High Signal: Data Science | Career | AI Episode 23: Why Most AI Agents Fail (and What It Takes to Reach Production)
Sep 2, 2025
Anu Bharadwaj, the President of Atlassian, shares insights on how AI agents are transforming teamwork across industries like publishing and finance. She discusses the success of bottom-up experimentation in creating effective AI tools and how non-technical teams are leading the charge. The conversation covers the importance of reliability in AI outputs, the future of proactive workflows, and the challenges of user interaction as AI evolves from tools to teammates. Anu also explores the exciting possibilities of multiplayer interactions between humans and AI.
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Agents Reshape Teamwork
- Agents change teamwork by blending human decision points with automated assistance.
- This hybrid shifts how software is created and how teams coordinate daily work.
Treat Agent Work As Iterative Experiments
- Experiment broadly because agents adapt to context, data, and underlying models.
- Test agents in real workflows to discover where they help and where deterministic automation is better.
Onboarding Agent Evolved With Use
- Atlassian built an onboarding agent that improved as it collected more usage data and contexts.
- The team discovered new use cases organically and enhanced the agent over time.