Australian businesses will be invited to create their own generative artificial intelligence chatbots in a development that could stop employees sharing sensitive information online, Atlassian has revealed.
The Australian tech unicorn announced plans to share its latest AI tools on Thursday, including features to search databases and allow companies to create “agents” capable of performing basic tasks.
The tools will arrive just five months after Atlassian launched its first suite of AI technology for businesses and amid predictions more Australians will adopt AI assistants in 2024.
Atlassian AI head Sherif Mansour said the company’s latest service Rovo was designed to help employees find information hidden in internal documents and third-party apps.
Businesses would also be able to create their own AI chatbots or “agents” to suggest ways to use the information, which Mr Mansour said could stop employees sharing sensitive business information with open AI platforms.
“A few customers said ‘we blocked (employees) from ChatGPT but they still install it on their phones and they copy and past company information’ so this is the challenge they have with this stuff,” he said.
“They’re taking something internal and asking AI to do something for them but because it doesn’t have the knowledge, they’ll also give it another document from inside the company.”
Mr Mansour said AI tools were becoming increasingly valuable to businesses, with more than 30,000 firms trying its first services since December and reporting they were saving time on mundane tasks.
“We survey all of our cloud users who use AI on a regular basis and 80 per cent have come back and said it saves them more than 45 minutes a week,” he said.
“That’s one less meeting which, in an enterprise workforce of 5000 people, is actually a lot of savings.”
The news comes just one day after Google released its AI assistant Gemini in more than 100 countries including Australia and after research conducted for the tech giant by Ipsos found nine out of 10 Aussies expected AI to transform jobs and industries in the next five years.
The survey of of 1000 people also found more Australians expected AI’s impact to be positive (42 per cent) than negative (22 per cent).
CSIRO AI expert Judy Slatyer also predicted 2024 would be the year many people tried artificially intelligent software for the first time and said more than one in two were already using AI every day.
“By end of 2024 many of us will have an AI-enabled assistant,” she said.