Liz Miller

Vice President & Principal Analyst Constellation Research

About Liz Miller: Liz Miller is Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation, focused on the org-wide team sport known as customer experience. While covering CX as an enterprise strategy, Miller spends time zeroing in on the functional demands of Marketing and Service and the evolving role of the Chief Marketing Officer, the rise of the Chief Experience Officer, the evolution of customer engagement and the rising requirement for a new security posture that accounts for the threat to brand trust in this age of AI.  With over 30 years of marketing, Miller offers strategic guidance on the leadership, business transformation and technology requirements to deliver on today’s CX strategies. She has worked with global marketing organizations to transform… Read more

Have you ever attended an event and just had something stick in your head…for days or even weeks? Months? Since attending Smartsheet ENGAGE in early November 2025, a thought has been rattling around: what matters for 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, process and AI work together, unified in a vision of not settling for the slog and instead move 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. Afterall, 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 of what we talk about 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?

First, one must break down what Collaborative Work Management (CWM) is supposed to deliver. For those who tend to have a distinctly functional bias, for example a marketer or CX leader more comfortable with a Marketing Work Management point of view where campaign calendars and product launch process templates dominate discussion…there is a need to see the bigger picture…to zoom out a bit.

CWM tools bring shared spaces, calendars, content and communications into a single work pane, bringing coordination and visibility to projects and tasks that are largely interconnected and dependent on one another. They bring order to chaos, streamlining and organizing what is often a cacophony of sound when a smoothly orchestrated symphony is in order. CWM tools can bring both agility and accountability to the most complex projects. It is built for organizations that want to move beyond management by spreadsheet or passive communication and is ideal for teams where people need to work in close alignment, even when they don’t work in close proximity.

For the most part, this is what customers have come to know and rely on Smartsheet to deliver: to be their trusted collaborative work engine that brings order to the chaos. Smartsheet customers most often talk about the flexibility, reliability and durability of the tools. The collaborative work management ethos celebrates how, where and when projects can move from a plan into action. Through this lens, the “future” of this work leans into ways in which data, AI and automations can advance and accelerate key tasks.

So, what is IWM? And how is it different from CWM?

The answer lies primarily in the shifting tides of work and technology, more specifically around AI, especially generative and agentic capabilities within the user experience and across solutions and applications. IWM relies on AI-powered insights and intelligence to manage work, learning as it goes, to turn passive activity into recommendations including different processes that can complete work more quickly and effectively. Over time and with the right work and the right data, these suggestions will become even more fluid, and actions can be taken autonomously in true agentic workflows.

While CWM centralizes project tasks, conversations and content, IWM takes those same tasks, conversations and content and establishes smarter paths to performance, automating tasks, streamlining processes and empowering AI agents to tackle the repetitive and mundane.

IWM focuses less on workflow speed and more on business velocity. Speed can, and is often increased thanks to collaboration, efficiency and combined effort, but speed just tells you how fast something has moved. Velocity, on the other hand, tells you how fast something has moved…and the direction of that movement. The goal of IWM is not only to reach the end of a project faster (which it still does) but crank up the velocity of work and the velocity of decisions to land with greater precision, impact and force. The fuel that powers speed is collaboration. The fuel that powers velocity is intelligence.

Translating rows of data to monitor project performance, identify trends, flag bottlenecks and recommend fixes in moments not months…this is intelligence set to work…and intelligence set to amplify velocity. Instead of leaning into the AI hype cycle attendees were not worrying about how they could build a digital workforce. Instead, conversations turned to how project managers could delegate work to digital agents.

That’s why a key line from newly minted CEO Rajeev Singh’s first ENGAGE keynote sprang into focus: “We will be a strategic platform, not a tactical tool.” This is perhaps the greatest and most tangible explanation about how IWM differs from CWM: strategy with intention.

Pratima Arora, Smartsheet’s Chief Product Officer, brought the ENGAGE audience to a familiar place: imagine it is late in the day after long hours of work, and everything looks fine. That is, until in the blink of an eye that high stakes project you and the team have been working on together, grinding on all gears, suddenly and inexplicably goes off the rails. In those moments, decisions don’t just get made…they get made with force and ideally conviction. They get made before it’s too late.

“It’s not just about having the right plan,” Arora noted from the keynote stage. “It’s about having the best insights that make the best decisions to deliver on that plan. But the problem is in critical moments, planning feels like guessing. Guessing is not a strategy.”

We’ve all been in these situations…as a Marketer, with budget and spend decisioning on the line for a critical go to market initiative, the chaos of the unknown is only overshadowed by the complexity of the known variables and swamps of data that can make the most seasoned CMO question the most mundane decision. Then suddenly the market shifts. The unexpected sweeps the market sending months of planning into question and chaos.

While CWM tools can help a team react to the chaos, an IWM platform will have already allowed the marketing team’s project leader to run multiple scenarios and set AI agents to the task of testing for the unknown. With Scenario Planning, teams can use AI to automatically generate what-if scenarios, explore different paths, and decide the best way forward without disrupting live project plans. Yes, guessing isn’t a strategy. Similarly, gut isn’t intelligence. Daring to ask “what if” or “why not” shouldn’t come at a cost. And that cost should never be the success of any project.

As look back on Smartsheet ENGAGE 2025, it's perhaps this idea that the real future of work demands a new velocity for decisions so that decisions big or small can predictably accelerate the velocity of work. The goal here is to ensure that both the speed and direction of our actions, our strategies and our business outcomes are always in view. Without this new age of work management, all our work and our efforts are just addressing speed, held constant but never transforming. All our work ends up stuck on a treadmill, fooling us into believing we are in motion when we are just running in place.

So, here’s to another year bravely marching into this new future of work where agents aren’t taking over our work, but instead are being put to work because working faster than the pace of change demands decisions rooted in strategy and intelligence.

Image AI generated using Adobe Firefly Image 4 and Gemini Nano Banana. No real rabbits were turned into robots and forced to wear hoodies.

Dr. David Bray

Distinguished Chair of the Accelerator & Principal/CEO Stimson Center & LeadDoAdapt Ventures

Dr. David A. Bray is a Distinguished Fellow and Chair of the Accelerator with the Alfred Lee Loomis Innovation Council at the non-partisan Henry L. Stimson Center. He is also a CEO and transformation leader for different “under the radar” tech and data ventures seeking to get started in novel situations and an elected Fellow with the National Academies of Public Administration in addition to a lifetime member of the Senior Executives Association. He is Principal at LeadDoAdapt Ventures and has served in a variety of leadership roles in turbulent environments, including bioterrorism preparedness and response from 2000-2005. Dr. Bray previously was the Executive Director for the bipartisan National Commission for the Review of the Research and Development Programs of the U.S. Intelligence… Read more

While global leaders gather in Davos to discuss "Cooperation in a Contested World," corporate Boards face a starker reality: your fiduciary duty now extends into the gray zone. This is not the world of traditional risk management. It is a domain where Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs) exploit hardware-level vulnerabilities to exfiltrate IP, where fragmented AI policies across 50 U.S. states create compliance nightmares that competitors exploit, and where nation-state actors target your brand equity as a geopolitical weapon.

The question is no longer whether your company will be targeted, but whether your Board understands that cybersecurity, AI governance, and geopolitical risk are now inseparable from corporate strategy and shareholder value.

The Convergence at Davos

In his analysis of the World Economic Forum's 2026 gathering, my friend and colleague Ray Wang posed a critical question that should keep every Board member awake at night: "In 2026 and beyond, will countries and companies have to choose a side between China vs the United States?" As Ray noted, the deepening rivalry between these powers creates a mutually exclusive relationship where strategic alignment with one comes at the expense of ties with the other. For Boards, this is not an abstract geopolitical debate. It is a daily operational reality that intersects with three immediate threats I want to address directly.

First, your hardware supply chains are compromised at levels most Boards do not yet comprehend. Second, the Balkanization of AI policy across both the United States and the rest of the free world creates strategic asymmetries that favor competitors operating under unified national frameworks. Third, gray zone conflict has made your company a target whether you realize it or not, and the attacks are designed to stay below the threshold that would trigger a traditional security response or even Board awareness.

Let me be direct: if your Board's risk committee is still treating cybersecurity as an IT issue, AI as a compliance checkbox, and geopolitics as someone else's problem, you are already behind.

Hardware Vulnerabilities: The 15-Year Systematic Campaign You Didn't Know Was Happening

During my time first as a Senior National Intelligence Service Executive and later as Chief Information Officer at the Federal Communications Commission, I confronted a reality that most corporate Boards still have not internalized. Advanced Persistent Threats are not opportunistic hackers looking for quick wins. They are nation-state operations with 15-year time horizons, systematic discipline, and one objective: position themselves so deeply in your infrastructure that by the time you discover them, it is too late.

These actors do not just exploit software vulnerabilities. They compromise hardware at the manufacturing level, embedding backdoors in chips, routers, and firmware that your security teams will never detect with conventional tools. They target the supply chain chokepoints where a single compromised component can give them access to thousands of downstream customers. And they are patient. They will sit dormant in your systems for years, exfiltrating IP, monitoring communications, and mapping your network until the moment they need to activate.

Ray's analysis highlighted that over $6 trillion will be invested in AI infrastructure by 2030. But here is what that statistic obscures: every data center, every AI accelerator chip, every network switch in that infrastructure represents a potential entry point for APTs if Boards do not demand hardware-level security verification from their vendors.

The strategic question for Boards is this: do you know where every critical component in your infrastructure was manufactured, by whom, and under what security protocols? If the answer is no, you have a fiduciary exposure that goes far beyond traditional cyber insurance.

The 50-State AI Policy Fragmentation: A Gift to Your Competitors

I have spent the past two years working with policymakers and industry leaders on AI frameworks on both sides of the aisle as well as external to the United States. What I have witnessed is a policy disaster unfolding in slow motion, and it is creating competitive disadvantages that most Boards have not yet quantified.

Right now, your company must navigate conflicting AI regulations across 50 U.S. states, each with different definitions of algorithmic accountability, data privacy, and bias testing. California has one framework. Texas has another. New York is developing a third. Meanwhile, your competitors in China operate under a unified national AI strategy with clear guidelines, centralized resources, and government backing.

This is not just a compliance cost issue, though those costs are real and growing. It is a strategic speed issue. While your legal team is parsing whether your AI model meets the requirements of all 50 states, your competitors are iterating, deploying, and capturing market share under coherent national policies.

The fragmentation also creates security vulnerabilities. When compliance requirements conflict across jurisdictions, companies often default to the lowest common denominator or create patchwork solutions that leave gaps. APTs and gray zone actors exploit these gaps ruthlessly. They study your compliance posture, identify the seams between state regulations, and target the vulnerabilities that emerge from trying to satisfy everyone.

For Boards, this raises a governance question that transcends the legal department: are you building AI systems that are merely compliant, or are you building systems that are strategically resilient in a contested global environment? There is a difference, and it matters.

Gray Zone Conflict: Your Company Is Already a Target

Let me introduce you to a concept I have been writing about for years: gray zone conflict. This is the space between peace and conventional warfare where state and non-state actors use cyberattacks, disinformation, economic pressure, and IP theft to achieve strategic objectives while staying below the threshold that would trigger a military response or even public awareness.

Your company is operating in this zone right now, whether your Board acknowledges it or not. And the attacks are not random. They are targeted, systematic, and designed to achieve one of three objectives: financial gain through ransomware or extortion, brand damage to undermine market position or public trust, or access to your secrets and IP to accelerate a competitor's capabilities or a nation's strategic industries.

I have seen gray zone operations unfold in real time during my career in the intelligence community and as a federal CIO. The sophistication is breathtaking. Adversaries will spend months studying your organization, identifying key employees, mapping relationships, and crafting social engineering campaigns that exploit human psychology, not just technical vulnerabilities. They will compromise a mid-level employee's personal device, pivot to corporate systems, and exfiltrate terabytes of data over months while your security operations center sees nothing unusual.

The brand damage operations are equally insidious. Adversaries will seed disinformation about your products, manipulate social media to amplify customer complaints, or leak selectively edited internal communications to create reputational crises that tank your stock price. And because these operations stay below the threshold of overt attack, your crisis communications playbook is often useless.

Here is what keeps me up at night: most Boards do not have visibility into gray zone threats until after the damage is done. Your quarterly risk reports focus on traditional metrics like cyber incident response times or compliance audit results. But gray zone operations are designed to evade those metrics. They succeed precisely because they do not trigger the alarms your systems are designed to detect.

What Boards Must Do: From Risk Management to Strategic Foresight

I have spent my career leading what I call "near impossible missions," from modernizing legacy systems at the FCC to directing technology-enabled bioterrorism responses to 9/11, anthrax in 2001, SARS in 2003, and more. The common thread in all these experiences is that traditional risk management frameworks are insufficient when you are facing adaptive, intelligent adversaries in rapidly changing environments.

Boards need to shift from reactive risk management to proactive strategic foresight. This means three things.

First, demand hardware-level security verification. Your procurement processes must include rigorous supply chain security assessments that go beyond vendor questionnaires. You need to know the provenance of every critical component, the security protocols at every manufacturing facility, and the verification methods that ensure no tampering occurred. This is not an IT issue. It is a Board-level strategic sourcing issue that affects the integrity of your entire operation.

Second, advocate for federal AI policy leadership. The 50-state fragmentation is not sustainable, and it is not in your shareholders' interests. Boards should be vocal in calling for light-touch federal frameworks that provide clarity, consistency, and competitive parity with other nations. This is not about stifling innovation. It is about creating the conditions where American companies can compete globally without one hand tied behind their backs by conflicting state mandates.

Third, build gray zone resilience into your governance model. This means expanding your risk committee's mandate to include geopolitical threat intelligence, not just cyber metrics. It means conducting tabletop exercises that simulate gray zone scenarios like IP theft campaigns, brand sabotage operations, or supply chain compromises. And it means developing decision elasticity, which is the ability to respond rapidly to ambiguous threats without waiting for perfect information or consensus.

The Agency Paradox and the Future of Corporate Governance

Throughout my work, I have observed what I call the Agency Paradox. As our technological tools become exponentially more powerful, our collective sense of human agency often feels increasingly fragile. For Boards, this paradox manifests in a troubling way: the more data and AI capabilities you have, the more you may feel overwhelmed by complexity and uncertainty rather than empowered by insight.

The solution is not to retreat from technology or to hand over decision-making to algorithms. The solution is to develop what I call decision elasticity, which is the ability to use AI and data to gather intelligence at scale while maintaining the nuanced, ethical judgment that only humans can provide. In the context of gray zone threats, this means using AI to detect anomalies and surface threats, but relying on human judgment to interpret ambiguous signals, assessing strategic context, and making decisions that balance security with values like privacy, transparency, and due process.

The most forward-thinking Boards I work with are already making this shift. They recognize that cybersecurity, AI governance, and geopolitical risk are not separate silos. They are interconnected dimensions of a single strategic challenge: how do we build resilient organizations that can thrive in a contested, rapidly changing world while preserving the human agency and ethical judgment that define great companies?

In Part 2 of this series, I will explore how Boards can operationalize this strategic foresight through AI-augmented defense and human-machine partnerships that balance speed with wisdom.

An Invitation to Deeper Dialogue

If your Board is grappling with these converging threats, if you recognize that traditional risk frameworks are insufficient, or if you simply want to stress-test your current approach against the realities of gray zone conflict and geopolitical competition, I invite you to engage in a deeper conversation.

My work as both as a Board Member and a senior advisor is major compaies is dedicated to helping Boards develop the strategic foresight and decision elasticity needed to navigate what I call "tech tectonics," which are the seismic shifts beneath the surface of global business. This is not about selling you a technology solution or a compliance framework. It is about building the governance capacity to make wise decisions in conditions of radical uncertainty.

The stakes could not be higher. As Ray noted in his Davos analysis, we are entering an era where the nature of work, the meaning of human existence, and the future social order are all in flux. For corporate Boards, the question is whether you will shape that future proactively or react to it after your competitors, your adversaries, and the market have already moved.

I have spent my career wrestling with these challenges, and I use the word "wrestling" deliberately. Leadership in this era is not a graceful dance. It requires constant engagement, humility, and a commitment to co-creating a future where technology serves human dignity rather than constraining it.

Your fiduciary duty now extends into the gray zone. The question is whether your Board is ready to govern accordingly.

Dr. David Bray is both Chair of the Accelerator and a Distinguished Fellow at the non-partisan Stimson Center as well as Principal and CEO at LeadDoAdapt Ventures, Inc. He previously served as a non-partisan Senior National Intelligence Service Executive, as Chief Information Officer of the Federal Communications Commission, and IT Chief for the Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Program. Business Insider named him one of the top “24 Americans Changing the World” and he has received both the Joint Civilian Service Commendation Award and the National Intelligence Exceptional Achievement Medal. The U.S. Congress invited him to serve as an expert witness on AI in September 2025. He also advises corporate Boards and CEOs on navigating the convergence of AI, cybersecurity, and geopolitical risk.

Esteban Kolsky

Chief Distiller, Board Advisor Constellation Research

Esteban Kolsky spent the first part of his professional career working on the customer service front line and in management roles, culminating in early implementations of first-generation CRM tools. In 2000, he became a research analyst at Gartner, focused on CRM, customer service, customer experience management, enterprise feedback management, and voice of the customer, among topics that later became the basis for the current field of CX. During his tenure at Gartner, Kolsky assisted vendors and Global 2000 organizations with their customer strategies. He left Gartner to focus his career on strategic advisory services and influenced all the major software vendors, as well as many smaller vendors, in the CX industry and advised executive leadership teams across industries and countries… Read more

Welcome to a new edition of The Board: Distillation Aftershots ^(*).

This newsletter shares curious and interesting insights and data points distilled from enterprise technology to identify what’s notable.  If you want to subscribe to the newsletter, in your inbox every Sunday morning, please click here.

In this issue, we will continue our discussion of robots and robotics. Previously, I wrote about humanoid robots and their limited usefulness. Today, I’d like to talk about functional robots… the ones that don’t look like us but do a good job.

First, my take. 

Last week, I made my case against humanoid robots: they are cute, work in movies, make me laugh, but they’re not valuable to businesses (for the most part; as with anything else, use cases apply). Many reasons, mostly related to efficiency versus costs (how much it costs to make a humanoid work like a human, when there’s no need for such complexity). 

This week, I want to discuss the opposite: the ROI inherent in non-humanoid robots and the efficiency they deliver as they move from innovation spend to infrastructure ROI. Treat is a system, not a tool, and it locks in structural cost and competitive advantages.  It is no longer a novelty; it works.

As shown in the resources below, large organizations have turned to robots to save time and money.  Whether we are talking about reducing health and life risks, speeding up processes, reducing costs, operating 24/7, automating manual tasks efficiently, or a combination of all these, we have proven that they work.  What started in the 1980s and 1990s in manufacturing plants became more impressive for smaller outfits as robotics improved (and costs decreased, naturally).

Whether it’s Amazon running a dark warehouse where Roomba-like robots move merchandise 24/7 to speed up shipping, or UPS loading and unloading trucks to balance labor and health issues, these scenarios should spark the imagination of any other organization.  Are there any repetitive tasks in your processes that could benefit from non-stop or safer operations?  Are there menial tasks that are taking valuable time from team members who could be working on higher-revenue tasks?  That’s the starting point.

More and more, robotics startups are moving to create highly-specialized, industry- and job-specific robots that return ROI in a short time (as low as six months, mostly fully repaid within two years).  And the merger (or, better said, integration) of AI and robotics, which we are experiencing now, will further change these equations. Imagine mixing the autonomy of thought of an agent, with the mechanized operations of a robot – no longer a single, static operation but a dynamic, “thinking” one.  

Imagine the possibilities – everyone else is, in 2026 and beyond.

Here are some reading resources:

1. UPS deploys truck-unloading robots to optimize logistics, expanding a pilot program that showed great potential.  They demonstrated ROI by addressing labor availability, injury risk, and peak-volume volatility.  Published December 2025. 

2. Danfoss deployed autonomous mobile robots (AMRs) integrated with compact storage to manage growth without expanding the warehouse footprint. Published 2025

3. Walmart continues to roll out robots across its regional distribution centers, using fleets of high-speed mobile robots for picking, sorting, and palletizing. Because they were deployed as a supply-chain platform, the ROI extends beyond a single function to all interdependent functions. Published 2025.
4. Starship’s sidewalk delivery robots crossed 9+ million autonomous deliveries for Uber Eats, operating at urban and campus scale.  One of the few robotics cases with multi-million transactions validating economics over novelty. Published 2025.
5. Here’s a functional example, not tied to any one company: airports, hospitals, and others have adopted professional cleaning robots to address labor shortages and rising operating costs. Published 2025.
6. A study reviewing numerous use cases and case studies found impressive results for organizations deploying functional robots: an average 18–24% ROI over 5 years; up to 30% reduction in labor costs; throughput gains of up to 40%; and space utilization improvements of up to 25%. Published September 2025.

What’s your take? We are fostering a community of executives who want to discuss these issues in depth. This newsletter is but a part of it. We welcome your feedback and look forward to engaging in these conversations.

If you are interested in exploring the full report, discussing the Board’s offering further, or have any additional questions, please contact me at [email protected], and I will be happy to connect with you.