Atlassian's CEO says AI can't be paused: Here's his reason

Calls to slow down AI development are getting louder, and one of the biggest names in enterprise software has just said no. "Will we slow down? No, we won't," Atlassian CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes told media at Atlassian Team Europe 2026. 

More calls have been made in light of some of the recent high-profile events, but the firm has no plans to alter its process of development in any way.

Since countries compete with each other in order to be ahead in terms of AI, he believes that development will continue at pace regardless of what one firm does. "We cannot control that," he adds, which means that Atlassian must find a way to deal with the current reality.

He allows that he may be too pragmatic, but his bottom line is that it isn't in his control. He points instead to the rewards, chiefly gains in efficiency and productivity.

Cannon-Brookes wants you to view Atlassian as one of the top five software vendors in the world by revenue, with an enormous portion of Fortune 500 companies as their customers. 

And that it's becoming deeply entrenched into essential processes, not only in team collaboration but also in business operations.

Moreover, trust was identified as the main issue. The solution, according to him, is that the agents are incorporated within Atlassian itself, allowing them to track their activities. As he said, the customers are paying for "the software we will build", not the software that's being built today.

And Atlassian has reasons for doing so on its own. In March, it laid off roughly 1,600 employees, which equals 10% of their total workforce, claiming that this move would finance further investments in AI and enterprise sales. Cannon-Brookes said to the employees that this was done for changing the skill set for the future.