notebook LM, which can also manipulate several file types to present data as a podcast, graphics, or a slide deck. However, Atlassian said Notebook LM has limits.

“Notebook LM is great for multi-modal transformation, but it works in a vacuum. The key difference is workspace-native context,” the spokesperson wrote. “Remix works within the pages, permissions, and structures teams already use — meeting notes, PRDs, runbooks — not a separate environment you copy/paste back from. With Notebook LM, users run the risk of creating an isolated artifact - with Remix, the output is always connected to the source content.”

Notebook LM, they said, is a single-player experience, while Remix outputs live inside Confluence where teams already work together. Comments, mentions, and real-time editing are native, not bolted on.

“The content stays multiplayer from the start, organized and findable by the entire team,” Atlassian’s spokesperson said.

On the agentic front, Atlassian said it has partnered with Lovable, Replit, and Gamma while promising more agent providers to come to turn data inside Confluence into software applications.

Confluence already allows users to create artifacts such as product requirements documents that can link directly to work tracked in Jira, its project management product. These new partner agents simply compress the process of taking a product requirements document, prototype, or strategy note and turning it into an app, prototype, or presentation using AI.

“It's not about turning Confluence into an app factory. It's about letting teams transform knowledge into whatever format it needs to be - with the source knowledge and the resulting experience connected and governed in one place,” an Atlassian spokesperson said.

The agents have no independent ability to carry out tasks without the user’s permission.

“They don't silently deploy apps or make architectural decisions on their own,” Atlassian’s spokesperson said. “The user initiates. They might say ‘turn this into an app’ or ask what's possible - and the agent suggests options and scaffolds a starting point. Users review and confirm outputs, but the experience goes further: teams can set up automations where partner agents proactively act on a schedule or trigger, without manual prompting.”

In terms of guardrails, Atlassian said its agents operate within Confluence's existing access controls, meaning that if a user can't see a page, the agent can't either. Users must also review and confirm outputs before anything is published or deployed.

“Teams that want to go further can configure agents to act proactively: triggered by a schedule, an event, or a workflow condition. The level of autonomy is yours to dial.”

In March, the company announced it would lay off about 10 percent of its staff, cutting about 1,600 jobs to fund AI initiatives. Late last year, the Australia-based company migrated more than 3,000 Jira and Confluence instances to AWS Graviton processors, with Graviton 4 handling user-facing tasks, resulting in roughly 10 percent savings, lower latency, and better customer response times. ®