If you want to understand what Atlassian Rovo is and how to get the best out of it, this guide is for you.
Teams in Atlassian live across Jira issues, Confluence pages, Slack threads, etc. Information is scattered all over; what you need for a specific project may be somewhere in a Jira epic, Google Drive, or a Confluence page. However, finding it feels like a full-time job, which can harm your team’s productivity.
In Rovo, Atlassian has developed a solution to stitch everything up. Atlassian Rovo allows your teams to collaborate with AI and speed up finding, learning from, and acting on information across your Atlassian and third-party apps.
In this guide, we’ll cover what it is, its benefits, and how to use it to improve your efficiency as you manage projects in the Atlassian ecosystem. Plus, we’ll show you how to boost your efficiency further by combining Rovo with Easy Templates for Jira.
Let’s start on the same page by first understanding what Atlassian Rovo is.
What is Atlassian Rovo?
Rovo is Atlassian’s new AI-powered tool, built to help teams and organizations find, understand, and take action on their data scattered in Atlassian and third-party apps. Atlassian introduced Rovo in Team ‘24 (April 2024) as a tool to help users search through Atlassian and third-party apps without switching from one app to another.
With Rovo, you can:
- Find information across different Atlassian apps (Jira, Confluence, etc.) and third-party apps, such as Slack, without leaving the tool you’re currently using.
- Learn about the data you’re searching for extensively and in context. Rovo understands your company’s data and provides useful AI-driven insights on it.
- Act on your findings with the help of AI agents.
Fast-forward to Team ‘25, Atlassian announced that Rovo has now been segmented into three platform apps: Search, Chat, and Studio. Search and Chat are for finding and understanding your company’s data, respectively. Whereas Studio is for creating AI agents that act when specific conditions are met.
Why Rovo is such a game-changer for Atlassian customers
Rovo is a massive step up in Atlassian’s AI offerings because it uses generative AI to solve a huge challenge organizations face today. Here’s how.
Traditionally, searches in Atlassian are confined to the product you’re currently using. If you’re Jira, you can only search what is in Jira. This is a siloed approach that makes it difficult to work with related data across these apps.
Rovo changes this with a different approach. It integrates data across Jira, Confluence, Compass, and the third-party tools you work with seamlessly. On top of that, it uses AI to understand the intent and context behind what you’re searching for or what you want to do.
How is it able to do this? Its capabilities are built on top of the Teamwork Graph. This is how it understands who’s working on what, with whom, and in what context, across all Atlassian Cloud and third-party tools.
As a result, its responses and actions are always in context because it considers your data across these apps and their relationships. In this way, it doesn’t just break data silos alone, but relationship silos as well.
What is the purpose of Atlassian Rovo?
Companies use several tools to manage work. This leads to their knowledge being dispersed across these tools. Employees use up a lot of time gathering the information they need to work.
McKinsey reports that employees spend about 1.8 hours a day looking for information. That’s more than 9 hours a week, a full working day!
Rovo helps to bring this dispersed knowledge together intelligently. The result? Teams can work faster and smarter.
Key features of Atlassian Rovo
Here are Rovo’s key features to help you understand better how you can utilize this effective tool on Atlassian.
Unified, context-aware search with Rovo Search
Rovo makes searching for information easy for teams working in Jira, Confluence, and Jira Service Management. It understands that any search, for example, a feature update, spans multiple tools.
So when you perform a search, Rovo will look through all these apps, plus connected third-party apps such as Google Drive, provided you’ve granted it permission. Then it will return a response that considers all of these information sources.
Understand data with Rovo Chat
With Rovo Chat, you can access your company’s knowledge and get insights on it by simply having a conversation with Rovo. You can ask it questions, for example, ‘How close are we to achieving our goal of increasing sales by 15% in the next quarter?’.
Rovo will analyse sales data across your apps and give you a realistic projection. That aside, you can ask Rovo Chat to do anything you might ask a person, for instance, reading, reviewing, or creating new content based on what it knows about your data.
In essence, Rovo chat works like your AI-powered assistant that you can interact with using natural language.
AI agents in Rovo Studio
With all the information you have centralized, you can act on it with the help of AI agents built in Rovo Studio. AI agents are virtual teammates that can complete various tasks without your intervention.
Tasks such as:
- Responding to basic customer service questions.
- Helping with onboarding new team members.
- Completing time-consuming tasks such as clearing the Jira backlog.
- And so on.
Let’s say you’ve created a customer service AI agent. An employee can submit an HR ticket in Jira, asking about something like their stock awards. The customer service AI agent will review the question and search through the company policy on stock awards.
Then it will create a response (with links to the policy page) for a human customer service agent to approve and share with the employee.
Rovo has a library of prebuilt, ready-to-use AI agents, but also allows you to create your own custom agents.
Enhanced automation for better efficiency
Rovo supports various automation processes in such as:
- Document summarization: Rovo can read through Confluence pages and generate a summary of the main points for you.
- Smart auto-suggestions: When someone uses Rovo for a specific task, it can suggest the next course of action. Suppose a developer asks Rovo to review a bug ticket. Rovo might say, ‘This issue is similar to a past bug in Project X – do you want to link them?’.
- Query to action: AI agents aside, you can ask Rovo chat to complete specific actions for you, for example, closing a completed Jira issue or creating a new one.
Let’s say you asked it to review a bug issue. You can follow this up by asking it to create a new issue and assign it to someone else.
However, when it comes to creating Jira issues automatically using Rovo Chat or even AI agents, you can run into several problems. Let’s go over them.
Common challenges of creating Jira issues automatically with Atlassian Rovo
Rovo agents and Chat are powerful for automating tasks such as creating Jira issues. But you could run into several practical challenges when Rovo automatically creates issues for you.
These include:
- Generic Jira issues. Different projects use different types of issue formats. They usually have different fields, workflows, and custom screens. If you simply ask Rovo to create an issue, it will create a generic issue.
This generic issue could have a different format from the one you’re using for that specific project. It could be missing the required fields, have an inaccurate description, or be assigned an incorrect label.
This adds more work downstream of locating the issue and restructuring it.
- Misinterpretation due to a vague prompt. One of the best things about Rovo is that you use natural language. Although Rovo can interpret context pretty well, vaguely telling it to create an issue could cause it to create an out-of-context issue.
For example, ‘Create a bug report’ could mean different things depending on the context.
- Duplicated issues. Suppose you already have an ‘Employee Onboarding’ issue. If Rovo interprets that the next course of action is to create a similar issue, it will create a new one. This leads to duplicated issues that clutter your Jira board.
Ultimately, you could end up with unclear, unstructured, and inconsistent Jira tickets. To solve this, you might need to get really specific and write paragraphs of prompts to try and cover everything.
But this is just more work that could eat into your productivity. Luckily, you’ll be glad to know that you can bring more structure to Jira issues created automatically with the help of the app, Easy Templates for Jira.
Bring consistency to automated issues with Easy Templates for Jira
To make your Rovo-generated Jira issues structured, accurate, and consistent, you can pair Rovo up with Easy Templates for Jira. This is a Jira app that enables you to save recurring issues as templates and reuse them to create new, similar issues.
With this app, you can create templates for all types of issues, including epics, stories, tasks, and even sub-tasks. If you have a complex epic with tons of stories, tasks, and sub-tasks, you can save this epic as it is. Then recreate it as a new Jira issue from it while retaining its complex structure.
Needless to say, this saves you a lot of time as you don’t have to create a new epic and define this hierarchy one issue after another.
How else do you benefit from Easy Templates? Here’s how:
- Better productivity. You’ll save the time and effort you would otherwise spend creating new issues and use this time to do more impactful work.
- Improved consistency. You’ll set a structured format for issues created with Rovo to follow. This ensures Rovo creates issues that are consistent with other issues in the current project.
- Less risk of errors. Given that all the critical details are pre-defined in the issue template, there is less risk of errors.
- Personalized issues with dynamic variables. Easy Templates enables you to use dynamic variables in your issue templates. With dynamic variables, you can add context-specific data to the template automatically.
You can create and manage your issue templates on an easy-to-use editor. And if you get stuck, our support team will be there to help you all the way.
Now that you know what Atlassian Rovo is and how to bring structure to automated issues with Easy Templates, let’s get practical and see how this works.
How to get started using Atlassian Rovo
Atlassian has different rollout plans for the different paid plans. First, if you have a Premium or Enterprise Cloud subscription for Jira, Confluence, Jira Service Management, etc., you will receive Rovo between April 14 and July 2025. If you have any of these paid plans, you only need to ensure AI is activated in these apps, and you’ll be able to use Rovo.
For Standard plans, however, Atlassian has two rollout phases:
- Phase 1 (mid-2025): You’ll access some AI features in your Standard Cloud plan. Atlassian will notify you via email once this happens. Any apps on Standard, Premium, or Enterprise plans added to your organization will have AI enabled by default once AI is activated.
- Phase 2: (August – October 2025): This is when you’ll access Rovo itself. You’ll receive an email notification informing you that Rovo is available in the Atlassian apps you use. This will include access to more AI features.
Organization admins can manage AI preferences from Settings > AI-enabled apps in Atlassian Administration.
What if you’re on a Standard or Free plan?
Keep in mind that Rovo has features that use AI and those that don’t. If you’re in any of these plans, you’ll be able to use the non-AI features of Rovo, including:
- Search – You can still use Rovo Search to search through and aggregate results from Atlassian and third-party connected apps. Although natural language prompts won’t serve you well here.
- Rovo Agents – You’ll be able to build rule-based agents in the automation section of your project’s settings.
NOTE: If you don’t want to use Rovo in any of your apps, you can simply deactivate AI in the app.
Connect your third-party apps
If you’re working with third-party apps such as Google Drive, you’ll need to connect them. Rovo has connectors for these apps, each of which has a different procedure for connecting to Rovo. Let’s look at an example with Google Drive.
To connect Google Drive, you’ll need to:
- Go to Atlassian Admin > Settings > Rovo > Add Connector and select Google Drive.
- Copy the Client ID here and paste it under Manage Domain Wide Delegation in your Google Admin Console.
- You’ll need to do the same for your OAuth scope URL, and once done, select Authorize in your Google Admin Console and Confirm in your Atlassian Admin.
Atlassian Admin has extensive docs that walk you through how to connect other third-party apps. Be sure to check them out.
Use Rovo in Atlassian
You can access Rovo from Atlassian Home in the left side menu or on the top right in Jira and Confluence. If you want to use Rovo Search, you can access it from Atlassian Home. This will be where you can search for everything in one place.
Rovo Chat is available in your Atlassian apps on the top right corner, next to Notifications. You can click on it and have a conversation with it concerning various aspects of your work (like we’ve covered earlier).
Once you click on it, a pop-up will appear on the right allowing you to do this. You’ll also see an Agents tab here where you can access pre-built agents (like the Global Translator) or the custom agents you build yourself.
Final thoughts
Rovo transforms the way teams in Atlassian collaborate with AI in this platform. You can either use Rovo as an assistant to help you find information and learn about your data. Or as a teammate (AI agents) to help you get repetitive work done hands-free.
Rovo can help you do all sorts of things in Atlassian, including creating Jira issues automatically. However, in doing so, your AI-generated issues could be generic or unstructured.
