Trello’s New AI Features for Better Task Management – Atlassian Team ’25 NA

This is Textron tv. We are back at Atlassian, team 25 in Anaheim, California. I'm John Swartz.

Uh, with me is Agora Cat, who's the head of product at Trello. That is an interesting history of Trello. Atlassian bot Trello.

Seven years ago you joined Atlassian four years ago. Mm-hmm. And I'm trying to reconcile how Trello and Jira coexist, or do they compete?

Maybe you can tell me. Excellent question, John. So I I really love that you started the discussion there and let's, for our, uh, viewers here, let's give them a little bit of background.

That Trello was started almost kind of 14, 15 years ago. And, and it grew like wildfire. I mean, people in over 150 countries use Trello.

It's the most downloaded, one of the most downloaded apps on Android Play Store and Apple, uh, iOS store. So it's, it's a very, very popular app all over the world. Tens of millions of users.

And when Atlassian acquired it, I mean there was a little bit of kind of complexity in this situation that Trello is a project management tool for lightweight projects. And then Jira is a much more sophisticated project management tool that can scale for larger teams and can scale for an entire company. So we had kind of two in a box for a while, and last time when Techron interviewed me some time ago, uh, I couldn't tell you at that point, but now the secret is out.

So we have found, uh, a new place for Trello. So just like 15 years ago, Trello created a completely new category. We are in the process of creating a completely new category now, which is around AI to-do list or AI task management.

Now we are living in a world where we have many, many applications. I'm guessing that in your work and in my work, Uh, yeah, just a quick aside. Yeah.

Um, Trello is an indispensable tool in terms of organizing our editorial content, especially on the video side. Absolutely. And people use Trello for all kinds of use cases from simplest to the most complex.

But over time, we had made the product more complex to serve these more complex use cases and try to become like a full-fledged complex project management tool. But now we are going back to our roots and really focusing on the simplicity of the experience and thinking about why do people come to Trello in the first place. It's because it's easy to use.

I can download it on my phone and get started and edit. It's simple as type something, say something, check a box, and simple as that. And it's also very visual, like that's the other thing.

Mm-hmm. And people can personalize it to their personality, their taste. I mean, Trello has board background, card cover, images, all kinds of stickers, all the amazing things that are so special about Trello.

So for this new era of Trello, and, and here's the secret that that is now out and I can talk about it is less than 48 hours ago. So this is really hot off the, uh, oven. We have unveiled a new Trello, and then within the last, uh, 48 hours, we have had over half a million people sign up for it, where they are experiencing a new Trello, which is an AI powered to-do list.

And I'm just kind of simplifying it. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about Yeah.

Uh, maybe define what the AI Absolutely. To-do list, like gimme like a list of maybe tasks I might organize through Trello. That's A very interesting concept.

If you think about it. We want AI to do the work for us, but actually work comes at us from all different places. So you have email and Slack and Microsoft teams.

We probably have a CRM system workday, and like a plethora of different tools and everything is sending you work. How do you keep track of it? I mean, maybe you write down on a piece of paper, like not very practical, and then you forget.

In fact, uh, we have seen that, uh, majority of users often struggle with multitasking, induc induced forgetfulness. Like they're like, somebody slacked me or send me a notification or walked by me in the hallway or said something in a Zoom meeting and I don't remember exactly what it was. And then they come back to you and say, did you do, did you follow?

Did you do that? Like, do what? Yeah.

Do what? Where, where? Yeah.

What did you tell, when did you tell me this? So, our goal here is to really make user keep track of all their to-dos and let the AI do a lot of the hard work in organizing things. So for example, let's say you get an email with a bunch of information, do this, do that and do it by this date.

If you forward that email to Trello, Trello, AI will automatically pass that email, summarize it, tell you exactly the action item. If it has multiple action items, rake it into a checklist, assign a date and put it on your Trello card. And not only that, you can see that Trello card on your phone as a widget on Android or iOS, so you know exactly what you need to do.

It's nicely summarized with, with the date information on it. Same thing for Microsoft Teams or Slack or any other tool you're using. And, and we have also have voice support.

So if you're walking and you speak to your Apple Watch, you can add a reminder or an action item to, to your to-do list. So the idea is pretty simple that all your action items and to-dos that are in all the different tools, including in Jira and other places, you can centralize it in a single to-do list. And once you have it in one place, the next opportunity is how can you help the user actually do the work?

I mean, it's one thing to make a list of 50 things to do, but how do you find the time to do the 50 things that are on your to-do list? So what we have done is we have created a planner or a calendar experience within Trello, which thinks with the Google calendar or the Microsoft, uh, outlook calendar, so that the user does not have to maintain multiple calendars. And you can drag and drop things just like you do on, on the regular Trello experience.

You drag and drop items to your calendar. So you could say, I have these 10 things to do. I'm gonna do these three this afternoon, the next four tomorrow morning, and the remaining on Friday afternoon.

You just simple drag and drop. It's right there on your calendar. And that way you can live your life in an organized way.

So I like, I'm visualizing this what I have, for instance, they had like 10, 10 things I had to do. Right. And I could, I maintain that 10 list checklist, and as I do each task, it will tell me, you finish this one, you finish this one, there's like eight more to go.

Absolutely. Okay. Absolutely.

So you can check them off. And a lot of users have very interesting kind of workflows. So sometimes people just work from a single list.

Other people are much more organized. They'll organize their work to say that this is high priority. I want to do it within this week.

This is a life goal. I want to do it sometime this year. Yes.

So they have kind of different ways of organizing the work because not everything is urgent that needs to be done today. So we, we give the ability or the flexibility, and this is the special thing about Trello, to help people organize all their work in the format that makes most sense to them and personalize it so that it's very intuitive for them. Uh, and as I said earlier, because it's available on the phone, it's available on the go.

Yeah. I wonder if in a, in a sense, through Trello and other tools or apps, a a person can use AI to better organize their lives. Yep.

Right? Not just with work. Yep.

But with paying bills or appointments or remembering anniversaries, I mean anything. Yep. And it makes not only would AI make us more efficient, but it would make us, uh, think more clearly.

'cause I I do, you're totally right. Spot on. Mm-hmm.

We are just overwhelmed. Yep. There's just too much information.

Now I, I've read some statistic where there was more information now available than ever before Absolutely. In history of mankind at our disposal. Absolutely.

And I think this fits into that. Yeah. Managing what is just, I I just don't even know where to start sometimes.

Like I'm trying to work on things long term and short term and I Yeah, absolutely. And I don't know when to use the time to do achieve both. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. I mean, our goal is that in this world of human and AI interaction to really help the human be more productive with the help of ai because there's never going to be dearth of information and data and there's never going to be dearth of things to do.

There's always going to be a list of things to do, but can we help the user really prioritize, keep track of the most important things so that you're not wasting your time doing things that don't matter. Yeah. You're actually prioritizing and doing things that do matter.

And, and that is the ultimate goal for us to collect all the bits and pieces of information, make sense out of it, help the user prioritize what needs to be done, and ignore the rest, ignore the noise. Like find that focus. So there's like a clear delineation between Jira, JIRA and um, Trello.

Absolutely. So thank you for, uh, explaining that in these new, uh, enhancements Yeah. Product features, which sound incredibly cool and very productive.

And you said half a million people have Already signed up. Is that A record number of people to sign up for a, In less than 48 hours. Wow.

Yeah. Yeah. That's amazing.

And um, hey, thank you so much for being on. Absolutely. Appreciate it ly.

Absolutely. Um, so this is the great stuff, great content you're getting from Atlassian, team 25. And we're gonna have more coming for you very soon.

So thanks for joining us. Thanks, John. Thanks.

Yeah.