’Tis the season to be merry, enjoy some PTO…and play psychic. With 2024 nearly in our rearview, we asked five Atlassian leaders for their expert predictions on the world of work in 2025 and beyond. These folks live and breathe effective teamwork, and their forward-looking insights touch on elemental topics like asynchronous collaboration, managing complexity, harnessing creativity – and the revolutionary tech underpinning it all: Artificial intelligence.
Here’s a look ahead at the future according to our experts.
🔭 Annie Dean, Head of Team Anywhere
In 2025, AI-enabled teams will be more connected than ever. We are on the cusp of becoming the most connected and collaborative workplace we’ve ever experienced because AI will erase busywork and give teams the exact support they need to explore and execute big ideas, faster. When teams collaborate with AI, they can more easily bring their ideas to life. This means the workplace will no longer be dominated by the loudest voices, but rather, the most creative minds.
Read more: How to make time for the work that matters
🔭 Molly Sands, Head of the Teamwork Lab
In 2025, people with strong people management skills – even if they aren’t in leadership roles – will get 75% more value from AI agents. As highlighted by our AI Collaboration Index, those who approach AI as an extra teammate rather than a tool for simple tasks reap greater benefits in terms of time savings and improved work quality. As more people turn to AI as a creative sparring partner or strategic collaborator, they will find that the skills required to be a strong people leader—providing context about the problem, assembling the right team of experts, and delegating work—are also the skills needed to effectively use AI.
Read more: AI Collaboration Report: “Using” AI is not enough
🔭 Jamil Valliani, Head of Product, AI
2025 will be the year of the AI agent. As agents grow richer in interactivity and start to reach across more than just text and into audio and visual elements, they will bring about a powerful cultural shift in how humans collaborate with AI. Agents are already quite good at augmenting and accelerating our work – in the next year, they will get even better at performing highly specific tasks, taking specialized actions, and integrating across products, all with humans in the loop.
I’m most excited to see agents becoming exponentially more sophisticated in how they can collaborate with teams to handle complex tasks. Agents are benefitting from rapidly evolving foundation models, reasoning over increasingly rich data sets, and gaining the ability to take more actions. These advancements will not only yield better results when handling tasks but also allow the agent to continually learn and handle increasingly complex problems, much like a human teammate or collaborator might Our relationship with them will evolve, and we’ll see new forms of collaboration and communication on teams develop.
Read more: Getting started with generative AI
🔭 Joe Thomas, Loom Co-founder and Head of Product, Loom
As we approach 2025, I predict that teams will fully embrace asynchronous work as the foundation for AI-driven collaboration. Companies will recognize the immense value of high-fidelity, documented contexts – especially through asynchronous video – which AI can index and convert to other formats in powerful ways. We’ll see a surge in content transformation from video to metadata and text, with AI agents converting these inputs into efficient workflows and actionable insights. Video recording will be increasingly leveraged as a powerful and efficient documentation mechanism, with individuals and teams increasingly trusting AI to help package the most effective note possible, whether it is to other teammates or to AI agents to get work done on the team’s behalf. This shift to asynchronous work will empower measurable productivity gains, both to solve for human-oriented constraints of time zones or schedules and human-AI collaboration.
Read more: How to excel at asynchronous communication
🔭 Dom Price, Work Futurist
2025 is all about rethinking what productivity actually looks like in the age of AI. Today, many teams operate in silos under something called functional productivity, which fails to look at an entire operating system, rather favoring one sole function or way of working. Sure, it’s all well and good to say, “we increased our team’s productivity by X%,” but has that resulted in net positive gains for the business as a whole? Or are we working the ways we’ve always worked, added more overall strain to the business, and given a round of high-fives regardless?
This mindset might have worked 200 years ago when we could make a production line machine faster and output more. But today, that system just doesn’t truly measure the effectiveness of knowledge workers and the constantly evolving tech that supports them. Introducing system productivity, which looks at the productivity of the entire work ecosystem. It’s a way to realize more overall benefit for the wider organization by prioritizing true productive outcomes, making the whole system more effective, and avoiding bottlenecks throughout the business.
Read more: The problem with productivity metrics
Seems like this AI business is gonna be a big deal, huh?
In all seriousness, if these predictions signal anything, it’s that a more nuanced understanding of AI – as an ever-evolving collaborator more than a static tool – is key to unlocking its most valuable benefits. The better we can wrap our heads around its powerful potential, the more it will reshape our very notion of productivity.