Cannon-Brookes: Knowledge businesses are process networks, not static databases
Mike Cannon-Brookes · Atlassian CEO on the SaaS Apocalypse, AI Agents & What Comes Next · Mar 6, 2026 · at 14:24
Mike Cannon-Brookes, co-founder and co-CEO of Atlassian, pushes back against classifying enterprise software purely as systems of record during a discussion on AI enterprise architecture.
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“To me, businesses are a set of processes. They're not a system of record. Like, these are all process-based systems, right? Everything Alex has just said is totally true, but there are processes like reference checking or other things, and your ability to coordinate a set of processes to happen As cheaply and efficiently and quickly as possible is actually in a knowledge business, not an industrial era business, but a knowledge era business, your entire business, right?”
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