Atlassian CPO: HR needs to be driving, not riding, the wave with AI

Atlassian’s HR team does not sit on the sidelines – “we’re a business team”, not just a support function.

Those are the words of Avani Prabhakar, CPO of the $4.4 billion revenue software giant.

She sat down with the UNLEASH Editorial team for an exclusive interview ahead of her session at UNLEASH America 2025.

Prabhakar argues that “HR has always been a strategic function” – and in this AI revolution, she believes that “HR and IT teams are going to become the most strategic function in any organization”.

To achieve this, they need to start with the basics: “Going really deep with customers, understanding the product the company is trying to sell, and understanding the P&L.”

Then, according to Prabhakar, you overlay AI on top; think of of what needs to evolve, and how you need to redesign your workplace to truly reap the rewards of new ways of working in this AI revolution.

She doesn’t think the HR community has gripped “how uniquely this function is in a position to be driving the wave” with AI – most of them are currently just riding the wave.

Read on to find out how Prabhakar and her HR team are driving the AI wave at Atlassian, and her top tips for her HR peers.

Atlassian’s CPO on being ‘customer zero’

Atlassian’s vision is “unleash the potential of every team”, and it is “a customer zero company”.

This means that for Atlassian’s HR tools, the HR team, led by Prabhakar, decided to “dog food ourselves” – they figure out if the products work in house before they take them to the market.

The HR team are true power users, and then provide feedback to product teams – in this respect, “we are uniquely positioned compared to traditional HR teams”.

Prabhakar’s HR peers “don’t get to build those custom flows”, and they also don’t have access to Atlassian’s HR research wing, Team Anywhere and the Teamwork Lab, which experiments with tools and ways of working to get the most of Atlassian’s 12,000 employees.

Avani Prabhakar on stage with Aptiv’s Ronda Bazley Moore at UNLEASH America

UNLEASH was keen to find out Prabhakar’s advice to her HR peers on how they can emulate Atlassian’s customer zero, research approach to HR and reap the rewards?

First of all, Atlassian works hard to outsource and share their learnings from the Teamwork Lab so that the insights can be used by any HR team “irrespective of the industry, and irrespective of where they are in the journey”.

Next Prabhakar says: “Do small pilots, do more experimentation.”

She recommends that leaders pick a specific team that are willing to experiment, and are tech savvy, and get them play around with different tools, but also ways of working.

Prabhakar recommends that rather fighting the battle around RTO, to focus on the “how we work elements”.

This is Atlassian’s approach; it still has offices, but there’s no RTO mandate, just a focus on designing work to help its employees thrive.

The future of work is AI and human workmates

The conversation turned to the main theme of UNLEASH America 2025: AI.

Atlassian is far ahead in its use of AI, and particularly the newest frontier – AI agents – so UNLEASH was keen to get Prabhakar’s perspective on this topic.

For Prabhakar, people are the center of the AI revolution, so CHROs won’t be losing their seats at the table.

The bigger challenge now is that the future of work “is going to be a team of AI mates and human mates, [so] what does that interaction look like?”

Figuring out how to nail this interaction, and “how are we evolving our ways of working now to be future ready”, is top of Prabhakar’s to-do list.

She believes that HR needs to drive this AI conversation – rather than just riding the wave, and seeing what happens.

“The changes that are coming with AI are so fast paced”, and this is creating challenges for HR teams.

Compared to the shift to cloud computing, budgets and pricing are not so much of a issue, according to Prabhakar.

Instead, “the challenge with AI is how do we make sure that we can have three, four AI agents, AI tools, that [all] play in the same playground?”

There’s work for HR leaders to do with vendors on this interoperability element.

However, other challenges include focusing on driving AI adoption and also upskilling their people to be ready for the agentic future of work.

Prabhakar’s advice is for teams to choose “the agentic AI tool which is most intuitive for non-tech users”, and then encourage your teams to build their own agents on top of it.

“If you can give them an agent, and say, this is your onboarding agent, go and use it for onboarding purposes, adoption will only go so far.

“But if your team builds the onboarding agent [themselves], then then the adoption is automatically a lot more,” shares Prabhakar.

The onboarding use case (where agents answer new hires’ questions) is a highly successful one for Atlassian – but others include supporting employees with their performance reviews, sorting through reward nominations, and as a help desk for the HR function.

Ultimately, Prabhakar tells UNLEASH, the winners in the future of work are those who can embrace AI agents as work mates.

As a HR professional, my advice would be to be ahead of the race” – “think of it from an upskilling perspective, think of it from ways of working, what needs to evolve,” she concludes.