Episode
23

Anu Bharadwaj on Why Most AI Agents Fail (and What It Takes to Reach Production)

Anu Bharadwaj (President, Atlassian) joins High Signal to unpack how humans and AI agents will work together across the enterprise—and how that shift could change the very nature of teamwork. Atlassian employees have already built thousands of agents across product, marketing, engineering, and HR teams, while customers like HarperCollins are cutting manual work by 4x as industries from publishing to finance rethink their workflows. We dig into how Atlassian’s culture enables bottom-up experimentation, why grounding and reliability are critical for adoption, and how non-technical teams are often the ones creating the most useful agents. The conversation also looks ahead to the frontiers of multiplayer agent collaboration, proactive and ambient workflows, and the governance and compliance challenges enterprises will face as agents move from tools to teammates.
September 2, 2025
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Guest
Anu Bharadwaj

Atlassian

,

Anu Bharadwaj is President of Atlassian, a leading technology company that helps millions of teams transform the way they collaborate. As an accomplished executive with 20+ years of experience in leading transformations and building billion-dollar businesses for high-growth startups and enterprises, Anu brings deep expertise across Product, Operations, Strategy, CorpDev and Engineering to help teams deliver customer-focused growth. As COO of Atlassian, she was responsible for scaling a distributed workforce in 13 countries while leading Atlassian’s SaaS transformation, building the Cloud enterprise business, and scaling cloud platform teams. Before Atlassian, Anu held various leadership roles at Microsoft, and launched multiple products in Visual Studio. Anu is deeply passionate about growing diverse teams and making the world a better place with technology. She loves helping diverse founders on their mission of building bold and exciting companies. Anu served on the board of Outsystems, advise young and emerging companies and is part of the Operator Collective venture fund that pioneered the collective venture model to empower diverse founders.

Guest

,
HOST
Hugo Bowne-Anderson

Delphina

Hugo Bowne-Anderson is an independent data and AI consultant with extensive experience in the tech industry. He is the host of the industry podcast Vanishing Gradients, a podcast exploring developments in data science and AI. Previously, Hugo served as Head of Developer Relations at Outerbounds and held roles at Coiled and DataCamp, where his work in data science education reached over 3 million learners. He has taught at Yale University, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and conferences like SciPy and PyCon, and is a passionate advocate for democratizing data skills and open-source tools.

‍

‍

Key Quotes

Key Takeaways

‍Agents are becoming teammates.
Atlassian frames agents as collaborators embedded in workflows, forcing the question of when agents should take action and when humans need to decide.

‍

Most agents end up in the graveyard.
Thousands of agents have been built across product, marketing, engineering, and HR. Many don’t last, but experimentation at scale is what surfaces the ones that reshape work.

‍

Adoption is the bottleneck.
Building agents is easy; making them discoverable, trustworthy, and useful in daily work is the real challenge. Proof-of-concepts only matter if teams actually adopt them.

‍

Grounding determines reliability.
Enterprise agents must be anchored in verified data sources and show their reasoning. Without grounding, trust and adoption stall.

‍

Humans still set the boundaries.
Some workflows can already be automated end-to-end, while others still require human judgment. Over time, more tasks will shift toward autonomy.

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The frontier is proactive and ambient agents.
Anu predicts agents will move beyond prompts: surfacing next best actions and triggering background workflows without being asked.

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The frontier is self-healing and orchestration.
Agents will increasingly be able to debug themselves and coordinate across workflows, moving closer to true autonomy.

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The leap ahead is multiplayer collaboration.
Agents won’t just work one-to-one with humans, but alongside multiple people and other agents in real time.

‍

‍Governance will decide who scales responsibly.Audit logs, transparency, permissions, and ownership attribution are becoming the foundations for enterprise adoption.

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You can read the full transcript here.

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction to AI Agents in Teamwork

00:55 Atlassian's AI Platform and Its Impact

02:15 Interview with Anu: Exploring AI in Daily Work

05:31 The Role of Experimentation in AI Development

10:25 Building and Deploying AI Agents at Atlassian

22:37 Grounding and Reliability in AI Systems

26:26 Exploring Self-Healing Systems

27:15 AI Agents and Their Capabilities

28:44 Evaluating Business Value of AI

32:12 Industry-Specific AI Adoption

33:29 Challenges in AI Adoption

40:39 Proactive and Reactive AI Agents

42:41 Future of AI Agents and Security

49:35 The Next Leap in AI Agent Capabilities

50:36 Conclusion and Wrap-Up

‍

Links From The Show

Transcript

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