How to enable Confluence AI: A step-by-step guide

Let’s be honest, Confluence can sometimes feel like a digital attic. It’s where all the good stuff is stored, your team’s best ideas and most important documents, but over time it gets cluttered. Finding exactly what you need can turn into a frustrating scavenger hunt, and keeping everything up-to-date feels like a never-ending task.

Atlassian Intelligence, the AI built right into Confluence, is meant to help with that. The idea is to have a smart assistant that can help you draft new pages, summarize long documents, and tweak your writing on the fly. It sounds great, right?

But first, you have to turn it on. In this guide, we’ll walk you through exactly how to enable Confluence AI. We’ll cover the permissions you need and the buttons you have to click, so you can get your team using it without any headaches.

What you’ll need before you start

Before we jump into the "how-to" part, let’s quickly get our ducks in a row. Taking a minute to check these things now will save you from hitting a wall later and wondering why a certain setting isn’t showing up.

• The right Confluence plan: Atlassian Intelligence is available on the Confluence Cloud Standard, Premium, and Enterprise plans. If your team is on the Free plan, you’ll need to upgrade before you can access any of the AI features.

• The right permissions: This one is the most common trip-up. To activate Atlassian Intelligence, you absolutely must be an Organization Admin. Not a Space Admin, not a Product Admin, but the top-tier Org Admin for your entire Atlassian site. If you’re not, you won’t even see the option in the settings, which can be pretty confusing.

• A clear goal: It’s worth taking a moment to think about why you’re turning this on. What problem are you trying to solve? Maybe your marketing team is spending too much time writing first drafts, or your internal support folks need a faster way to find answers. Having a goal in mind helps you figure out if the tool is actually working for you down the line.

Prerequisite	Requirement	Why it’s important
Confluence Plan	Standard, Premium, or Enterprise	AI features are not available on the Free plan.
User Permissions	Organization Admin	Only Org Admins can see and access the Atlassian Intelligence settings.
Clear Goal	A specific problem to solve	Helps measure the success and ROI of using the AI features.

How to enable Confluence AI in 5 simple steps

Okay, once you’ve confirmed you have the right plan and the keys to the kingdom (aka Org Admin rights), actually flipping the switch on Atlassian Intelligence is pretty simple. Here’s how you do it.

Step 1: Navigate to Atlassian administration

First things first, you need to get to your organization’s main control panel. The easiest way is to log in directly at "admin.atlassian.com". Think of this as the mission control for all your Atlassian products, from user management to billing.

Step 2: Find the AI settings

Once you’re in the admin panel, you’ll see a navigation menu on the left-hand side of your screen. It can be a little busy, but you’re looking for a section called Settings. Under that, you should see an option for Atlassian Intelligence. Click that, and you’re in the right place.

Step 3: Select apps to activate

You’re now on the main page for managing Atlassian Intelligence. You’ll see a prominent button that says Select products to activate. Go ahead and click it. A list will pop up showing all of your Atlassian products that can use AI. Find Confluence in that list and tick the little checkbox next to it.

Step 4: Review and confirm your selection

After you’ve selected Confluence (and maybe other tools like Jira, if you want), click the Next button. A final confirmation screen will appear, just to make sure you’ve selected the right products. Give it a quick once-over and then hit Activate. That’s the magic button. Atlassian Intelligence is now officially active for your Confluence site.

Step 5: Start using AI in Confluence

And that’s it! You’ve done it. AI is now enabled, and your team can start using it right away. To try it out, just open any Confluence page. You can either type "/ai" on a new line to see a menu of commands or highlight some existing text to get options like "summarize" or "change tone."

This video demonstrates how to use the new features in Confluence and other Atlassian products once you enable Confluence AI.

Common mistakes and tips for success

Getting the feature turned on is just the first step. To make sure it’s actually useful for your team, here are a few tips to help you avoid some common bumps in the road.

• Can’t find the settings? It’s probably your admin level. Seriously, this is the number one issue. If you’ve logged into the admin panel and you just can’t find the "Atlassian Intelligence" option, it’s almost certainly because you’re not an Organization Admin. Your best bet is to find out who manages your company’s Atlassian account and ask them for help.

• Start with a small pilot team. Instead of sending out a big company-wide announcement, maybe roll out the AI features to a single team first. Pick a group that’s generally open to new tech, let them play around with it for a week or two, and then ask for their honest feedback. This gives you a chance to figure out what’s useful and what’s not before everyone jumps in.

• Be clear about its limitations. Confluence AI is a neat tool, but it’s not a mind reader. It generates its answers based on the information it can see within your Confluence site and any connected Jira projects. It has no idea what’s happening in other tools. For example, it can’t tell you the status of a customer support ticket in Zendesk or pull details from a project plan stored in a Google Doc. This is a really important detail to understand because most companies have their knowledge spread all over the place.

Beyond the basics: What to do next

Enabling the built-in Confluence AI is a solid first move. But after the initial excitement wears off, you might start to notice where it falls short. What happens when the answer to a question isn’t in Confluence?

For most of us, that’s an everyday reality. Critical information is scattered across a dozen different apps, and that’s where the native AI hits a wall.

The challenge: Confluence AI only knows Confluence

Your internal wiki in Confluence might be beautifully organized, but that’s only one piece of the puzzle. Your support team lives in Freshdesk, your engineers are deep in Jira tickets, and the latest company policies are probably sitting in a Google Drive folder.

When an employee has a question, they don’t care which app holds the answer; they just want the information, fast. Confluence’s AI can’t connect those dots, which means it gives incomplete answers and people end up having to search manually anyway.

The solution: Unifying your knowledge with eesel AI

This is exactly why a dedicated AI platform like eesel AI exists. Instead of being stuck inside a single app, eesel works like a smart layer that connects to all the places your company keeps its knowledge.

It integrates with tools like Confluence, Zendesk, Google Docs, Slack, and over 100 others. By doing this, eesel AI builds a complete picture of your company’s collective brain. This allows it to give a single, accurate answer pulled from the best possible source, whether that’s a wiki page, a helpdesk ticket, or a shared document.

An infographic showing how eesel AI connects to various apps like Slack, Google Drive, and Zendesk to create a unified knowledge base, a step beyond what's possible when you just enable Confluence AI.

The challenge: A lack of control and safe testing

With the native Confluence tool, your options are pretty much "on" or "off." You can’t really tweak its personality, tell it how to answer certain questions, or test it out before you let your whole team use it. That all-or-nothing approach can feel a bit risky, especially if you want to use AI for customer-facing support or important internal processes.

The solution: Simulating and deploying with confidence

One of the best things about eesel AI is that you can get it up and running in minutes, not months. The platform comes with a simulation mode, which is basically a dress rehearsal for your AI. You can point it at thousands of your past support tickets and see exactly how it would have answered them. This gives you a real forecast of your automation rate and lets you tweak its behavior until you’re happy with it, all before it interacts with a single real person.

This puts you in complete control. You can start small, maybe letting the AI only handle simple, repetitive questions. Then, as you get more comfortable, you can gradually give it more responsibility. It’s just a smarter and safer way to bring AI into your workflow.

A screenshot of the eesel AI simulation mode, which allows for safe testing before full deployment, a feature not available when you only enable Confluence AI.

Your journey begins when you enable Confluence AI

Turning on Confluence AI is a quick and easy win for introducing your team to the world of generative AI. As we’ve seen, any Organization Admin can get it running in just a few minutes, giving everyone helpful tools for drafting and editing content.

But real, long-term efficiency comes when your AI can see and understand all of your company’s knowledge, not just the slice of it that lives in one application. While Confluence AI is a perfectly fine place to start, its value is ultimately capped by the data it has access to.

For teams that are tired of information silos and ready to build a truly smart and automated workplace, the next step is pretty clear.

Ready to connect Confluence with all your other tools and create a single source of truth for your team? Sign up for eesel AI for free and see for yourself how easy it is to launch a powerful AI assistant that’s customized for your business.