A practical guide to Jira and generative AI in 2025

For so many of us, Jira is the command center for our work. It’s where projects take shape, tasks get tracked, and tickets (eventually) get resolved. But as workflows get more complicated, the manual work needed to keep everything on track can feel like a full-time job in itself.

This is where the idea of Jira and generative AI gets interesting. It promises to automate the boring stuff, speed up communication, and just generally make your projects smarter.

In this guide, we’ll give you a straight-up look at what Atlassian’s own AI offers inside Jira. We’ll cover its main features, untangle the credit-based pricing, and talk about the real-world limitations you should know before you dive in.

What is Jira and generative AI?

First, let’s get on the same page. Jira is Atlassian’s go-to tool for managing work. If you’re in software, IT, or even marketing, chances are you’ve stared at a Jira board or two. It’s the place where work gets done.

Generative AI isn’t just tech jargon here. It’s a type of AI that can create new content, summarize long walls of text, and even set up workflows from simple instructions. Think of it as a smart assistant who can understand what you’re asking and help you do it faster.

So, when we talk about "Jira and generative AI," we’re talking about the AI features Atlassian has built right into its platform (often called Atlassian Intelligence or Rovo). The idea is to help you get more done without having to leave Jira, freeing up your team to focus on the work that actually moves the needle.

Key capabilities of Jira and generative AI

Atlassian has sprinkled its AI throughout Jira to help with common tasks that tend to eat up a lot of time. These features are meant to make everything from ticket management to writing updates just a little bit smoother.

Streamlining ticket and task management

Let’s be real, a huge chunk of any project is just juggling the work itself. Jira’s AI tries to lift some of that weight.

• AI summaries: We’ve all been there, opening a Jira ticket to find a novel of comments. The AI can scan the entire conversation and spit out a quick summary of the key points and decisions. It’s a huge help for anyone who needs to get up to speed without reading every single reply.

• Breaking down work: Staring at a massive project epic can be intimidating. With the AI, you can ask it to suggest smaller, more manageable child issues or sub-tasks. It helps turn a huge chunk of work into a clear plan, which makes sprint planning a lot easier.

• Ticket triage: For teams on Jira Service Management, the AI can help sort, prioritize, and route new requests automatically. It looks at the ticket’s content and tone to figure out how urgent it is and who should handle it, keeping your support queue from turning into a mess.

Enhancing content and communication

Getting the right info into a ticket and communicating clearly is half the battle. Jira’s AI has a couple of tools to help you write better and faster.

• Generative AI in the editor: Right in the ticket editor, you can ask the AI to draft content for you. It’s handy for writing detailed user stories, filling out task descriptions, or composing replies. You give it a few bullet points, and it can flesh out the text.

• Adjusting the tone: How you say something matters. The AI can rework your text to change its tone. For instance, it can make a technical explanation sound more empathetic for a frustrated customer or turn your rough notes into a professional summary for stakeholders.

Improving search and automation

Finding what you need in Jira can sometimes feel like a scavenger hunt, and setting up automation can be tricky if you’re not a power user. The AI is designed to make both a bit easier.

• Natural language to JQL: Jira Query Language (JQL) is super useful for searching, but the syntax can be a pain to learn. This feature lets you type a search in plain English, like "show me all open high-priority bugs," and the AI translates it into the proper JQL for you. Suddenly, anyone can run complex searches.

• AI-powered automation rules: Instead of clicking through menus to build automation rules, you can just describe what you want. For example, you could write, "When a ticket priority changes to Highest, send a notification to the on-call Slack channel." The AI then builds the rule for you.

How to get started with Jira and generative AI (and what it costs)

Alright, so how do you get these AI features? First off, they aren’t on Jira’s Free plan. You’ll need a Standard, Premium, or Enterprise cloud plan to get access to Atlassian Intelligence.

But here’s the catch: it’s not an all-you-can-eat buffet. Atlassian uses a credit system. Every time you use an AI feature, it costs you credits. This model can make it really tough to predict your monthly bill, especially if your team starts to rely on the AI.

Here’s how the plans and their credit limits shake out:

Plan	Price (per user/month)	Atlassian Rovo AI Credits
Standard	$7.53	25 AI credits per user per month
Premium	$13.53	70 AI credits per user per month
Enterprise	Contact Sales	150 AI credits per user per month

The real headache here is the unpredictability. If you have a busy month and ticket volume spikes, your team could blow through its AI credits way faster than you expected. Then you’re stuck: either you tell everyone to stop using the AI features you’re paying for, or you brace for surprise overage fees. For any team trying to stick to a budget, that kind of uncertainty is a big problem.

The limitations of using Jira and generative AI (built-in features)

While having AI baked right into Jira sounds great, it comes with some serious trade-offs. The built-in tools are a decent starting point, but they might not have the power or flexibility that a growing team really needs.

The Jira and generative AI walled garden: Stuck in the Atlassian ecosystem

Jira’s AI works best if your company’s entire brain lives inside Atlassian products, especially Confluence. The AI is designed to pull answers and context from your Confluence pages.

But let’s be honest, whose team actually works that way? Most of us have crucial information scattered everywhere: in Google Docs, Notion pages, Slack threads, and a dozen other places. Atlassian’s AI can’t see any of that. It’s basically flying blind, working with only a fraction of your company’s knowledge, which often leads to incomplete or just plain wrong answers.

For an AI to be genuinely helpful, it needs to learn from everything. A dedicated tool like eesel AI solves this problem by connecting to all your apps, making sure your AI has the full story before it tries to help.

Limited customization options

Built-in tools are usually designed to be one-size-fits-all. Atlassian’s AI is easy enough to switch on, but it doesn’t give you much control over how it actually works. You can’t really customize its personality, set up complex actions, or create detailed rules for which tickets it should touch and which it should leave alone.

This is where a dedicated platform can make a huge difference. With eesel AI, for example, you get a full workflow editor that lets you call the shots. You can use a prompt editor to dial in the AI’s tone of voice, build custom automations (like letting it look up an order in Shopify and then update a field in Jira), and choose to only automate the simple, repetitive questions you’re tired of answering.

Jira and generative AI: No way to test it safely

Would you launch a new feature without testing it? Probably not. So why would you unleash an AI on your customers without a proper test run? Unfortunately, Atlassian’s platform doesn’t give you a way to simulate how the AI will perform on your real-world data before you turn it on.

A good simulation is key. It lets you see exactly how the AI would have answered thousands of your past tickets, giving you a clear idea of its accuracy and how many issues it could have resolved. This lets you find gaps in your knowledge base and fine-tune the AI’s behavior in a safe environment.

This is another area where a specialized tool has a clear advantage. eesel AI comes with a simulation mode, so you can go live feeling confident about how it will perform and what kind of results to expect.

Is the built-in Jira and generative AI enough for your team?

For teams that are all-in on the Atlassian ecosystem and just need some basic automation, Jira’s built-in generative AI is a decent place to start. It’s convenient and easy to flip on.

But for teams that need more flexibility, control, and predictable costs, its limitations show up pretty fast. The reliance on Confluence, the confusing credit-based pricing, and the lack of a safe testing environment are real roadblocks that can get in the way as you grow.

So that leaves one last question: what if you need an AI that works with all of your company’s knowledge, gives you total control, and has simple, predictable pricing?

Supercharge your Jira and generative AI workflows with eesel AI

Instead of trying to fit your team into the box of a built-in tool, you can bring in an AI platform designed for flexibility and power. eesel AI plugs right into the tools you already use, making them smarter without making you change the way you work.

Here’s how eesel AI handles the main drawbacks of Jira’s native AI:

• Connect all your knowledge: Link Jira Service Management to Confluence, Google Docs, Notion, past tickets, and dozens of other apps. Give your AI the complete picture so it can give truly helpful answers.

• Get started in minutes: You can get set up on your own, without having to sit through a sales demo or a long implementation process. It’s a truly self-serve platform.

• Test with confidence: Use the simulation mode to see how the AI performs on thousands of your past tickets. You’ll know your potential resolution rate and find knowledge gaps before you ever turn it on for your team.

• Full control and clear pricing: You can customize everything from the AI’s tone to the specific actions it can perform. And it all comes with simple, transparent pricing that never charges you per resolution, so your costs are always predictable.

Ready to see what a more powerful and flexible AI can do for your Jira workflows? Start your free eesel AI trial today and you can build your first AI agent in just a few minutes.