“I have made the extremely difficult decision to reduce our team by approximately 10 percent.” This announcement comes from Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder and CEO of Australian-American software company Atlassian. According to Cannon-Brookes, around 1,600 employees will be affected by the workforce reductions.
Is this wave of layoffs due to AI? Cannon-Brookes is evasive in his statement. “Our approach is not ‘AI replaces people’. However, it would be disingenuous to pretend that AI will not change the mix of skills needed or the number of jobs needed in specific areas. It does,” he wrote in the announcement.
Of the laid-off employees, 40 percent work in North America, 30 percent in Australia and 16 percent in India. Will the job cuts also affect Germany? The human resources industry asked Atlassian Germany. “In Europe we are in consultation with the respective employee representatives and relevant advisory bodies,” is the answer from Alexander Thieme, Senior Corporate Communications Manager, EMEA at Atlassian.
In Germany, this would affect, among other things, the economic committee and the works councils. “They are working diligently to review our proposal,” the company said. Until then, Atlassian does not want to comment on the extent of any personnel changes.
Farewell package for dismissal
Atlassian wants to make the separation from employees as gentle as possible. The company announces a sixteen-week “global separation package,” which will be extended by one week per year of service. Employees are already being granted the bonuses on a pro-rata basis for the 2026 fiscal year and there is a $1,000 refund when they return the work laptop.
Parents who have postponed their paid parental leave to a later date will have it paid out in full. In addition, all health measures for eligible employees will be extended by six months. This is especially true for employees in the USA. relevant, who usually have health insurance through their employer and no state-paid parental leave.
All those laid off are entitled to personal discussions with the human resources department and to take advantage of the company’s Employee Assistance Program (EAP). Atlassian also promises support with internal applications and outplacement and support for employees with visas.
This is not the first downsizing at Atlassian. Last year, Atlassian laid off around 350 employees in the fall. At that time, the areas of customer service and support were particularly affected – a trend in tech companies that has been apparent for some time. At the end of February, the American fintech company Block announced that it would reduce its workforce by 40 percent with more than 4,000 layoffs. The reason: The use of AI allows smaller teams.
What about compensation in remaining jobs?
The development of replacing entry-level jobs with AI is confirmed by a current survey of 1,000 US companies by the software provider Resume.org. 21 percent are currently not hiring young professionals. A third of those surveyed expect to completely eliminate jobs at this level by the end of the year. A current study by the IESE Business School also indicates that starting salaries in the USA are already being influenced by the spread of AI: After the introduction of ChatGPT in the company, salaries fell by around five percent on average, and by six percent for entry-level positions.
After entry-level jobs, it is the turn of skilled workers
However, the situation at Atlassian looks a little different if you look at LinkedIn. Lots of ex-Atlassian employees come here looking for work. Many of them are senior developers. including those who have been involved in AI projects themselves: “Over the last 12 months, I have been working on developing more reliable agent-based workflows as part of Atlassian Studio,” writes one of them. The Talent Acquisition team is also affected by the cut.
The company’s strategy appears to be to replace higher-paying senior positions with junior positions supported by AI. According to Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index Annual Report, which surveyed 31,000 employees from 31 countries, about a third of companies plan to hire AI agent specialists to design and optimize them. It remains to be seen whether these agents will ultimately replace their inventors.
Info
Atlassian was founded in Sydney in 2002. The headquarters are now in San Francisco. Atlassian employs around 12,000 people in 15 countries. Atlassian primarily produces software solutions for IT development, but also tools such as Confluence, which is used for company wikis, and Jira, a web application for operational project management. Since 2017, Trello has also been part of Atlassian, developer of the digital Kanban board of the same name.
Angela Heider-Willms is responsible for reporting on the topics of transformation, change management and leadership. She also deals with the topic of diversity.
