In its recent earnings release, Australian B2B software company Atlassian (TEAM +5.81%) announced it was acquiring chatbot service Percept.AI. In this video clip from "The AI/ML Show," recorded on Feb. 2, Fool contributor Jason Hall discusses the strategy behind the acquisition, and what it means for Atlassian's customers.
Jason Hall: Anyway, getting back to the point of Percept.AI, the idea here is, we saw on the Forrester, it looks a lot like the Gartner Magic Quadrant says the same thing. Forrester puts them very high in strategy and very high in the product itself. I think this is a case of Atlassian making sure they're maintaining their edge. Jira Service Management was something that they only launched a little over a year ago. It's a very new product. They have about a quarter million customers and less than 40,000 at the time of the report use their service management tool. So I think they see it as a big opportunity. This is another thing I wanted to share right here. This is from their shareholder letter, and it talks about why this is an important strategy.
This is from their CEO says: "Three years ago, we declared our intention to double down on IT teams. Since then we've delivered a steady stream of innovation and, powered by our platform, launched Jira Service Management last fiscal year. Its unique blend of IT service management capabilities is helping customers deliver great employee and customer support quickly -- critical capability in today's digital first remote friendly world." They go on to talk a little bit more about where they are and Percept.AI. There's two things that it's going to do. Obviously the big one is the automation. The ability to make this as a tool, to take labor off the service desk. Put that labor where you have somebody that has tools and expertise, you can leverage them more effectively. There's a cost benefit to companies, too, because you don't want to pay somebody $85,000 a year plus the burden labor to tell people to restart their machine, or to reset their password or send them a link to where they could do those things themselves when you can have a chatbot doing those things. I think that's really at the core right there, is they're hearing from their customers that this is something that they need to improve.
