Smartsheet is Building a Path for Work That Amplifies Enterprise Experience

Smartsheet continues to bet that AI will shift organizations into a new era of work, where the insights, operations and data that exist across the organization can be aligned and set to work more effectively across teams. With its Q1 2026 update, we see the realization of promised functions outlined at Smartsheet Engage 2025 and the introduction of even more intentional conversational, generative and agentic AI capabilities intended to accelerate velocity and insight from planning through to impact.

Some of the buzziest announcements focused on bridging the gap between where users want to work and where they have been working, consolidating and simplifying surfaces and functions in Smartsheet, while giving more access to collaborators without breaking the bank. The introduction of a Smartsheet MCP server including CLI Power Tools, a pack of six Claude Code agents that tackle key tasks project managers will happily bid farewell to thanks to conversational prompts. Deeply rooted in Smartsheet’s responsible AI principles focused on security, accountability, reliability and explainability, these tools encourage users to confidently deploy AI with an intentional trust model where AI analyzes and recommends, but in the end, the human decides.

Highlights of What’s New

• Work Gets Personal: Smartsheet has introduced flexible work views and canvases to put the controls of how users want to work into the hands of the user. With three views available now (Table, Board and Timeline) and two views expected to hit early access in Q2 with quick follows into GA (Custom and Gantt), it is the custom view capability I’m most eager to see in use. In a world where not all work is uniform, neither is how users best organize, track and accelerate. This lean in shows that work management methodologies can and should be flexible to accommodate different audiences, different use cases and different points of focus without duplicated work. With Custom Views, users focus on the work instead of fighting sheets.
  
• Planning With Certainty: A notable standout in the Smartsheet Engage keynote was the intro of Scenario Planning. This is all about running all of those “what-if scenarios” to best understand options, impacts and complications. Instead of using historical or synthetic data, Smartsheet’s Scenario Planning leverages live data, yet is nondestructive, allowing teams to clearly see the best path forward. A personal favorite among the roadmap items from late 2025, Scenario Planning keenly understands that predictive or planning on assumption is nothing more than a guess. The important factor here is that Scenario Planning runs on live data, but relies on the users understanding, expertise, and broad experience, to test assumptions often baked into scenarios. Not synthetic. Real current state stuff. No punishment for even the most outlandish scenario. This is where AI takes on new opportunity for organizations thanks to this capacity to empower new interrogation and level real business outcome insights. It further proves guessing is not a strategy you should settle for under any scenario.
  
• Contributors Get an Even Better Seat at the Table: It isn’t necessarily a secret that customer feedback on the traditional “Viewer” seat was not always positive. Historically the limitations and restrictions that once ensured viewers could not tamper with or destroy content or plans became overly rigid and costly. But in an example of the new Smartsheet leadership being willing to listen and act, the latest update includes the introduction of the Contributor seat. Think of this as Viewer unleashed and unlocked. Contributor users have free access with a nice list of added functionality including commenting and attachments. Current Smartsheet customers have likely already seen their Viewer seats transform with no disruption or destruction. This seat is part of the free tier of solutions and aims to give contributors more access and greater freedom to collaborate. Smartsheet hasn’t just opened the flood gates here…there are significant account visibility, governance and controls being added into the enterprise plan manager.

Why it Matters

Smartsheet is in a race against itself to modernize thanks to and with AI. As an organization that has had a long history with careful, opinionated, durable updates and upgrades, the team has never been one to race to join a hype fueled roller coaster. This has come with, ironically, ups and downs. While their customers know, respect and value their own role as leaders in a customer-driven innovation cycle, Smartsheet’s CEO announced on stage at ENGAGE 2025 that Smartsheet was going to focus on product-led growth. That’s a pretty big goal and one that has been met with questions about how the company can satisfy both.

This release starts to demonstrate just how this new Smartsheet narrative of customer-led innovation driving product-led growth. While competitors are working hard to swim up-market, Smartsheet is securing their position as a leader by entrusting their core project management customer with the keys to powerful AI-fueled capabilities that shift from smart to smarter and doubles down on the vision that states while others aim for speed, Smartsheet is intentionally creating velocity for their customers and themselves. The randomized spray-and-pray approach to AI application is not on CEO Rajeev Singh or CPTO Pratima Arora’s roadmap, so to measure Smartsheet by how many agents are released or how many AI tokens can be burned is a fool’s errand. That’s not the game they are interested in playing. This is about meeting organizations where they work…and then reinventing and reimagining that work for a new, AI-forward era that replaces guessing with certainty.

Final Thoughts

The current philosophical debate around AI argues that because AI can achieve a deep mastery, knowledge and skill of specific tasks traditionally gained over time available to the modern enterprise in seconds, expertise is now commoditized. To make this landing stick, you must first understand the difference between expertise and experience, namely that expertise is deliberate (and deliberately focused and deep) and measured by the results (or output) delivered, while experience is broad and often measured in time served. Expertise is most often measured by the results delivered.

Thanks to AI model training that is intentionally deep into specific areas or skills, Agentic AI systems are ideal to institutionalize expertise. For example, AI can analyze x-rays and scans of commonly diagnosed issues with stunning accuracy in a fraction of time needed by a trained radiologist who is limited by human capacity. It is undeniable that AI has successfully replaced the need for radiologists to read scans and images of common, high-volume, high-visibility conditions. Meanwhile, the demand for skilled radiologists is at an all-time high and Radiology residency programs can’t keep pace with demand and salaries are climbing to lure experienced Radiologists into new positions.

What is the lesson in this dichotomy? Experience, not just in the task at hand, is valued because the devil is in the details…in the complexity of context in which the task is mired, still belongs to the humans. AI thrives in bringing context to narrowly defined tasks within tightly controlled and constantly monitored conditions. Addressing the exceptions, focusing on the less common subspecialties, seeing across conditions in non-standard, real-world scenarios: This is where humans will always thrive. Thankfully, Smartsheet has seen beyond the hyperbole and is making a bet that agentic AI tools can, will and should trade on expertise, trained on the deep understanding of core tasks in a business, freeing project, strategy and business leaders to advance the business and their own roles forward thanks to their experience. AI can take the tasks driven by expertise. Smartsheet is inviting users to leverage their experience to drive business velocity.