Most companies trying to drive AI adoption resort to the same playbook: mandate it, measure it, put it in performance reviews. Atlassian chose a completely different path — and what happened next is worth watching.
At Atlassian Team in Amsterdam, Techzine TV sat down with Alicia Leonard, VP of HR at Atlassian, for one of the most grounded conversations about enterprise AI transformation you’ll find. This isn’t a pitch. It’s an inside account from someone who has been running the experiment — on herself, on her team, and on a 13,500-person global organization — for two years.
The results speak for themselves, but what’s more interesting is how Atlassian got there, what failed spectacularly along the way, and what the company is now confronting as AI reshapes the very concept of a team. If you lead people, manage teams, or are responsible for driving AI adoption inside an enterprise, this conversation has something in it that will challenge how you’re thinking about the problem.
What this conversation will answer for you
- Why the companies mandating AI use might be measuring the wrong thing entirely
- What Atlassian’s adoption numbers actually look like — and how they changed the metrics when the first ones became too easy
- The counterintuitive reason why distributed, remote-first companies may have a structural advantage in AI transformation
- What a company-wide hackathon taught Atlassian about going too fast, too broad, too soon
- How to find the right AI champions inside your organization — and why leadership-appointed ones often don’t work
- Where Atlassian draws an absolute line between what AI can and cannot decide in HR processes
- Whether AI agents should be considered part of your team — and what that means for how managers operate
- Why graduates are currently Atlassian’s most valuable AI asset, and what that means for hiring strategy
- The framework Atlassian uses for reskilling that deliberately avoids starting with roles
- What the org design of an AI-first enterprise might actually look like — and why Atlassian is already testing it
Why this interview stands out
There is no shortage of AI transformation content. What’s rare is a conversation this honest about failure, this specific about process, and this thoughtful about the human side of the shift. Alicia Leonard speaks from experience — not aspiration — and she doesn’t shy away from the harder questions around trust, hiring ethics, and the future shape of teams. Hit play and find out what Atlassian learned the hard way — so you don’t have to.