The ultimate guide to your Confluence AI copilot in 2025

Let’s be honest, finding the right answer in your company’s shared drive can feel like a full-time job. Your team’s best knowledge is scattered everywhere. Confluence is probably a big hub for your important docs, project plans, and all that hard-earned institutional wisdom, but getting that information into the right hands at the right moment is a whole other battle.

This is where the idea of a "Confluence AI copilot" pops up. It promises to act as a smart assistant, digging through all that content for you. But what does that really mean?

This guide will walk you through what a Confluence AI copilot is (and isn’t), look at the different ways to get one, and explore a more powerful, integrated alternative that might just be what you’ve been searching for.

What is a Confluence AI copilot?

The term "Confluence AI copilot" gets thrown around a lot, and frankly, it can be confusing because it usually refers to two completely different things. Let’s clear that up right now.

1. The Built-In AI: This is the artificial intelligence that Atlassian has built directly into Confluence, now called Atlassian Intelligence and Rovo. Its job is to help you create, summarize, and find content while you’re already working inside a Confluence page.

2. The External Connector: This is when you use a third-party tool, like Microsoft Copilot, and connect it to your Confluence account. This lets you ask questions and pull information from Confluence while you’re working in other apps, like Microsoft Teams or a chatbot.

Both of these aim to make your Confluence knowledge easier to use, but they work in very different ways and come with their own unique benefits and some pretty major drawbacks. Let’s dig in.

The native approach: Atlassian Intelligence

Atlassian Intelligence (and its next evolution, Rovo) is Confluence’s very own AI assistant. The best way to think about it is as a helper that lives right inside your Confluence pages. It’s designed to make life easier for the people on your team who are actively writing and managing content.

What can Atlassian Intelligence do?

The main purpose of Atlassian Intelligence is to give a hand to users who are already logged into and working within Confluence. It’s pretty handy for a few things:

• Beating writer’s block: It can help you draft a new page from scratch, fill out a project plan template, or just get some words on the page when you’re staring at a blank screen.

• Giving you the short version: When you’re faced with a monster of a project doc or a long thread of meeting notes, the AI can whip up a quick summary so you get the gist without having to read every single line.

• Handling repetitive tasks: It helps automate some of the little, repetitive things you might do over and over again inside your Confluence workflows.

• A friendlier search: It gives you a more conversational way to find information that’s tucked away in your various Confluence spaces.

For instance, a project manager could ask it to summarize a dense project plan for an executive who just wants the highlights. Or a new team member could ask it, "Where can I find our company’s remote work policy?" and get an answer pulled from the right page.

Pricing: How much does Atlassian Intelligence cost?

Atlassian doesn’t sell its AI features as a separate add-on. Instead, it’s bundled into the Confluence Cloud plans, usually with a credit system that limits how much you can use it. Here’s a quick look at the plans:

Plan	Price (per user/month)	AI Features Included
Free	$0 (up to 10 users)	No Atlassian Intelligence features.
Standard	$6.05	No Atlassian Intelligence features.
Premium	$11.55	Atlassian Intelligence features included.
Enterprise	Billed annually	Atlassian Intelligence features included.

Source: Atlassian Confluence Pricing

The problem with a native-only approach

While it’s a nice tool for content creators, Atlassian Intelligence hits a massive wall pretty quickly: your company’s knowledge doesn’t all live in Confluence.

• It only sees part of the picture: The AI is great at searching Confluence, but it’s completely blind to what’s happening in your Zendesk support tickets, your team’s Slack channels, or the marketing plans sitting in Google Docs. It’s like having a brilliant librarian who’s only allowed to read books from one shelf. The answers it gives are incomplete because it’s missing critical context from other tools.

• It’s not for your customers: This tool was built for your internal team. You can’t use it to power a customer-facing support bot in your helpdesk or answer questions on your public website. It’s strictly an internal affair.

• It can’t take action: Atlassian Intelligence is a passive tool. It can’t actually do anything in your other systems. It can’t escalate a support ticket, check a customer’s order status in Shopify, or create a Jira ticket based on a customer complaint it finds in a document. It can find information, but that’s where its job ends.

The connector approach: Using an external AI copilot

The second option is to use a connector that pulls all your Confluence data into a different AI tool, like Microsoft 365. This allows your team to ask questions about stuff in Confluence without having to leave the apps they’re already working in all day.

How do external connectors work?

Basically, you set up a special connector that reads, copies, and indexes all the content from your Confluence instance (both Cloud and On-premise versions are supported). This creates a searchable replica of your Confluence knowledge that an external AI tool, like Microsoft Copilot, can then access.

Once it’s running, a team member could be in Microsoft Teams and ask a question. The copilot searches everything it knows, which now includes all your Confluence data, and spits out an answer, usually with a handy link back to the original page. Microsoft provides connectors for both Confluence Cloud and On-premise setups.

Why use an external AI copilot?

The main advantage here is that it cuts down on context switching. Your team can stay focused instead of constantly hopping between browser tabs to find what they need.

• An IT support agent could find a troubleshooting guide from Confluence without leaving their Microsoft Teams chat.

• A sales manager could ask for the latest project updates (stored in Confluence) right from their Outlook inbox.

• An engineer could pull up key design documents from Confluence while they’re reviewing code.

This video demonstrates how you can set up the connection between Confluence and Microsoft 365 Copilot.

The hidden headaches of external connectors

While it sounds like a good idea on the surface, this approach has its own set of problems that can make it a real headache to manage.

• Setup is a pain: This is not a simple "click-and-it-works" solution. Setting up these connectors usually requires admin access to both Confluence and your other system. You’ll probably have to deal with things like OAuth authentication or API keys. If you’re using an on-premise version of Confluence, you might even have to install and manage a separate piece of software. It’s definitely not a self-serve process.

• Painfully slow sync times: This is a big one. New content might get synced every 15 minutes or so, but changes to user permissions can take up to 24 hours to update. This is a huge security risk. It means a former employee might still have access to sensitive documents, or a new team member might be blocked from seeing something they need to do their job.

• It’s still just a search tool: Just like the native AI, these connectors are really just for search and summary. They can find information for you, but they can’t do anything with it. They can’t automate workflows, triage requests, or perform any real actions.

• You’re paying twice: With this model, you’re paying for two separate, expensive systems. You’re paying your Confluence subscription fees, and then you’re also paying a hefty per-user license for the external copilot, which can add up fast.

The unified approach: From a simple copilot to a true AI agent

So, if the built-in AI is stuck in its own silo and the external connectors are complicated and limited, what’s the answer? The modern solution is to move beyond a simple search copilot and build a true AI agent, one that can access all your company knowledge and actually take action on it. This is exactly what platforms like eesel AI are built for.

Why unifying knowledge is key

To get truly helpful AI assistance, the AI needs a complete view of your company’s brain. A copilot that only searches one source from inside another app is like asking for directions from someone who’s only allowed to look at one page of the map.

A real AI agent, however, can connect the dots between all your knowledge sources to take smart, independent action. It needs access to your Confluence docs, your helpdesk history, your Slack conversations, and your Google Docs to understand the full context and deliver real help.

How eesel AI builds a powerful AI agent

eesel AI was designed from the ground up to solve the problems that both native and connector-based copilots create. It does this by unifying your scattered knowledge and turning it into action.

• Go live in minutes, not months: Forget about complicated setups and waiting weeks for your IT department. With eesel AI’s one-click integrations, you can connect Confluence, Zendesk, Slack, and other tools in a completely self-serve dashboard. You can have a working AI agent in just a few minutes, no sales call required.

The eesel AI dashboard showing one-click integrations with tools like Confluence, Zendesk, and Slack.::

• Bring all your knowledge together: The eesel AI Confluence integration is just the beginning. It seamlessly blends that knowledge with information from your helpdesk tickets, macros, Google Docs, and dozens of other sources. This creates one single, reliable source of truth for your AI to learn from.

• You’re in complete control: Unlike a simple search copilot, an eesel AI agent is fully customizable. You can use a simple prompt editor to shape its personality and tone of voice. Most importantly, you can define the real actions it can take, like escalating tickets to the right team, applying tags, or even looking up order information using API calls.

The eesel AI platform's interface for customizing the AI agent's behavior and defining actions.::

• Test it out with zero risk: Before you let your AI agent talk to live customers, eesel AI’s simulation mode lets you test it on thousands of your past support tickets. You can see exactly how it would have responded, get accurate forecasts on how many issues it will solve, and find any gaps in your knowledge base. It’s a risk-free way to launch with confidence, something you just can’t do with a standard copilot.

A risk-free simulation mode in eesel AI to test the Confluence AI copilot agent on past support tickets.::

Putting it all together: Choosing your AI copilot strategy

To make things simple, here’s a quick guide to help you figure out the right path based on what you actually need to do.

If you need to…	Your best option is…	But be aware of…
Write and summarize content while you’re inside Confluence.	Native Atlassian Intelligence	It can’t see any of your knowledge outside of Confluence.
Search your Confluence docs from inside your Microsoft 365 apps.	An external connector (like Microsoft Copilot)	The complicated setup, slow sync times, and high per-user costs.
Automate support, answer questions, and take real action using knowledge from Confluence and all your other tools.	A unified AI platform like eesel AI	It’s built to take action, not just find documents.

What’s next for your Confluence AI copilot?

A basic Confluence AI copilot is a decent first step if you’re just trying to make your knowledge a bit easier to find. But the real change happens when you stop thinking about it as a search tool and start building a true AI agent, one that can learn from all your scattered knowledge to automate entire workflows.

Ready to go beyond a search-only Confluence AI copilot?

Your Confluence knowledge base is a goldmine. It’s time to stop just searching it and start putting it to work. Turn it into a powerful, 24/7 AI agent that resolves support tickets, assists your team, and actually helps your customers.

Start your free trial with eesel AI and see for yourself how quickly you can unify your knowledge and automate your support.