Smartsheet Enhances Work Management Platform with Generative AI

Work management software company Smartsheet has announced the release of its next-generation platform. The new features are designed to provide users with generative AI-powered capabilities at scale.

The Smartsheet platform revolves around “sheets” that contain project-related information. Users can include various details such as descriptions, statuses, due dates, and assigned workers for each task. The goal of Smartsheet is to create a powerful, intuitive, and delightful user experience. With the new enhancements, customers can now visualize their work in more efficient ways.

Ben Canning, Senior Vice President of Products at Smartsheet, highlighted the company’s practical approach to AI. By providing practical AI capabilities, Smartsheet aims to help customers achieve their goals faster and remove mundane tasks from their workflow.

The revamped Smartsheet, available in private beta, offers users the ability to generate data insights and visual charts using conversational prompts. While this capability is currently limited to individual sheets, Smartsheet plans to expand it to thousands of active projects and data stores in the future. Users can generate formulas, sheet summaries, translations, and image captions by offering simple descriptions. Additionally, users can create custom solutions by responding to questions posed by the platform.

The new AI-powered assistant in Smartsheet can provide customized and natural language responses to customer inquiries. This assistant focuses on addressing common pain points in the user experience, such as working with formulas and quickly building custom solutions.

Building out the platform at scale

Aside from AI capabilities, the updated Smartsheet platform aims to make it easier for users to work at scale. The Smartsheet Control Center will support 20,000 active projects per business program by January, marking a 20-fold year-over-year increase. In 2024, each sheet will support five million cells and allow for five million sheet links per sheet, a significant increase from the current level.

Smartsheet introduces a new timeline view that provides teams with a big-picture look into date-based work. This feature allows data to be organized into visual groups or by project milestones, making it easier to identify key dates. The platform also offers refreshed Grid and Card Views, allowing users to create modern and colorful dashboards with multiwidget editing, scaling optimizations, and wider canvases. Dashboard snapshots, which enable users to schedule regular automatic deliveries, are also on the horizon.

Business and Enterprise users will have access to two new features: Workload Heatmap and Workload Schedule. These tools, available directly in project sheets, enable project managers to quickly identify who is working on what, address over-allocations, and make data-driven staffing decisions for successful project delivery.

For advanced protection, Enterprise plan customers can purchase Smartsheet Safeguard, a collection of security and governance controls. It includes customer-managed encryption keys, data egress policies, event reporting, and data retention controls.

According to analyst Chris Marsh from S&P Global Market Intelligence, Smartsheet is being pragmatic in its implementation of AI capabilities. The company focuses on areas where there is a scale advantage, such as analyzing large volumes of data in its grid and auto-captioning images.

Margo Visitacion, principal analyst for portfolio management and enterprise architecture at Forrester, explains that while AI is still in its early stages, vendors are quickly embracing its potential. However, to sustain interest and adoption, vendors need to deliver real value in terms of automation, smart decision-making, and successful business outcomes. It is also crucial for vendors to handle customer data ethically.