A practical guide to Rovo out-of-the-box agents

Let's be honest, a lot of the workday gets eaten up by small, repetitive tasks. It's the constant backlog grooming, the status updates you have to write, and that endless search for a document you swear you saw last week. Atlassian's answer to this daily grind is Rovo, an AI assistant with a team of specialized "agents" built to handle these jobs for you, right inside the tools you already use.

This guide is a straight-to-the-point look at the pre-built Rovo Out-of-the-Box Agents. We’ll get into what they are, what they can actually do, how to get them working, and, most importantly, where their limits might prevent your team from getting the seamless automation you’re really after.

What are Rovo Out-of-the-Box Agents?

Think of Rovo Agents as configurable AI teammates that hang out in your Atlassian tools, like Jira and Confluence. They’re there to help automate tasks, dig up information, and just generally keep work moving along so you don't have to jump between a dozen different apps.

A screenshot showing how Rovo Out-of-the-Box Agents can automate tasks by generating a weekly project summary report inside a Confluence page.

The "out-of-the-box" part is what makes them so accessible. Atlassian gives you more than 20 pre-built agents that are good to go from day one. They’re designed for common jobs like drafting release notes or tidying up a Jira backlog, meaning you don't have to do any custom coding to get started. It's a quick way to dip your toes into AI within your current workflow.

Behind the scenes, these agents are powered by what Atlassian calls its “Teamwork Graph.” It’s basically a map of how all the people, projects, and documents in your Atlassian suite are connected. This context helps the agents make smarter decisions. While you can build custom agents if you want to get your hands dirty, we’re going to stick with the ready-made ones for this guide.

A breakdown of key Rovo Out-of-the-Box Agents by function

To really understand what these agents bring to the table, it’s helpful to group them by the problems they solve. Here’s a look at some of the key players and what they do.

Rovo Out-of-the-Box Agents for simplifying project management in Jira

This group includes agents like the Work Item Planner, Issue Organizer, and Readiness Checker. Their whole purpose is to reduce the administrative headache that often comes with managing projects.

For example, they can take a huge epic and chop it down into smaller, more manageable stories, which is a lifesaver during sprint planning. They can also clean up a messy backlog by finding a home for orphan issues or flagging old ones for deletion. The Readiness Checker is especially handy for dev teams, as it can double-check that a task has everything it needs before a developer writes a single line of code.

Rovo Out-of-the-Box Agents for content creation and communication

In this corner, we have the Release Notes Drafter, Comms Crafter, and Global Translator. These are all about making your team’s communication quicker and more consistent.

The Release Notes Drafter can scan a list of completed Jira issues and spin up a clear summary for your customers. The Comms Crafter helps you whip up content that sticks to your brand's unique tone, and the Global Translator does exactly what it says on the tin. It's a solid set of tools for helping everyone speak with one voice.

Rovo Out-of-the-Box Agents for operations and support

This category, featuring the Service Request Helper and Triage Assistant, is built mostly for folks using Jira Service Management.

These agents are designed to give IT and support teams a head start. The Service Request Helper can pull up suggested replies based on how similar tickets were handled in the past. The Triage Assistant helps with the initial sort of incoming requests by suggesting things like urgency level or request type. It’s a step in the right direction, but its knowledge is stuck inside the Jira bubble.

Rovo Out-of-the-Box Agents for planning and analysis

The OKR Generator and Customer Insights agent are for when you need to zoom out and look at the big picture. They help you make sense of your work and the feedback you're getting.

The OKR Generator can assist in drafting Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) that follow standard best practices. The Customer Insights agent is meant to dig through customer feedback from Jira and Confluence pages to find patterns and trends.

How to use and manage Rovo Out-of-the-Box Agents

Getting started with Rovo agents is pretty simple. You can chat with them directly in Rovo Chat, use "/ai" or "/Rovo" commands in Confluence and Jira, or even add them to your automation rules.

But here’s where you might hit a wall: customization. You can’t really change the core programming of an out-of-the-box agent. The best you can do is duplicate it to make a custom version. This allows you to change its name and, more importantly, tell it which knowledge sources to use. For example, you could tell a duplicated agent to only look at one specific Confluence space.

A screenshot of the Rovo Studio where a user is building custom Rovo agents by defining instructions and connecting actions for a specific workflow.

If you need to make bigger changes, like altering what it can do or the logic it follows, you’ll have to jump into Rovo Studio and build a new agent from the ground up. This is where the simple, "out-of-the-box" experience ends and a much more technical, developer-focused process takes over.

The limitations of relying solely on Rovo Out-of-the-Box Agents

While Rovo’s pre-built agents are a nice introduction to AI, they have some big limitations that can stop teams from building the truly connected automation they need.

They operate within an Atlassian-only world

Here's the biggest catch: Rovo agents are designed to know about Atlassian data and not much else. But what about all the critical info your team keeps in Google Docs, Notion, or SharePoint? Or the years of valuable customer conversations buried in help desks like Zendesk or Intercom? Rovo can't tap into those sources unless you build or buy connectors, which adds a whole new layer of complexity.

A screenshot of the eesel AI integrations library, showing its wide range of connections, which is a key advantage over the more limited Rovo Out-of-the-Box Agents.

This is where a platform like eesel AI is different. It was designed from the start to connect all your company's knowledge, with over 100 one-click integrations. You can train your AI on everything, past support tickets, help articles, internal wikis, no matter where it lives. Getting all your sources connected takes minutes, not months.

"Out-of-the-box" means limited control and flexibility

Pre-built agents are a bit rigid. They follow a set script and you can't really change their behavior. But real work is messy, right? It rarely fits into a perfect box. You might want to let an AI handle simple password resets but send any complex billing question straight to a human. With Rovo's standard agents, that level of nuance is tough to pull off.

In contrast, eesel AI gives you a fully customizable workflow builder. You get fine-grained control to decide exactly which tickets get automated and what the AI is allowed to do. You can set up rules based on the ticket's content, the customer's plan, or any other detail, and even have the AI perform custom actions like looking up an order status in Shopify through an API call.

The challenge of testing and deploying with confidence

With Rovo, you can't really see how an agent will behave with your actual data before you turn it on. That's a pretty big gamble, especially for any automations that will interact with customers. How can you be sure it will work as expected? You can't.

A screenshot showing the eesel AI simulation report, which provides analytics on bot performance and accuracy before activation, a key difference compared to Rovo Out-of-the-Box Agents.

eesel AI tackles this problem head-on with a powerful simulation mode. You can safely test your entire AI setup on thousands of your own past tickets in a practice environment. You get to see exactly how it would have replied, get accurate predictions on how many tickets it will resolve, and tweak its behavior until it's perfect, all before a single customer sees it. It lets you launch with total peace of mind.

Pricing: What do Rovo Out-of-the-Box Agents cost?

So, how much does all this cost? Rovo and its agents aren't something you can buy on their own. They come bundled with Atlassian Cloud Premium and Enterprise plans for tools like Jira and Confluence.

Usage is based on a credit system. Each user gets a monthly batch of credits, which are pooled together for the whole company to use. A simple chat with an agent might cost you 10 credits.

The thing is, while it might seem "free" with your plan, you're locked into Atlassian's most expensive tiers. If you need a powerful AI tool but don't want to upgrade your entire Atlassian subscription, you'll have to look elsewhere.

By comparison, eesel AI's pricing is straightforward and predictable. The plans are based on how many AI interactions you need, with no surprise fees that punish you for successfully resolving more tickets. You can start on a flexible monthly plan and cancel anytime, so you’re never stuck in a long-term contract.

Are Rovo Out-of-the-Box Agents the right tool for your team?

So what's the final verdict? Rovo Out-of-the-Box Agents are a decent first step for teams who live and breathe Atlassian and just want to automate a few simple, internal tasks. They give you a quick, no-extra-cost taste of AI without a bunch of setup.

But for any team that's serious about automation, the cracks start to show pretty quickly. They can’t see your knowledge if it's outside of Atlassian, they don't have the flexibility needed for real-world scenarios, and they don't give you a safe way to test before you go live.

When you need an AI agent that can connect to your entire knowledge base, give you complete control over its actions, and be ready to go in minutes, a dedicated platform is the way to go. Give eesel AI a try and see how our simulation mode can safely transform your support workflows today.