Atlassian's AI Fear Trade May Be Exhausted—3 Signs Point to a Reversal

Key Points

• Atlassian shares have collapsed nearly 80% over the past year, sending the stock back to 2018 levels despite repeated quarterly earnings beats.
• The appointment of a new CFO with deep industry experience should help reset investor confidence after one of the tech sector’s steepest selloffs.
• Analysts remain extremely bullish, with Piper Sandler recently calling for 160% upside potential. 

Atlassian NASDAQ: TEAM has endured one of the most painful declines across the tech space over the past year. Having traded for more than $300 just over a year ago, shares are currently trading around $80, as a 75% slide has sent them back to 2018 levels. 

What makes the collapse particularly noteworthy is that it’s occurred even as the company has continued to deliver headline beats in its quarterly reports. Revenue growth has remained solid, and the core business continues to expand. Yet the market has become increasingly concerned that the rapid rise of artificial intelligence (AI) could make it very easy for companies to simply automate many of the functions they’d otherwise rely on Atlassian’s collaboration platform for. This has been the case with many traditional tech companies, but particularly so with Atlassian. 

However, as we head into the final month of the quarter, early signs of stabilization are emerging. The stock has spent the past fortnight consolidating, and a key leadership change could help shift the narrative. With Atlassian appointing a new and highly regarded CFO, James Chuong, at a moment when sentiment appears as bad as it can get, there are several reasons to think the stock could be approaching a turning point.

#1: Price Action Is Starting to Improve

After months of relentless selling, the stock has begun to show early signs of stabilization. A decline of roughly 75% is severe even by any measure, but particularly so for a company that remains a core infrastructure provider for software teams worldwide. Atlassian’s tools, including Jira and Confluence, remain deeply embedded in the workflows of thousands of companies and are widely considered “must-have” platforms across many enterprises.

Still, concerns that AI could eventually eat into Atlassian’s long-term growth trajectory have led investors to dump the stock en masse. The selling pressure became so intense that the stock’s relative strength index (RSI), a measure of recent trading momentum, fell to its lowest ever reading last month.

Since then, however, the RSI has been steadily climbing out of extremely oversold territory, with shares also refusing to set a new low since the final week of February. Adding to the sense that a bottom may be forming is the recent bullish crossover in the stock’s moving average convergence divergence (MACD) chart.

None of these signals guarantees a recovery, but when they appear together, they often suggest that the heavy selling pressure that defined the past year may finally be easing.

#2: Analysts Still See Massive Upside

Even as the stock sank to fresh lows last month, many of Wall Street’s analysts remained firmly in the bullish camp. Atlassian carries a Moderate Buy consensus rating, and several prominent firms have recently doubled down on that conviction. The likes of Citigroup, Baird, and Piper Sandler, to name just a few, all reiterated Buy or equivalent ratings in recent weeks, with the latter’s fresh price target of $200 implying roughly 160% upside from current levels.

Price targets should never be taken as guarantees, but the gap between analyst expectations and the current share price is hard to ignore. While it is easy for investors to become spooked by the disruptive potential of AI, these are just a few of the market professionals who appear increasingly confident in Atlassian’s ability to navigate this shift successfully. 

The recent appointment of a new CFO is surely helping to reinforce that confidence. Leadership changes at that level often signal a renewed focus on execution and stewardship, both of which Atlassian could obviously benefit from as it heads into the rest of the year. 

#3: AI Could Actually Strengthen Atlassian

There's an increasingly credible argument that AI could actually strengthen Atlassian's platform rather than undermine it.

CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes used last month’s earnings call to dismiss the narrative that AI could make collaboration platforms, like Atlassian, obsolete. Instead, he argued that as AI accelerates software development, enterprises will need trusted systems even more to organize work, manage data, and coordinate increasingly complex teams.

The company also recently revealed that its Rovo AI offering has already reached over five million monthly active users, without significantly increasing costs. This suggests that the AI technology will actually be a revenue enhancer rather than a margin squeezer. 

For the company’s incoming CFO, who officially joins this month, that dynamic should be particularly encouraging. At a time when the broader platform continues to grow its revenue, successfully leaning into AI while analysts are calling for massive upside could be exactly the combination needed to turn sentiment around and mark the start of Atlassian’s recovery.