Atlassian announced that it has acquired Percept.AI, an AI company from Y Combinator’s summer 2017 batch that offers an automated virtual agent support solution — a chatbot based on a proprietary AI engine for natural language understanding.
Atlassian plans to integrate this virtual agent technology into Jira Service Management, its tool for helping IT teams provide better service to employees and customers.
Percept had raised a seed round for an undisclosed amount from Hike Ventures, Builders VC, Cherubic Ventures, Amino Capital, Tribe Capital and Y Combinator ahead of the acquisition Crunchbase.
There can be little doubt that Atlassian is investing heavily in Jira Service Management. In 2020, the company acquired Halp for its Slack-first help desk ticketing service, in addition to Mindville, an enterprise asset management firm. Last year, it picked ThinkTilt for its no-code/low-code form builder specifically to strengthen Jira Service Management (and that’s on top of several other acquisitions around the Jira ecosystem in recent years).
Edwin Wong, Atlassian’s head of Product for IT Solutions, told me that the company isn’t just betting on acquisitions to expand the service, though. “It’s not just about inorganic investments. There’s a whole host of organic things that we’ve done,” Wong said. “The goal isn’t just to buy something and plug it in; it is about a more deliberate strategy – to think about what fits well and then build on top of what has been created and create that sort of unified experience into one product. So it’s not about, ‘hey, here’s six different things’ and then for our customers to have to think, ‘oh, what do I need to do pull them together?’ It is about creating those integrated experiences.”
It’s no secret, though, that IT teams are under more pressure to deliver great customer service than ever, something the pandemic isn’t making any more accessible, while their customers, even in the enterprise, expect a consumer-like experience. Ideally, a product like Percept.ai would be able to deflect the vast majority of tier-1 support questions, provide users with a great experience and free up IT teams to focus on more complex tasks.
That’s the goal of a product like Jira Service Management, and, as Wong noted, the service now has over 35,000 customers that come from virtually every industry.
Wong said that what drew the team to Percept was its engine’s ability to understand a lot of the context behind a support query. It can analyse the content, intent and sentiment and – combined with the user profile – can provide a personalised response. When the virtual agent has reached its limits, it’ll automatically transfer the interaction to a human. Teams can set up and tweak the service using a no-code tool, another feature that made Percept attractive to Atlassian.
The company plans to integrate the technology into Jira Service Management natively. But Atlassian also plans to expand the service’s capabilities.
“Our broader vision, if we look at it a little bit further out, is to create what we think of a unified platform for any form of support and service desk. That’s our goal at the end of the day,” Wong explained. “We believe that expanse covers all sorts of different products, different capabilities. As an example, why can’t we draw from the knowledge of a Confluence space or article to help answer some of those questions? Why can’t we draw from, for example, maybe a Trello board? So absolutely, when we made this acquisition, it is part of our broader long-term vision across Atlassian to deliver great experiences for our customers.”
