Atlassian’s Mike Cannon-Brookes: AI agents need a name tag—and a human to blame for their mistakes
Source: Fortune ·
Cannon-Brookes says the hardest part of putting agents to work isn’t the model but the interface and the accountability.
From the source
Atlassian cofounder Mike Cannon-Brookes doesn’t want ‘the AI did it’ to become an office excuse. “That’s ChatGPT on behalf of Mike. Like, that’s Mike using ChatGPT. It’s not ChatGPT doing it,” Cannon-Brookes told Fortune on the sidelines of the Singapore Grand Prix. “The accountability is with Mike. It has to be with the end user, ultimately.” On Oct. 6, Atlassian rolled out its “Agentic Multiplayer Protocol,” a control plane that turns AI agents into visible, governed members of work teams with distinct profiles and owner attribution. In practice, an agent’s edits should show up in a document’s history the same way a colleague’s edits would. “You have to be able to see who did what when,” Cannon-Brookes said. A program might—incorrectly, in Cannon-Brookes’ eyes—say that Codex made an edit. ’ No, it didn’t—someone did that,” he affirmed. A wave of personal AI agents, like Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots, is now hitting the market. To Cannon-Brookes, those products are “taking an…