Up until April of this year, Avani Prabhakar was Atlassian’s Chief People Officer. She’d been at the Sydney-headquartered software company since July 2019, working her way through various senior HR positions on her way to assuming the role as Atlassian’s global head of people. But in April, this role changed, expanding in response to the growing importance of AI for Atlassian. She was no longer just CPO, but rather Chief People and AI Enablement Officer, reflecting how the management of talent had become essential to the productive deployment of AI.
This kind of strong overlap between HR and other departments is something that Prabhakar experienced in other positions at other companies. She started her career in 2001 at GE Capital, where the leadership programme meant she spent a solid two years familiarising herself with the different parts of the business. This was something that gave her a “well-rounded perspective,” one which she has maintained into her current role at Atlassian.
“My thesis, and this is what I tell my team as well, is before you talk about people, you should be able to talk about three things in any business,” she says. “You should be able to talk about the product or services like a salesperson, you should be able to tell me everything about a customer, so you should really know our end user and customers really well, and the third thing is if you can really explain the business through a profit-and-loss lens, then you really understand how the money is really made in the business.”
It’s this kind of holistic outlook that has informed her role as Chief People and AI Enablement Officer, which is focused on deploying AI solutions in a way that makes sense for Atlassian’s operations as a whole. Just as importantly, it’s also focused on ensuring that AI transformation is a people-led transformation, resulting in a cultural and organisational shift that enables AI adoption to meaningfully boost productivity.
How HR can reduce the AI ‘fragmentation tax’
For Prakhabar, integrating HR and AI responsibilities is necessary to overcome a common issue faced by adopters of artificial intelligence: the lack of clear and measurable returns on investment. “In the last 12 to 18 months, every big enterprise company has really spent a lot of money and dollars on deploying AI,” she explains. “And if you speak to anyone right now, particularly in the. C-suite, they will tell you, ‘hey, we have spent all of this money but we are not getting the ROI.’”
Atlassian has recently conducted research into the productivity (or lack thereof) of AI deployments, finding that only 6% of Fortune 500 companies have clear evidence of AI-related returns on investment. According to Prakhabar, a major cause of this is an inadvertent ‘fragmentation tax,’ whereby the siloing or misalignment of individual workers and teams results in the inefficient use of AI.
The C-Suite is saying: ‘Hey, we’ve spent all of this money on AI but we are not getting the ROI’
“Because I want to be productive, I’m creating my own agents and I have like my own operating system, you know, and [employee x] has got his own and [employee y] has got his own,” she says. “So now there are, instead of three employees talking to each other, we have 30 agents trying to speak to each other.”
Because individual staff members in some companies may be deploying AI quickly and without collaborating with colleagues and other departments, they end up producing lots of redundancies and duplications. This costs their companies a considerable sum of money, with Atlassian’s report concluding that Fortune 500 firms effectively lose $161bn per year because of fragmentation.
As Chief People and AI Enablement Officer, Prakhabar’s solution to this is to unify HR and IT, as well as other teams, under a single umbrella. “So in my current remit, I’ve got people organisation, but I’ve got internal IT engineering, data science teams, and our customer tech support teams,” she adds. “So the closer these organisations sit, then you can see the full end-to-end transformation and you can drive it.”
Reducing the fragmentation tax also requires, not simply restructuring or unifying teams, but restructuring and unifying them around redesigned workflows. As Atlassian’s State of Teams 2026 report outlines, successful teams can reduce fragmentation substantially by designing clear, extensive workflows for harnessing AI, as opposed to workflows for isolated or quick tasks. “That’s how you break the fragmentation tax,” Prakhabar explains. “By rethinking the entire workflow end-to-end.”
Another key element in improving AI productivity, according to Prakhabar, is the creation of workplace contexts. In Atlassian’s case, this involves the use of its Teamwork Graph platform, which provides a unified channel for all workplace tools and databases, and which has improved AI answer quality by 44% while using 48% fewer tokens.
“The best ROI for AI will happen for companies who are able to build this context layer or the organisational memory internally, where all the data is agent-ready, you know, for them to deploy and give you the better outcome,” she says. “If you just go and deploy AI on your current systems without building this context graph where A is not speaking to B, you won’t really succeed.”
Why AI could raise, and not lower, demand for graduates
Of course, as the most senior HR official at Atlassian, Prakhabar’s also responsible for training the company’s workforce to use AI tools as effectively as possible. Yet she and Atlassian have taken a more practical and collaborative approach to learning and (re)skilling, eschewing more formal methods that may be reminiscent of the classroom. “A more structured learning doesn’t work in AI,” she says. “Until somebody is sitting next to you and helping you redesign your whole workflow, that’s when you learn AI, because then you can touch and feel and you can experience it very differently.”
I want a salesperson who can come and sell more consumption-based pricing for AI usage, which is a very different skill set.
That said, Atlassian has been running a 16-week AI programme, in partnership with Stanford University, since 2022. This is an indication of how quickly the company realised the potential of LLMs, and of how it had to build AI faster because it would be competing with the new technology. Prakhabar says that around 30% of Atlassian’s internal population has graduated from the programme, and that she would “strongly recommend” any company to do something similar for most of its workforce.
On the other side of the equation, Atlassian has also changed its hiring criteria, given how roles in virtually all areas have been evolving. “Even if you’re a salesperson, I don’t want a regular salesperson who can sell like a Software-as-a-Service license,” she says. “I want a salesperson who can come and sell more consumption-based pricing for AI usage, which is a very different skill set.”
Interestingly, Prakhabar observes that the emergence of AI will create a greater need for graduate-level jobs, since younger generations are more likely to be digital- and AI-natives. Indeed, Atlassian’s own internal reviews have found that 19% of newly hired graduates can be classified as ‘AI super users,’ a higher percentage than for the workforce as a whole.
With a workforce capable of using AI productively, Prakhabar predicts that the organisational structure of Atlassian’s HR department (and other departments) will shift over time. The use of AI will increasingly bring different units together, reducing the need for more specialised teams, and becoming more focused on outcomes rather than specific processes. “If a business is going through a big org design or an org change or it wants to complete an M&A, it will need like two, three people right now with the right skill set, but some of the generalist roles like talent, compensation agents will be able to do that for you,” she explains. “So what you need is people with strong business acumen.”
Taken across an entire organisation as a whole, these shifts will result in significant structural changes, including changes in workflows and roles. However, Prakhabar believes that, while HR is transforming, it won’t be going away anytime soon. “It’s going to become more and more a strategic function,” she concludes. “HR has never been more critical than ever in this whole journey.”
Up until April of this year, Avani Prabhakar was Atlassian’s Chief People Officer. She’d been at the Sydney-headquartered software company since July 2019, working her way through various senior HR positions on her way to assuming the role as Atlassian's global head of people. But in April, this role changed, expanding in response to the growing importance of AI for Atlassian. She was no longer just CPO, but rather Chief People and AI Enablement Officer, reflecting how the management of talent had become essential to the productive deployment of AI.
This kind of strong overlap between HR and other departments is something that Prabhakar experienced in other positions at other companies. She started her career in 2001 at GE Capital, where the leadership programme meant she spent a solid two years familiarising herself with the different parts of the business. This was something that gave her a “well-rounded perspective,” one which she has maintained into her current role at Atlassian.
“My thesis, and this is what I tell my team as well, is before you talk about people, you should be able to talk about three things in any business,” she says. “You should be able to talk about the product or services like a salesperson, you should be able to tell me everything about a customer, so you should really know our end user and customers really well, and the third thing is if you can really explain the business through a profit-and-loss lens, then you really understand how the money is really made in the business.”
