How to Create a High-Impact Rovo Agent: Lessons from NORA, Atlassian’s Onboarding AI ✨

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Are you looking to supercharge onboarding, support, or any workflow in your organisation with a Rovo agent?

Atlassian’s own journey with NORA, the Newlassian Onboarding Rovo Agent, offers a blueprint for success. In this post, we’ll walk you through the steps to create your own Rovo agent, share the impact NORA delivered, and provide practical tips to maximise value for your teams.

Why Build a Rovo Agent? The NORA Story

When Atlassian set out to transform onboarding for new hires (“Newlassians”), NORA was launched as a Rovo agent to answer onboarding questions, guide new hires, and showcase the power of Atlassian AI from day one.

The results?

• 5x increase in AI adoption among new hires in Week 1 (compared to pre-NORA cohorts)

• 70%+ of 250+ Newlassians used NORA in the first month, asking over 2,000 questions

• NORA became one of the top 5 internal agents by weekly active users and message volume

Creating Your Own Rovo Agent

1. Define Your Agent’s Purpose and Audience

• What problem will your agent solve?

  • NORA focused on onboarding, but your agent could support IT, HR, customer support, or any workflow.

• Who will use it?

  • Tailor the agent’s tone, knowledge, and responses to your audience (e.g., new hires, customers, internal teams).

2. Curate and Connect Knowledge Sources

• Aggregate the right content: NORA pulled from onboarding guides, HR policies, product documentation, and more.

• Keep it fresh: Regularly update your agent’s knowledge base to reflect the latest processes and FAQs.

3. Drive Adoption and Tips for Success

• Share wins: Highlight how your agent saves time, improves onboarding, or boosts productivity.

• Encourage engagement: Promote your agent in onboarding sessions, team meetings, or internal comms.

• Gather feedback: Use surveys or direct feedback to identify gaps and opportunities.

System prompt starter

Role: You are a friendly, tenured Atlassian employee named NORA who knows everything about Atlassian. You were chosen for this role because you are easy to talk to and have a wide breadth of knowledge about working at Atlassian.

Job: Your job is to help onboard every new Atlassian employee by answering questions, directing new hires to resources and being a “safe space” for them to learn about the company. You are able to translate company jargon into language any newcomer can understand.

When responding, it is essential to provide links to the referenced pages. When you get questions about benefits, payroll or office related information, consider the users location before providing a response. When you get questions about benefits, please include any remote work allowances and ergonomic self-assessment reimbursements in your response. Provide dollar amounts associated with location and more granular details.

After every other response you provide send this survey link to get feedback: [Jira feedback form link]

Relevant context: Use the attached Confluence space to search for documentation that will help answer the user's questions. Always assume that the user does not have any context on Atlassian, our products, HR policies, IT processes, people to interact with or how to interact with them. Use simple language, check to make sure your answers are understood and be generally positive and upbeat.

Feedback loops: Quality of the response is important for all agents. See in the starter prompt how the agent includes a chance for users to give feedback.

Tip: Use public forms in Jira to get feedback from all users across the company

After every other response you provide send this survey link to get feedback: [Jira feedback form link]

Plan for adoption: Once the agent was ready, it was then intentionally incorporated into the onboarding experience for new users in multiple stages of the new hire welcome, including as part of the Jira Custom Onboarding that greets new users:

Ready to Build Your Own Rovo Agent?

If you’re inspired by NORA’s story, now’s the perfect time to start! Whether you’re onboarding new hires, supporting customers, or streamlining internal workflows, a Rovo agent can help you deliver value fast with the “Let’s build” series https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Atlassian-AI-Rovo-articles/Workshop-Series-Let-s-build-a-Rovo-Agent/ba-p/3121618

What use case would you tackle first with a Rovo agent? Share your ideas or questions below! 👇