How to enable AI in Jira: A 2025 step-by-step guide

It feels like everyone is talking about AI in project management these days, and honestly, it makes sense. Teams are looking for any advantage they can find to automate the boring stuff, speed up their work, and generally make life a little easier. Atlassian has definitely gotten the memo, rolling out its own AI features (now part of "Rovo" and "Atlassian Intelligence") to help with everything from summarizing endless ticket threads to writing tricky JQL queries you’d otherwise have to Google.

But here’s the part that trips a lot of people up: actually turning it on isn’t as simple as flipping a switch. I’ve heard from plenty of Jira admins who’ve spent ages clicking through settings, only to come up empty-handed because they don’t have the right permissions or they’re on the wrong subscription plan. It’s a frustrating experience.

This guide is here to clear up all that confusion. We’ll walk you through exactly how to enable AI in Jira, step-by-step, so you can stop searching and start using it.

Prerequisites for enabling AI in Jira

Before you even think about opening the settings panel, let’s get a few things sorted out first. Taking a couple of minutes to check these prerequisites will save you a lot of time and potential headaches down the road.

1. A Jira cloud subscription

   First off, this is a must-have. Atlassian’s AI features are only available on their Cloud plans, which means Standard, Premium, or Enterprise. If your team is still running a Data Center or Server version of Jira, you simply won’t find these options. Atlassian is focusing its new development, especially AI, on its cloud platform, so this is a key distinction. If you’re not sure what you’re on, it’s worth checking your subscription details first.

2. Organization Admin permissions

   This is, without a doubt, the single biggest hurdle where most people get stuck. To activate Atlassian Intelligence, you need to be an Org Admin, not just a Site Admin. It’s an easy mistake to make. A Site Admin has a lot of power, but only over a specific Jira site. An Org Admin, on the other hand, holds the keys to the entire Atlassian kingdom for your company, all your Jira sites, Confluence spaces, and everything else.

   Think of it like this: a Site Admin is the manager of a single store, while the Org Admin is the regional manager for the entire chain. Only the regional manager has the authority to roll out a big new initiative like AI. If you follow this guide and can’t find the menus we’re talking about, it’s almost a guarantee that you’re not an Org Admin. In that case, you’ll need to find out who is and ask for their help.

3. A rough idea of what you want to achieve

   You don’t need a detailed, multi-page strategy document here, but it helps to have a simple goal in mind. Why are you turning this on in the first place? Are you hoping to help your support team get up to speed on long, complicated tickets without reading every single comment? Or maybe you want to help your developers draft more consistent bug reports. Having a clear, simple use case will help you measure success and get value from the AI features much faster once they’re live.

A step-by-step guide

Alright, once you’ve confirmed you have the right cloud plan and the all-powerful Org Admin permissions, the rest is actually pretty straightforward. Just follow these steps.

Step 1: Navigate to Atlassian administration

First things first, you won’t find the AI settings in your usual project or site-level administration areas. You need to go to the central command center for your entire Atlassian organization.

Log in to admin.atlassian.com with your Org Admin account. If you happen to be a part of multiple organizations, you’ll be prompted to pick the right one from a list. This is the main hub where you manage billing, users, and high-level settings for all your products.

Step 2: Locate the AI settings

Once you’re in the Atlassian Administration portal, take a look at the main navigation menu, usually on the left-hand side. Atlassian is known for tweaking its interface, so the exact wording might shift over time, but you’re looking for something related to your applications and AI.

As of right now, you can typically find it by going to Apps > AI settings > AI-enabled apps. You might also see it under a top-level "Settings" menu with a label like "Atlassian Intelligence."

Step 3: Activate AI for your Jira products

This screen is where the magic happens. You’ll see a list of all the Atlassian products active in your organization, like Jira Software, Jira Service Management, and Confluence. The cool thing is that you can activate AI for each product individually, giving you some control.

Click the "Select apps to activate" button. A list will pop up, just check the boxes for the Jira products you want to enhance with AI. You’ll need to review and accept the terms and conditions, and then hit the "Activate" button. The change should roll out across your organization almost instantly.

Step 4: Verify that AI features are active

Now for the fun part, let’s make sure it actually worked. Pop over to one of your Jira projects and start looking for the new AI-powered features. They’re usually marked with a little sparkle icon.

Here are a few things you can check right away:

• The "Summarize" button: Find a ticket with a really long comment history. In the "Activity" section, right above the comments, you should now see a "Summarize" button with the AI icon. Give it a click and see what it does.

• The AI icon in the editor: Go to write a new comment or edit a ticket description. You should see that same sparkle icon in the editor’s toolbar. You can also just type /ai on a new line to bring up a menu of commands for drafting, editing, or changing the tone of your text.

• Natural language JQL: For those who work with JQL, this is a neat one. Go to the advanced issue search (JQL view), and you should see an option to write your query in plain English. For example, you can type "show me all unresolved bugs in the Phoenix project assigned to me" instead of writing out the formal JQL syntax.

If you can see these features, then congratulations! You’ve successfully enabled AI in your Jira instance.

Tips and common mistakes to avoid

Flipping the switch is just the beginning. To really get value out of these tools, it helps to know what to expect and what common pitfalls to look out for.

Common mistakes

• Trying to activate without Org Admin rights: I know we’ve said it a few times, but it’s worth repeating. If you can’t find the "AI settings" in the admin portal, the first thing to check is your permission level.

• Looking for AI in Data Center or Server: Remember, this is a Cloud-only party for now.

• Expecting it to solve everything immediately: Atlassian’s native AI is designed to be an assistant, not a fully autonomous team member. It’s fantastic for speeding up manual tasks like summarizing text or drafting replies, but it’s not going to triage your entire backlog or resolve complex technical issues on its own without human guidance.

Pro tips

Going beyond the basics: Getting full control of your support automation

Enabling Atlassian’s built-in AI is a fantastic first step. It’s a powerful tool for agent assistance, it helps your team members summarize, draft, and search faster within Jira.

But if your goal is true support automation, deflecting common questions before a ticket is even created, having an AI perform actions across different systems, and letting it learn from all your company knowledge no matter where it lives, you’ll quickly realize you need a more specialized solution.

This is exactly where a platform like eesel AI comes into the picture. It’s designed to layer on top of your existing help desk, including Jira Service Management, without forcing you to change the way you work. It’s built to handle the kind of heavy lifting that most native AI tools just aren’t designed for.

Here’s how it fills in the gaps:

• It unifies all your knowledge sources: While Atlassian AI mostly sticks to Confluence and Jira, eesel AI can connect to over 100 different sources right out of the box. It learns from your Google Docs, Notion pages, past support tickets, PDFs, and even your internal Slack conversations. This means your AI gets the full picture of your company’s knowledge, not just a small slice of it.

• You can simulate before you activate: This is a huge confidence booster. Instead of just turning on your AI and hoping it performs well, eesel AI lets you run simulations on thousands of your past tickets. You can see exactly how the AI would have responded in each case, get a surprisingly accurate forecast of your deflection rate, and find gaps in your knowledge base, all in a safe sandbox environment before a single customer ever interacts with it.

• It gives you total workflow control: Native AI can suggest text for an agent to use, but eesel AI can actually take action. Its workflow engine lets you define exactly which types of tickets the AI should handle, when it should escalate to a human, and what actions it’s allowed to perform. Need it to look up a customer’s order information in Shopify via an API call, add the right tag to a ticket, and then close it automatically? You can build that in minutes.

Here’s a quick comparison to make the difference clear:

Your journey starts now

So there you have it. You now know how to check your prerequisites, find your way through the admin panel, and officially enable AI in Jira. It’s a solid move that can give your team a nice productivity boost and start chipping away at all those time-consuming manual tasks.

While Atlassian’s native AI is a great starting point for helping your agents work more efficiently, teams who are serious about automating support, cutting down their ticket volume, and giving customers instant answers will eventually want a more dedicated platform. When you’re ready to take that next step, you can layer on a specialized tool designed for true automation.

Ready to see what a fully controllable AI agent can do for your Jira workflows? Try eesel AI for free and build your first AI support agent in just a few minutes.