How Rovo agents can automate cross-platform workflows in 2026

TL;DR

Rovo agents are AI teammates inside Jira, Confluence and the rest of Atlassian Cloud that answer from your company knowledge and take actions like creating, updating or transitioning work items. Atlassian ships 27 ready-made agents, and anyone in your org can build more in Rovo Studio unless an admin restricts it.

They come with every paid Standard, Premium and Enterprise Cloud plan. Each run spends Rovo credits: 10 for a basic agent, a variable amount for advanced agents and agents in Jira, and from December 3, 2026, anything over your allowance is billed at $0.01 per credit.

Their actions are strongest inside Atlassian. If your workflows run through a helpdesk like Zendesk or across Slack and Teams, I'd look at eesel, which works tickets in those tools and is priced per ticket or chat, not per seat.

What are Rovo agents?

Simply put, Rovo agents are Atlassian's take on AI agents: they're designed to work alongside you, cut down on manual tasks, and take action for you right inside the reliable Atlassian suite. Think of them as specialists you can call on in Jira, Confluence, and other Atlassian tools to help get work done more efficiently.

To get a feel for what they do, it helps to know the three main flavors they come in:

1. Out-of-the-box agents: These are the ready-made agents from Atlassian for everyday tasks, 27 of them at last count, including Request Resolver (formerly Rovo Service) and the Jira Coding Agent. You can use them straight away to summarize a document, translate text, or help maintain your Jira backlog with ease.
2. Custom agents: If you have a very specific process, you can build your own agent with a tool called Rovo Studio. This lets you give an agent a unique job, connect it to certain knowledge sources, and define exactly how it should assist your team.
3. Marketplace agents: These are agents made by other developers to help Rovo work with other apps. For instance, the team behind the Budgety for Jira app built an agent so users could ask for financial data through Rovo's chat, showing the strength of the Atlassian marketplace.

What can Rovo agents do?

Rovo agents answer questions from your company knowledge and take actions in Jira and Confluence, such as creating work items, updating status or editing pages. They are built to excel within the Atlassian framework. For teams that live and breathe Atlassian, they offer some impressive ways to automate work.

Automating tasks within Jira and Confluence with Rovo agents

The biggest strength for Rovo agents is how deeply they connect with Jira Service Management and Confluence. You can ask an agent to do things that would normally take up a chunk of your time.

For example, you could create an agent to help manage your Jira backlog by identifying any issue that hasn't been updated in 90 days and flagging it for a quick review. Or you could have an agent generate a weekly project summary on a Confluence page, pulling updates and key stats from your project boards automatically. It keeps everyone on the same page while the platform handles the heavy lifting. You can also assign a Jira work item to an agent, @mention it in a comment, or add it to a workflow transition or board column, though that experience is still in beta.

Where do Rovo agents get their knowledge?

Rovo agents draw on Jira, Confluence and any apps your admins have connected. Atlassian is aware that a company's brain isn't just stored in its products. Rovo agents can connect to external knowledge sources like Google Docs and Microsoft SharePoint to find information when you ask a question. This helps an agent give a fuller picture by searching both your Confluence space and your shared drive, effectively bringing external knowledge into the Atlassian world.

Building custom workflows for Rovo agents with Rovo Studio

For teams with their own way of doing things, Rovo Studio is where you can build custom agents from scratch. It gives you a place to define what you want the agent to do, which documents it should read, and what actions it's allowed to take. This level of control is excellent for building an agent that fits your team's unique professional process.

What should you know before using Rovo agents?

Three things: they work best inside Atlassian, every run spends Rovo credits, and good results take prompt work. It is worth understanding that design to get the most value out of them.

The Atlassian-first focus of Rovo agents: Specialized ecosystem integration

Rovo's primary strength is its optimization for the Atlassian ecosystem. It is designed to be the ultimate companion for Jira and Confluence. This focus is perfect for teams who rely on these industry-standard tools to get their work done.

If you have a workflow that spans multiple non-Atlassian platforms - like replying to a ticket in Zendesk - you can easily supplement Rovo with other tools. Rovo does reach into Slack: its Slack app summarizes threads and can create Jira and Confluence work, and agents can send a Slack message once you connect your account. For work beyond that, eesel AI is designed as a complementary option that can work across a wide variety of apps, letting you extend your automation wherever your team happens to be.

How much do Rovo agents cost?

Rovo agents come with every paid Standard, Premium and Enterprise Cloud plan, and Atlassian includes Rovo with no separate purchase. Free plans don't get it.

What you pay for is usage, in Rovo credits. Each paid user adds 25, 70 or 150 credits a month on Jira or Confluence (250, 700 or 1,500 on Service Collection and Teamwork Collection) to one pool shared across your organization. A basic agent run costs 10 credits, while advanced agents with model selection, agents in Jira, Jira Coding Agent and Request Resolver use a variable number, per Atlassian's credits guide. So a team of 200 Jira Premium users gets 14,000 credits a month, or about 1,400 basic agent runs, before overage. From December 3, 2026, extra usage is billed at $0.01 per credit, on by default, and admins can set a cap. My Rovo pricing guide walks through the details.

For teams looking for different options, eesel AI offers credit plans where 1 credit is one ticket or chat, starting free with 100 credits and then from $299 a month for 500. This provides another choice for teams to consider based on their specific volume of work.

How hard is it to build a custom Rovo agent?

Creating a custom Rovo agent that meets exact specifications is a professional task. As experts at Eficode have noted, this involves detailed prompt engineering to achieve the best results. This allows for a high degree of precision for those who want to fine-tune their automation.

Atlassian has since made the starting point easier: in Chat or Studio you can describe the agent in everyday language and let Rovo draft it, or configure it manually. Atlassian also recommends no more than five tools per agent to keep performance high.

Where do Rovo agents fall short, and when should you use eesel instead?

Rovo agents are at their best inside Atlassian. They're built into Jira and Confluence, they only see what each user is allowed to see, search and summaries are free, and every paid seat brings credits. For a team that lives entirely in Atlassian and mostly wants search, summaries and light Jira housekeeping it already pays for, Rovo is still the better pick.

The limits show up when agents do real volume. Every run draws on the credit pool, and from December 3, 2026 overage is billed by default (Atlassian's credit rules). One team that built a release-notes agent while credits were free found it now "quickly uses all of our free credit" (r/atlassian). Bulk Jira actions stop at 20 work items, and assigning work items to agents is still in beta.

eesel AI fits when the work spans more than Atlassian. It's an AI teammate that works inside Jira Service Management through its Jira integration, reads docs through its Confluence integration (read-only), and also works in Slack, Microsoft Teams and help desks like Zendesk and Freshdesk.

It acts, not just searches: it creates, assigns and transitions Jira issues, updates fields, replies to the customer or adds an internal note. Pricing is per ticket or chat, not per Atlassian seat, with every integration included, Shopify among them. For a wider comparison, see my Rovo alternatives roundup.

Rovo has Slack and Teams apps too, but everyone who asks it something needs an Atlassian account on a Rovo-enabled site, and replies in public channels need a shared account an admin sets up. With eesel, the person asking needs no Atlassian seat. One difference to know: eesel reads Confluence through one Atlassian API token, so it sees what that account can see rather than each asker's own permissions.

Are Rovo agents the right AI agent for your team?

Rovo agents are an impressive choice for teams whose work is centered in the Atlassian ecosystem. As a mature and trusted platform, Jira and Confluence provide a reliable foundation, and Rovo agents help you get even more out of that investment.

For companies that use a diverse mix of tools, Rovo is often best used as part of a broader AI strategy. By understanding its credit-based pricing and specialized focus, you can decide how to best pair it with other options.

Many businesses find that a combination of the industry-leading Atlassian platform and flexible tools like eesel AI provides the best results. This approach allows you to build a powerful, scalable, and comprehensive automation strategy that supports your entire business. You can compare eesel's plans or try eesel AI for free alongside your existing Atlassian setup.