Have you ever attended an event and just had something stick in your head—for days or even weeks? Months? Smartsheet ENGAGE  in early November 2025 raised just such a question: What matters for the reality of work? 

The dominant message of the event was the declaration that Smartsheet’s future would be focused on intelligent work management (IWM), a platform where people, data, processes, and artificial intelligence (AI) work together, unified in a vision of not settling for the slog and instead moving faster. As the snappy keynote intro video put it, “You can blindly hold on and watch potential slip beyond the horizon, or you can decide to lead and turn vision into execution faster than the pace of change.”

A passive visitor could easily leave well enough alone and take this new age of IWM at face value. After all, Smartsheet had been actively investing in a rebuilt platform, empowered by AI and agents and updates galore. But more investigation—more digging in and rethinking—is required. In an age when so much conversation is linked to the concept of intelligence, why is it hard to get past this shift from collaboration as the key to work and just accept the idea of intelligent work? 

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