20VC: Atlassian CEO on Why Agents Won't Replace Interfaces | Why Enterprises Won't Trust Chinese Models | Why The Jury Is Still Out On The Benefits of Specialised Models with Mike Cannon-Brookes

If you're giving up on your user interface, if you're giving up on evolving your experience for a customer, I think that's a brainless bet. I don't think agents will replace all the interfaces. For the first time in a long time, we're solving foundational design challenges again. There is certainly some customer pushback in some places to, quote unquote, Chinese models. There is not customer pushback to open models. The jury is really out on the benefits of building specialized models at the moment. Right now, the production of technology is faster than the consumption of technology. We're moving from a world of information asymmetry to imagination asymmetry. This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. So in today's show, we sit down with Mike Cannonbrooks, founder and CEO at Atlassian, to discuss what happens to traditional software in a world where agents are able to extract information from databases. Do they still carry value? Where is enduring value in a world of agents? How does Atlassian think about building the context layer that will power enterprise AI agents? And what does this mean for the next generation of enterprise software? This and so much more in an incredibly revealing, but also just awesome discussion with Mike. I've known him for years. He's an incredible dude, and this was so much fun to record. But before we dive into the show today, base 44 is one of those products I used, and I just thought straight away, man, I wish I'd had this when I started 20 VC with $50 and no contacts in venture. I wanted to see what it could do, so I built a guest research hub for the show. Upcoming guests, company notes, previous interviews, sponsored contacts, follow ups, all in one amazing location. I described it in plain English. A few minutes later, I had the product open in front of me. Database, login, back end, and hosting already handled and just all in one. It made it so easy, and that's what I loved. I didn't write a long spec. I didn't stitch five different tools together. I built the thing, and I started using it. For any founder listening, that's the point. The faster you turn an idea into something real, the faster you launch. Apps, dashboards, internal systems, AI agents, whatever you need to build, Base forty four gets you there. Go to base44.com/20vc. That's base44.com/20vc. While base forty four helps you build faster, LARADIN helps you measure AI impact. Every company now runs two workforces, humans and AI agents. Is the first unified dashboard across both workforces that measures their work and optimizes their impact. Laredon answers four questions. Who's using AI? Which tools? What is it costing? And was it actually being produced for every team across every vendor? AI ROI stops being a guess and becomes a number that you can consistently and confidently measure. Gainsight, Vertiv, SurveyMonkey, and many other enterprise organizations run their AI programs on …