In late August, 2025, 150 Atlassian employees opened their laptops expecting a normal day at work. What they got instead was a pre-recorded video message from co-founder and CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes. Calm, professional, but utterly detached, the video informed them their jobs were no longer needed. Within minutes, their laptops went dark, system access revoked.

The announcement spread quickly beyond Atlassian’s internal Slack. News sites and social media lit up with headlines: “Atlassian replaces staff with AI,” “Tech giant axes jobs via brutal video,” and “Workers swapped for bots.”

The public outrage was immediate. How could a company that champions “teamwork for the digital age” deliver layoffs in such an impersonal way? And more importantly—was this the long-predicted moment when artificial intelligence finally began to replace human jobs en masse?

The answer, as usual, is more complicated than the headline.

Atlassian’s Official Story

Atlassian, known for tools like Jira, Trello, and Confluence, employs around 12,000 people globally. Cutting 150 staff—just over 1 percent of the workforce—may not look catastrophic on paper. But the way the layoffs were framed (and delivered) gave them outsized symbolic weight.

The roles eliminated were customer support and service staff. These are the people who answer questions when a Jira installation goes wrong, when a Confluence space isn’t syncing, when a corporate user can’t navigate Atlassian’s cloud migration.

Why were these jobs axed? According to Atlassian, the company’s cloud transformation and self-service tools have dramatically reduced support demand. In other words, customers no longer need as much hand-holding.

Executives stressed that AI was not directly “replacing” people. Co-founder Scott Farquhar put it bluntly: “This is not about replacing humans with bots. This is about our technology maturing to the point where many common support queries simply never reach a human.”

Yet, in the same breath, Farquhar acknowledged that AI is a factor. Atlassian has heavily integrated machine learning into its products, offering AI-powered assistants that help users file tickets, debug errors, or find documentation instantly. The more effective those tools become, the less often a customer needs to interact with a support agent.

The paradox is clear: Atlassian insists it didn’t fire people “because of AI.” But it openly admits that AI is part of why those people were no longer needed.

AI as the Convenient Scapegoat

It’s not the first time a company has faced this accusation. Over the past two years, IBM, BT, and Accenture have all announced layoffs tied—directly or indirectly—to automation and AI adoption. Each time, headlines screamed: “AI takes jobs.”

But insiders note a subtler dynamic: AI becomes a convenient scapegoat for broader corporate restructuring. It allows executives to frame cuts as an inevitable consequence of progress, rather than a choice made in the boardroom.

For Atlassian, saying “our cloud tools and AI assistants reduced ticket volume” is an easier message than admitting:

• They want to cut costs in a competitive SaaS landscape.
• Investors are pressuring for higher margins after years of growth-at-all-costs.
• They are reallocating resources toward higher-value engineering roles instead of customer support.

When a CEO says, “We had to cut jobs because of AI,” it almost sounds visionary. When he says, “We cut jobs because Wall Street wanted higher profits,” the tone is very different.

What’s Really Happening

Behind the headlines, Atlassian’s move is best understood as the outcome of its transformation into a pure cloud company. For years, it sold software licences that demanded human support. Each on-premises installation had quirks that could send users searching for help. With the shift to cloud subscriptions, the burden changed. Updates were automatic, documentation was centralised, and problems could often be solved before a support ticket was ever raised.

Artificial intelligence accelerated this shift. Today, a Jira user struggling with a workflow may type a query into an integrated assistant that offers a fix within seconds. Confluence spaces update with predictive prompts that guide the user without external help. Even community forums are moderated and indexed in ways that make human intervention less necessary.

The cumulative effect is stark. What once required armies of support staff can now be handled by a combination of automation, better design, and machine learning. For Atlassian’s leadership, keeping the same number of service roles made little business sense. For the people in those roles, it meant the floor fell away beneath their careers.

The Human Dimension

The raw numbers—150 jobs out of 12,000—were hardly catastrophic. Yet the way the layoffs were delivered turned the story into a reputational crisis. A pre-recorded video, devoid of dialogue, stripped of humanity, was all the farewell that loyal employees received.

The timing only made things worse. Just as workers were losing their jobs, Atlassian’s executives were in the news for high-profile spending. Millions were poured into a Formula 1 sponsorship, while Cannon-Brookes defended his use of a private jet reportedly worth tens of millions. The juxtaposition was brutal: ostentatious luxury for the top, unemployment for the base.

Generous severance packages—six months’ pay, counselling, job placement services—could not offset the bitterness. Online forums brimmed with anger. To many, it was not AI that had stolen their jobs but executives who hid behind AI to justify ruthless cuts.

Lessons from the Backlash

For other companies watching, Atlassian has become a case study in what not to do. The first lesson is that communication matters as much as compensation. Severance is financial; communication is emotional. Mishandle the latter, and no package will save your reputation.

The second lesson is about optics. Public trust cannot survive the sight of executives flaunting jets and sponsorships while firing staff. In an age when every expense can be scrutinised online, leaders cannot afford to appear indifferent to the sacrifices they demand of others.

The third lesson is that transparency counts. AI may be reshaping industries, but pretending it is the sole driver of layoffs misleads the public and alienates employees. Admitting to broader economic and strategic reasons may be uncomfortable, but it avoids the perception of dishonesty.

Finally, there is the matter of transition. Companies can choose to treat displaced workers as expendable or as candidates for new opportunities. Reskilling programs, internal redeployments, and digital apprenticeships show respect for human capital. Dismissing workers with a payout and a farewell video does not.

Is AI Really Taking Our Jobs?

This leads to the central question: are we really watching AI steal human livelihoods, or is something else at play? The evidence suggests that AI does not so much “replace” jobs as reshape them.

A customer support agent may no longer answer simple tickets, but the same skill set could be applied to monitoring AI systems, refining training data, or supervising customer experience design. IT specialists displaced by automation could become consultants who help firms adopt those very tools. The problem is rarely that such paths do not exist; it is that corporations do not invest in building them.

AI, then, is less a job-killer than a catalyst for transformation. The danger lies in how leaders respond. If they view it purely as a replacement tool, layoffs become the default. If they view it as an augmentation tool, new roles and industries can emerge.

The Bigger Picture

One of the more surprising outcomes of Atlassian’s controversy was a call by Scott Farquhar for a national AI strategy. He urged governments to collaborate with businesses to ensure workers are not left behind, suggesting digital apprenticeships and expanded reskilling efforts. Cynics saw it as damage control. Supporters argued it was a rare admission that the issue transcends individual companies.

Either way, he is right about one thing. The disruption unleashed by AI is not confined to Atlassian or even to tech. If a single software update can make entire support teams redundant, then every sector—from logistics to healthcare—is vulnerable to similar shocks. Preparing workers for that reality is not charity; it is survival.

AI Didn’t Fire Them—People Did

The story of Atlassian’s 150 layoffs is not, at its heart, about robots stealing jobs. It is about how leaders frame change, how they treat people during transition, and how they manage the optics of power. Atlassian chose a path that made them look ruthless and insincere: a cold video, followed by lavish spending elsewhere, dressed up in the language of AI inevitability.

The real lesson is subtler. AI did not fire those workers—executives did. AI only made it easier to justify the decision. The challenge for the future of work is not whether technology will outpace humans, but whether humans in charge of technology will act with foresight and fairness.

If companies treat AI as a reason to discard staff, we will see more headlines about jobs lost to machines. If they treat it as a chance to reinvent roles and industries, we may find that the future belongs not to AI or to humans alone, but to both together.