Replacing Jira, Confluence and Slack

Why tool-by-tool fails here and team-by-team does not

The governance questions to answer before you start

Every one of these has a real answer, and some of the answers are blocking.

• How do people sign in

  Polaris uses passwordless email codes and has no password path at all. There is no SAML SSO and no directory sync. In an organisation whose identity runs through a central provider, this is the question that decides whether a pilot is even permitted.

• Where does the data sit and who can read it

  Polaris runs on Supabase Postgres with row-level security, and connection credentials are stored server-side so agents can use them and browsers cannot read them back. There is no equivalent of Confluence space restrictions or Jira permission schemes.

• What does an AI worker do with a connection

  A worker's capabilities are a SKILL.md file you can open, read and edit, not a hidden prompt. Its tool access comes from the org's connection catalog, authorised once. Its work is logged job by job, and the bill is itemised on that log and challengeable from it.

• What is the vendor risk

  Polaris is in free public beta. No customers to reference, no certifications to cite, no enterprise agreement. Bring this up first rather than letting a security reviewer find it, because a pilot proposed honestly gets a different answer from one that gets discovered.

Staging by team

Five stages. The estate is untouched until the fourth.

1. 1

   Connect Slack for the pilot team's channels only

   Slack is the one free move in this stack. Messages arrive in the Polaris Inbox as prefilled task suggestions and a person clicks to make each one a task. Nothing about the Slack workspace itself changes, and nothing is exported.

2. 2

   Run the pilot team's new work in Polaris, old work in Jira

   No migration, no CSV. Work started after the pilot begins is created in Polaris. Everything already in flight finishes in Jira. Within a sprint the split is obvious and within two the old tool is mostly quiet.

3. 3

   Write the team's living documentation fresh

   Do not convert a Confluence space export. Write the ten pages this team actually reads, in Polaris Docs, and inventory which of their existing pages are Jira macros rather than documents, because those never export as what they look like.

4. 4

   Hire workers and measure delivered hours

   This is the only stage that produces evidence an executive cares about. Give workers the connections they need, assign real work, and read the work log. Each entry carries the estimated human-equivalent hours from an open formula, so the pilot produces a defensible number rather than a sentiment.

5. 5

   Decide about seats, one team at a time

   Only after a team has run in parallel for a quarter do you drop its Jira and Confluence write seats. The estate stays readable. Nothing in this plan requires cancelling an Atlassian contract, and any plan that did would not get approved.

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