How AI is changing the way we work - Angela Ho, Obsidian Systems — The author, Obsidian Systems’ Angela Ho

There is a moment every knowledge worker knows well. You open a blank ticket, a new Confluence page or a fresh e-mail thread, and you stare at it. Not because you don’t know what needs to be done but because the act of starting takes energy. Cognitive energy. The kind that, by mid-afternoon, you have already spent too much of.

Multiply that moment by every team member, every day, across every project in your organisation. That is not a productivity problem. That is a systemic drain, and one that AI is uniquely positioned to fix.

The real problem isn’t a lack of data. It’s a lack of clarity.

Most organisations are drowning in information. Tickets, pages, comment threads, meeting notes, messages, e-mails. The knowledge exists but it is scattered, buried and locked inside tools that don’t talk to each other in any meaningful way. Teams spend more time finding information than acting on it. They rewrite existing context. They sit in meetings to align on things that were already documented, just not in a way anyone could quickly surface.

This is the friction that slows delivery. It doesn’t show up in a single crisis. It accumulates quietly, meeting by meeting, ticket by ticket, until teams are working harder just to stand still. AI doesn’t solve this by adding another tool to the stack. It solves it by sitting inside the tools teams already use and making the work that is already there usable.

Starting is the hardest part

Ask any developer, product manager or support agent what slows them down most, and few will say the actual work. More often it is the overhead around the work. Writing a user story from scratch. Drafting a post-incident review. Turning a meeting discussion into structured action items and summarising a 40-comment Jira thread for a stakeholder who joined late. These tasks aren’t complex but they consume time and mental bandwidth in a disproportionate way to their value.

Read: Your next team member might already be in Jira

This is where AI-powered tools like Atlassian Intelligence and Rovo Agents shift the equation. Instead of starting from nothing, teams start with a draft. Instead of searching through pages of documentation, they ask a question in plain language and get an answer in seconds. A simple prompt like, “Create a Jira story for improving login performance for mobile users”, returns a structured, ready-to-refine ticket almost instantly. It might not be a perfect ticket, but it does provide a starting point. The cognitive lift of beginning is removed and teams start with momentum.

Repetitive work is a hidden tax on your best people

There is an uncomfortable truth most organisations avoid examining. Your most skilled people are spending a significant portion of their week on work that doesn’t require their skills at all. Reformatting documentation. Categorising incoming support requests. Writing the same type of status update for the fifth sprint in a row and answering questions that are already answered but are difficult to find.

This isn’t only an efficiency problem. It is a motivation problem. When talented people spend their days on repetitive, low-value tasks, they disengage. AI and intelligent automation can absorb much of this overhead.

In a service management context, AI can draft the first response to a support request, summarise the incident history and suggest resolution steps before a human agent even opens the ticket. The agent’s role shifts from doing the admin to applying judgment. That is a fundamentally better use of their capability. As we say at Obsidian, AI doesn’t replace support agents, it gives them superpowers.

Going from a strategic initiative to fully allocated, clearly defined work items in Jira often takes days or more than a week in many organisations. AI compresses this timeline. Confluence pages can be drafted from bullet points. Epics can be broken into stories with acceptance criteria already sketched. Meeting notes can be transformed into structured action items before the next meeting is even scheduled. This isn’t about cutting corners. It is about removing the administrative scaffolding that surrounds real work so teams can spend more time building and less time setting up to build.

AI works best as a teammate

The most effective implementations treat AI as a first draft colleague, one that is available at any hour, never forgets context and doesn’t get tired — but one that still needs a human to review, refine and decide. Organisations that position AI as a threat find resistance; those who position it as a productivity partner find engagement and results.

The tools are available and the use cases are proven. The question now is not whether your teams will work alongside AI, but how well you will set them up to do it. Start with your highest-friction workflows, build internal champions, invest in prompt literacy and measure time saved rather than just adoption rates.

The blank slate problem is solvable. The only question is when you will start.

Obsidian Systems helps organisations unlock the full value of their Atlassian stack, including AI-powered capabilities across Jira, Confluence and Jira Service Management. To explore what is possible for your team, get in touch or book a demo.