Atlassian Rides the Knowledge Graph Boom

The rise of AI agents that automate coding projects and other white-collar tasks has prompted software firms such as Atlassian to offer so-called knowledge graphs or graph databases, which help the AI analyze the relationships between different types of data inside an organization.

Software firms typically promote these new data management tools because they can help them make money from storing the information the AI requires to do its job. Firms like Microsoft have even put up some walls around their customers’ data so competing software firms won’t be able to access it, my colleague Kevin reported earlier this year.

Graph databases, also referred to as knowledge graphs, differ from other data management platforms like those offered by Databricks and Snowflake, which mostly organize huge amounts of data into columns and rows. While both types of databases clean up troves of data so AI can analyze it and spot trends in customer spending during a given quarter, for example, proponents of graph databases say they require the AI to do less processing, which can save on costs.