Reflections on the Future and the Opportunity of Intelligent Work
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 experience, 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 everything from…...
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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.
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