Feature Focus 2026 Vol. 10 (August)

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How KFC Uses AI Agents to Ship Software Faster (45 sec.)

Teamwork Reinvention with Accenture and Atlassian (31+ min.)

Inside Atlassian

• What High-Throughput Engineers do Differently and Why AI Widens the Gap: We interviewed 15 high-throughput Atlassian engineers who all work on brownfield codebases: systems with years of history, broad surfaces, and layers of complexity. The most interesting finding: AI didn’t make their fundamentals obsolete; it accelerated them significantly.

• The tech we love to hate is the tech we’d hate to lose: AI is one of the most contested topics in public life, and heavy users share those concerns. Yet that controversy is largely skipping over knowledge work. The same workers who have real societal questions about AI find it genuinely valuable in their own jobs. If you want to test this theory with your team, run the AI Play/Pause Days Play.

• Why better tickets help agents write better code: A reflection on building an enterprise product using AI agents, and what the data says about how we worked.

• Building a real-time PWA on Atlassian’s own stack: For our inaugural tech summit in Bengaluru, Atlassian Unleash 2026, we didn’t want just another schedule app. We wanted the app itself to be the product story.

• Rovo Search: Why Rovo is a Leading Enterprise AI Search Tool: Rovo Search now provides AI-generated answers with citations, routes intent-aware queries in Jira, searches across 50+ connected tools, delivers richer visual results, and is embedded directly in Atlassian workflows.

• Our Q4 FY26 letter to shareholders

Apps & Collections

Platform Apps

Administration

• New closed beta for expanded backup and restore size limits: Going forward, we’re expanding backup and restore to support more customers with larger datasets. We’re excited to share that we’ve recently launched a closed beta, unlocking higher database and attachment limits for customers who are within the new expanded size limits. Sign up here.

• A Sandbox Is Your Best Friend (Here's Why) A sandbox is a safe, separate copy of your Atlassian environment where you can experiment. Try a new workflow, test an automation, or make a change to your configuration, all without disturbing the production setup your team relies on every day. We’re also opening the beta for promoting changes from a sandbox to production.

Goals & Projects

• Atlassian Projects are now native in Jira: Atlassian Projects brings the status, owners, and progress context directly into Jira for a single, native connection between the work your team does every day and the projects that work supports.

• Set the editing default for new goals and projects: Until now, every new goal and project was created as Anyone can edit, and owners had to change it one by one after the fact. Now, site admins and app admins can set the starting permission that applies to every new goal or project created on the site.

Teamwork Collection

Confluence

• 🚀 Agents are now in (and out of) Confluence: here’s what you can do and how to try it: Agents can now work directly in Confluence, on your pages, in your comments, and from the AI tools you already use. Here’s what’s rolling out, who has access, and how to get started.

• Getting Started With Confluence Q&A (July 21): The full set of questions and answers from the session are shared here for those unable to attend live. Community Champion

Jira

• Coming Soon: Control how hierarchy is displayed when filtering in Jira Software Timeline: We're introducing a new inline hierarchy toggle to the Jira Software Timeline. This gives you more control over how work items are displayed, especially when timeline view level filters are active. After this update, filtered results will display in a flyout hierarchy modal OR inline hierarchy showing Epics and their immediate children, and you can switch between them using the new toggle.

• Jira Cloud work item field size and voter/watcher count limits: Starting this month, Jira Cloud will enforce hard limits on work item field sizes and voter/watcher counts per work item to ensure continued reliability and safeguard platform storage. These limits are most relevant to app developers, integrators, automation owners, and teams planning large migrations. Most customers using Jira day to day are unlikely to be affected.

• Upcoming Changes: Issue ADF Field Transformations: This post extends the issue transformations we announced for comments, attachments, linked issues, remote links and worklogs. Extending on those issue list limits, we announced a site wide limit of 1 MB on the amount of rich text (ADF) content a single field can hold, which you can read about in CHANGE-2145. The next phase will cover rich text fields on existing work items. Fields that still hold more than 1 MB of ADF content will be automatically transformed to bring them under the limit. To help you monitor and manage this data, we are releasing the Get Issue ADF Limit Report API. Admins can use it to get the list of work item IDs that are over the limit.

• 📣 Early Access Program now open for modernized boards (Company-Managed spaces): If you’ve been following our journey, the modernized board went GA to team-managed software boards in July (read our community post here) allowing us to unify 3 different board experiences down to 2. Now we’ve got our sights on unifying boards in company-managed spaces. To express interest, reply to this thread; email poh2@atlassian.com; or contact your Customer Success Manager, including 1) your company/organization; 2) your email address; 3) team size willing to participate (1 admin + 1-2 individual contributors). We'll review all expressions of interest and confirm participation by the week of 26 Aug with next steps and exact dates.

• 🤖 AMA: Scaling Jira admin: give teams autonomy without losing control: Join Ira Kudriashova, Atlassian Head of Engineering, and Dmitry Melikov, Atlassian Principal Product Manager, Jira, for a live Ask-Me-Anything session where they’ll explore how Jira admins can give teams real autonomy without sacrificing consistency, governance, or trust in reporting. RSVP here. August 26/27 | 3 PM PDT/8 AM AEST

• Jira Timeline, Plans, and Roadmap: which does what? These views can look similar at first, but each one is designed for a different planning job. Here’s a quick, practical guide to help you choose the right one!

• Automations in Jira with Cursor YouTube | <2 min.

• How to Calculate Release Schedule Variance in Jira: Release schedule variance shows how far the current forecast release date has moved from the original committed date. With Jira Formula Fields, this KPI can now be calculated automatically inside Jira and used in views, filters, dashboards, JQL, and automation rules. Community Champion

• Q&A from Jira sessions: The full sets of questions and answers from the sessions are shared here for those unable to attend live. Community Champion

  • Differences between Jira DC and Cloud: July 14 and July 30

  • Getting Started With Jira (July 29)

Loom

• Loom tools are live on Rovo MCP v2 Preview: your recordings, now agent-ready. Your agent can finally read your Looms, act on them, organize them, and even create new ones. Your recordings start being live, structured context your agents can reason over and act on.

Rovo/AI

• Connect any third-party AI agent to Rovo with Agent2Agent (A2A): Now in GA, any compliant third-party AI agent can now connect directly to Rovo, reason over your real Atlassian data, and take action on your behalf.

• Rovo Insights General Availability: Rovo Insights gives organization admins a centralized view of AI adoption. With Rovo insights, you can gain a better understanding of how Rovo is being used across your organization, where teams are finding the most value, and identify opportunities to improve adoption of Rovo. Learn more in our documentation.

• AI Access Controls for Atlassian Cloud: With AI Access controls, admins have the flexibility they need to support the rollout of Rovo AI at their own pace, balancing innovation with governance that keeps AI adoption aligned with organizational policies.

• What's New in Rovo Agents: Your Bi-Monthly Update: Every two months we highlight the latest features, key updates, and give you a preview of what’s coming next.

• Are you a Rovo Fundamentals Master? [100 Kudos + Certification] Take the Rovo Fundamentals certification exam, Atlassian's official Rovo credential that’s free and self-paced.

• AI Is No Longer Just Learning to Think. It Is Learning to Work. The Atlassian ecosystem is a good example of what that means in practice. With Jira, JSM, Confluence and Rovo, AI is no longer only about summarizing text or drafting a reply. Agents can increasingly use organizational knowledge, interact with work items, support automation and participate in real workflows. Community Champion

• Find and use AI agents with Rovo Q&A (July 21): The full set of questions and answers from the session are shared here for those unable to attend live. Community Champion

Service Collection

Assets

• 🚀 Big News: Assets Data Manager Has a Brand-New UI! The experience has been rebuilt from the ground up with a cleaner, more intuitive interface and a brand new setup flow. Premium/Enterprise

  • Explore the New Assets Data Manager: Key Takeaways from Our AMA: In this virtual session, we walked through the redesigned Data Manager UI, explained updated terminology, and showed a live end-to-end workflow for fetching, transforming, reconciling, and importing data into Assets in JSM. Watch the replay here (52 min.)

Jira Service Management

• Help us shape service management where agents already work: We are looking for enterprise IT teams and teams in departments such as HR, Finance, Legal, and Facilities to help us test how agents can handle requests end to end where they already work, without switching to the JSM agent experience. Spots are limited because we want to work closely with a small number of teams and learn from the details of how service work happens in practice. Sign up here. EAP, Feedback Opportunity

• Proactive Service Management for JSM: Instead of waiting for employees to report problems, PSM continuously monitors device health, detects issues early, automatically remediates common issues where possible, and proactively guides employees when automation isn't available. Sign up here. EAP, Premium/Enterprise

Product Collection

Jira Product Discovery

• Global Views is now generally available in JPD: Global Views let admins create a view once and reuse it across multiple JPD spaces. When the view configuration changes, those updates automatically stay in sync everywhere the view is used, no more rebuilding, no more drift. Premium

Software Collection

Bitbucket

• Introducing the redesigned deployments experience: Our new Pipelines Deployments page makes it easier to scan, filter, and act on. The new experience organizes environments clearly, surfaces the most important deployment details in one place, and updates live as pipelines run. Read the Community post here.

• August Bitbucket Digest: This is your go-to spot for the latest news on Bitbucket Data Center and Cloud, from handy resources to help your team plan ahead to a look at where Bitbucket is headed. In this issue, we're covering the new features in Data Center 10.3, the Bamboo to Bitbucket Pipelines importer going GA, and what's new in Bitbucket Cloud with Agentic Pipelines and the AI-native SDLC.

• Paid Bitbucket User Research Opportunity: Help Us Improve Your Activity-tracking Workflows: We're researching how developers stay informed about activity across the repos and projects they work with. Your experience will help us understand whether and how an activity feed in Bitbucket could be valuable. Sign up here. 60 min. | $100 digital gift card | Feedback Opportunity

• Variables are now passed to Dynamic Pipelines Provider Payload: Use pipeline, repository, workspace, and system variables to customize deployments, reuse shared settings, improve traceability, and integrate with external systems. Premium

Strategy Collection

Strategy Collection Innovation Spotlight Q3 Release: Everyone agrees on the priorities. Almost no one can see the money and the work behind them. This quarter finally closes that gap, showing priorities; the work driving them; the money behind them; and the outcomes they produce, in one place.

Additional Updates

Analytics

Upcoming Retirement of Dashboard Subscriptions in Analytics, Assets, and JSM: Starting September 8th, 2026, you will no longer be able to create new dashboard subscriptions. On November 2nd, 2026, all existing subscriptions will stop being sent, and the subscription feature will be fully retired. Enterprise

Community and Learning

• Did you know that Atlassian Cloud Foundations has become a FREE Certificate? Free and open-book means there's no barrier to getting started. This is your chance to turn your everyday Atlassian Cloud knowledge into a certificate that stands out.

• 🌟 Grow your career and score limited edition Team ‘26 Europe badges: As the largest gathering of the Atlassian Community in Europe comes to life in Amsterdam, we want to ensure you walk away with real, actionable value to advance your career. At the Atlassian Community booth you’ll find how to supercharge your AI skillset, earn Certifications, and learn ways you can promote and facilitate transformation, implement new ideas, and drive innovation at work, with support and recognition from Atlassian.

• Community FiveByFive Round-up: July 2026 It’s time once again to take a look at everything that has happened in the past month, including major events, product announcements, and amazing people providing great tips & best practices to help the Community. Community Champion

  • Tobi is a Kudos Millionaire: Tobi has become a familiar and valued presence in the Atlassian Community through his thoughtful forum participation, product knowledge, and willingness to help others learn. He talks about how meaningful the Champions community has been for him: “Once you get in the community itself, you know, you meet so many brilliant people… They're really enthusiastic about the work that they do… these people are amazing with what they are doing and how they approach things.”

• My Thoughts on Atlassian University: Learning, Certifications and Kudos: Even with extensive hands-on experience, Atlassian University is useful for revisiting the main concepts, filling occasional knowledge gaps and discovering new features and recommended practices. Community Champion

Data Center

• Security doesn't disappear in Cloud - it moves up the stack. Let's talk about it. Atlassian Senior Solutions Consultant Tony Rossiter is hosting a live session titled Security by Design: Strengthening Your Cloud Posture Without Slowing Teams. This session will cover where security risk truly resides in cloud and how to focus on the controls that matter most; how to modernize identity, access, and data governance without creating friction; what secure AI adoption requires in a connected cloud environment; and how security by design creates resilience, clarity, and speed at enterprise scale. Register here. August 26 | 11-11:45 AM EDT

Events

• Upcoming Live Events with Atlassian Experts (August 10, 2026): Atlassian experts are hosting a lineup of webinars and hands-on workshops covering everything from AI workflows, Jira automation, and building Rovo agents to planning your cloud migration and cloud user management & security.

  • See the full Class Calendar

• 27 August 2006 | London Teamwork Collection Learning Camp 2026: Join us in London for an immersive, in‑person experience showcasing how Jira, Confluence, and Loom work together as a connected teamwork system.

• 6-8 October 2026 | Registration for Team '26 Europe in Amsterdam is open. Check out the discounted Team pass bundle for teams of 3 or more!

• October 27-28, 2026 | Build IT Together (BIT) Conference | Dallas, Texas: This is a FREE Conference with two days of sessions and activities to make you a better a Jira admin! Each presentation will show you real use cases for how to leverage the power of Forge, Rovo, or AI. Atlassians will be on site with Forge and Rovo workshops to expand your skills. We'll also have stations for you to take an Atlassian Certified Holder exam (or two or three).

• More upcoming ACE Events in List and Calendar views

[Tomislav Tobijas]

Really awesome Feature Focus! I can use this to check whether I’ve missed anything over the past month 😄

And cheers for the shout-out! I didn’t realize my milestone had made quite that much of an impact, haha