The tech giant’s Australian CPO is taking on a dual function, bringing AI enablement into her portfolio and signalling the “third wave” of the profession: the rise of the HR technologist.
The era of HR sitting on the AI sidelines is over. Avani Prabhakar CPHR’s recent appointment to Head of AI Enablement at Atlassian – while still retaining her Chief People Officer role – shows that organisations are now clear on the important people-related implications and opportunities that this technology is introducing into organisations.
Her journey, shared at the AFR Workforce Summit in Sydney last week, offers a roadmap for HR practitioners navigating what she calls the “third wave” of the profession: the rise of the HR technologist.
Why HR practitioners need to lead the AI journey
Atlassian’s journey into its next phase of AI enablement began 24 months ago as a shared goal across the CTO, CIO, CISO and Chief People Officer. Prabhakar says that the natural progression of HR into AI leadership is essential because technical transformation and cultural transformation are inseparable.
When technology and HR teams operate in separate silos on AI integration, critical pieces of the puzzle are missed, she said.
“You can deploy a huge amount of AI tools that will enhance individual productivity, but no one is really looking at team productivity end to end,” she said.
“[They’re] not embedding it into the workflows. Or when [they] are bolting AI tools on top of workflows, [they’re] not really looking at the implication it’s having in terms of what upskilling is required, what change of work structure, what ways of working need to change. That holistic view only happens when you look at [AI] collectively. “
Today, alongside her CPO responsibilities, her mandate is to drive internal AI transformation. This entails oversight of internal IT teams, internal customer engineering, the data the organisation – including data scientists and researchers – and strategic initiatives across the CTO.
Becoming the “HR technologist”
Prabhakar, who is not an engineer by trade, attributes her ability to lead this technical shift to a career grounded in business partnering craft.
She advocates for a triangle framework, which she believes every HR professional should follow to sharpen their commercial acumen:
- Product and services: HR needs to go to the “end level of detail to really understand the product” and the roadmap, she said.
- The customer: Investing time to understand and know the customers well.
- The P&L: Moving beyond employment costs to understand the P&L like a CFO, knowing how capability pivots drive operating margins.
“I feel like the third wave of our role is really being the HR technologist at the forefront,” she said. “I’m seeing this move faster than I’ve seen before.”
For HR practitioners overwhelmed by this prospect, Prabhakar suggests starting by grounding the organisation in a “responsible AI tech framework”. At Atlassian, this involves clearly categorising workflows into three buckets:
- AI-assisted: Tasks where technology supports the human.
- Human in the loop: Workflows that require active human intervention.
- No AI: Areas where the technology has no role at all.
Sign up for AHRI’s ‘Embedding responsible AI: workforce planning and culture‘ course.
Innovation over efficiency
To move away from a “fear-based approach” to the future, Prabhakar suggests that HR set clear guardrails for leadership communication.
For example, Prabhakar said leadership must not anchor AI transformation solely on efficiency – a word she advises against using in relation to AI. Instead, the organisation’s mantra should be grounded in innovation to build genuine trust, she added.
Building this trust requires a high degree of leadership vulnerability. Prabhakar argues that in a field with so many unknowns, leaders must have the “humility to stand up on the stage and say, ‘I don’t know'”. By creating a safe environment for experimentation and faster learning loops, HR can shift the internal narrative from job displacement to collective discovery.
The results of this cultural shift are most evident in how non-technical teams at Atlassian have embraced the technology. During ShipIt, the company’s internal hackathon, the People team emerged as the second-largest participant group, followed closely by Finance and Legal.
Prabhakar says this represents a “massive shift” in organisational behaviour. It proves that when AI is framed through the lens of innovation rather than efficiency, employees from every function move beyond fear and into the role of active, creative contributors.
“You can deploy a huge amount of AI tools that will enhance individual productivity, but no one is really looking at team productivity end to end.” – Avani Prabhakar
It is, however, worth noting that Atlassian did recently make 1,600 jobs across the globe redundant due to AI-related advancements wihin the business.
How Atlassian measures the impact of AI
Atlassian has moved beyond simple adoption metrics to measure the true impact of AI across its organisation.
Prabhakar outlined a four-stage maturity ladder designed to track how employees integrate technology into their specific roles:
- Level 1: Simple AI user: Asking basic questions on an ad-hoc basis to perform existing tasks more efficiently.
- Level 2: AI as a personal assistant: Leveraging AI to prioritise a body of work and optimise schedules or meetings.
- Level 3: Strategic AI user: Utilising advanced functions, such as deep research, to build out comprehensive work products like market reports.
- Level 4: Strategic AI collaborator: Building and testing hypotheses by adjusting variables within an AI tool to solve complex business problems.
“The magic starts to happen when you move to the fourth stage,” said Prabhakar.
Atlassian now specifically tracks the number of “strategic AI collaborators” within the business. To qualify for this level, an employee must use the most advanced features relevant to their role at least 40 times in a single week to solve a particular business workflow.
The impact of this progression is significant. Prabhakar noted that for a market researcher reaching the collaborator level, the output was 4X higher than those staying in the first two stages.
This is where the focus shifts from individual gains to team productivity, as AI becomes embedded into cross-functional business workflows rather than remaining a siloed upskilling tool.
Advice for HR practitioners
For HR practitioners whose companies don’t yet see AI as a people-related initiative, Prabhakar offers three tangible pieces of advice to help make the shift:
- Own the employee lifecycle: “Employee lifecycle is one use case… which cuts across everyone in the organisation and that squarely sits within your domain. Look at how you can embed AI across the whole employee lifecycle.”
In her view, no one has yet mastered this yet. This is HR’s opportunity to do so. - Drive a bottom-up approach: If there is no top-down mandate, partner closely with the CIO and tech teams “in the weeds” to embed AI. By doing this, she says HR can create an organic, consensus-driven transition that feels like a natural progression rather than a forced mandate.
3. Invest in literacy: “Invest time in working on your own AI literacy, because that gives you more confidence.”
Ultimately, the goal of AI enablement at Atlassian is to shift the cognitive load of the workforce. While mundane tasks such as making presentations or giving regular updates are being automated, employees are finding more time for the “creativity side of their work”.
For the HR technologist, the challenge – and the opportunity – is to lead the organisation through this shift, ensuring that teams remain focused on solving complex business problems while navigating what Prabhakar calls the most “fascinating and exciting” evolution in modern history.
