Unleashing AI in Jira: A 2024 Retrospective and a Glimpse into the Future

2024 has been a year of significant advancements for AI within the Jira ecosystem. Atlassian has introduced a suite of innovative features that are revolutionizing how teams work, from automating mundane tasks to providing deeper insights into their projects. Let's delve into the key AI-powered enhancements that have shaped the Jira experience this year and a preview of early 2025 Atlassian Intelligence updates.

Automating structured work items with AI

AI Work Breakdown (Jira)

This groundbreaking feature simplifies project planning by automatically generating a list of child issues (Standard issue types or subtasks depending on the issue this is executed on) based on a high-level description. This not only saves time but also ensures a more structured and comprehensive approach to project execution.

This is a tool I have used in Jira when project planning often and it can generate a great starting point, if you are unhappy with the exact wording, it's seamless to remove or edit the Summary names and use other AI features to fill in the descriptions.

Note: AI Work Breakdown is exclusive to Jira Cloud Premium and Enterprise currently.

AI Work Creation (Confluence)

Seamlessly create Jira issues directly from Confluence pages. AI analyzes the page content, suggests relevant issue types, and pre-fills key fields like summary and description, streamlining issue creation and reducing manual effort.

Context switching and manually creating issues can consume a lot of your time, with this magic feature, you can create the issues directly inside Confluence with pre-filled summaries and description to kick start any tasks that need to be done.

This can also help enhance your collaboration if working with multiple teams or members, now they get this information directly in Jira without needing to read through Confluence and can start work immediately.

Note: In order to use AI work creation, cloud users will need to have Confluence Premium or Enterprise, and Atlassian Intelligence enabled within Confluence.

Enhancing Communication and Context

AI Issue Summaries

Quickly grasp the essence of any issue with AI-generated summaries. These concise summaries provide valuable context, enabling you to quickly understand the issue and prioritize your work accordingly. The summary will include all data from issue description, summary and the potentially long line of comments.

When scanning across multiple issues, this can be a life saver, it would be really great to see this expanded on and allow users to export AI summaries of multiple issues or all issues in a certain JQL but alas this could be done more manually if needed with Rovo and exporting issue data.

Note: AI Work Breakdown is exclusive to Jira Cloud Premium and Enterprise currently.

AI Issue Reformatter

Improve the clarity and readability of your Jira issues by using AI to restructure and refine their descriptions. This enhances communication and ensures that all stakeholders are on the same page.

Even though this is such a simple feature, this is the most used AI feature that I've encountered in my internal work, sometimes we forget how powerful structuring points and giving clear breakdowns offer to other stakeholders in our tasks.

We might understand everything about our task but if its not clearly communicated, the other users might make mistakes and consume more time figuring out or checking back in.

Although restructuring might not take too much time for one task, the wasted time caused by bad communication and multiplied across more issues can make a huge difference.

Note: AI Work Breakdown is exclusive to Jira Cloud Premium and Enterprise currently.

The Future of AI in Jira

Looking ahead, Atlassian is poised to further enhance the AI capabilities within Jira. Key upcoming features include:

• AI Work Creation from Slack: Seamlessly create Jira issues directly from Slack conversations, further streamlining workflows and improving cross-team collaboration. Atlassian claims that AI technology will use the context of your Slack thread conversations to suggest summaries and descriptions, making the process faster and more accurate, reducing the time and effort required.
• Related Confluence Pages: Automatically identify and link related Confluence pages to Jira issues, providing easy access to relevant documentation. This, I'm very excited about also, even in a small organisation, I have seen tasks replicated over and over, even creating content which already exists as some teams might not always work together and encounter similar problems. This would be a massive assistant to everyone encountering problems to potentially surface their confluence documentation into Jira seamlessly.

• Similar Jira Issues: Quickly find similar issues within Jira, enabling faster resolution and preventing duplicate work. This is a similar concept to the Related Confluence Pages, multiple times we have similar issues across projects or even sometimes the same project that we aren't aware of, so this excites me also.
• JQL Fixer: Resolve JQL query errors with AI assistance, enabling you to efficiently retrieve the data you need. This is similar to the existing Natural Language to JQL AI assistance but now it can correct your JQL for you and improve your JQL skills in the process.

Conclusion:

2024 has witnessed a significant leap forward in the integration of AI within the Jira ecosystem across all products, this is mostly focused on Jira as I have previously done articles on many JSM features too.

These innovative features are empowering teams to work more efficiently, improve communication, and unlock new levels of productivity.

As Atlassian continues to push the boundaries of AI within Jira, we can expect even more exciting advancements in the years to come and I will be onboard to test and utilise every one as they release into beta and beyond.

This article provides a general overview of the AI features introduced in Jira in 2024. For detailed information and instructions, please refer to the official Atlassian documentation.

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