Leigh Whiting

Principal Engineer

Atlassian

From REST to Agentic: Trusted APIs in the age of AI

Enterprise platforms don't get to start from scratch. When AI agents need to act on behalf of users, they inherit the API surfaces those users already depend on — surfaces evolved over many years for human-driven workflows, not autonomous reasoning. This talk explores the practical journey of adapting established, trusted API layers to serve agentic workloads while preserving the performance, predictability, and permission guarantees that earned customer trust in the first place.

In this talk we’ll explore two contrasting cases: Jira — a 25-year-old platform with myriad REST endpoints evolved over time and deep ecosystem integrations — and Teamwork Graph, a newer data layer, purpose-built for cross-product context retrieval. Together they illustrate the spectrum from built “for-human” to “machine-native" and the path to creating a complete agentic offering without sacrificing the trust customers have built over decades.

Key Takeaways:

Trust is inherited — Agent-facing APIs must honour the same permission, performance, and data-sovereignty contracts as the human-facing surfaces they extend. API Evolution demands strategy — Moving from human-driven REST to agent-ready tooling isn't a refactor, it's a product decision that demands intentional design and governance from day one. Machine-native is not the same as starting over - purpose-built agentic APIs don't require abandoning your existing ecosystem, they require a deliberate context layer on top of it

Leigh Whiting

Leigh is a Principal Engineer at Atlassian, where he works in Jira on bringing to life our agentic product strategy. His current focus is enabling AI agents to seamlessly operate at scale across Jira while preserving the trust, performance and permission guarantees customers depend on.

Before Atlassian, Leigh built software across a broad range of domains including institutional banking platforms, programmatic advertising infrastructure, enterprise search systems, autonomous robotics, and safety-critical medical device software. This background — spanning regulated finance, real-time bidding, information retrieval, and systems where failure isn't an option — informs his approach to building reliable, scalable platforms that balance innovation with operational rigour at scale.