Smartsheet AI-powered platform bridges gap between planning and results

Smartsheet Inc. today introduced an artificial intelligence-powered planning and execution platform designed to help enterprises identify when projects are veering off course and take corrective action before delays and cost overruns become serious problems.

Announced at the company’s Engage 2026 conference, the new vsActual platform — pronounced “versus actual” — uses AI agents to continuously monitor work across multiple enterprise systems, compare progress against strategic objectives and recommend adjustments. The company also announced new agentic workflow capabilities, integrations and security controls for its existing work management platform.

The centerpiece of vsActual is what Smartsheet calls Execution Graph, a knowledge graph built from what the company said are two decades of workflow data encompassing millions of projects and nine petabytes of information. The graph maps relationships between tasks, projects, programs and strategic objectives to help AI agents understand how changes in one part of an organization affect others.

The company’s goal is to address a growing disconnect between individual productivity improvements enabled by AI and measurable organizational results, said Pratima Arora, Smartsheet’s chief product and technology officer.

“We were seeing a lot of intelligence and productivity gains getting stuck at an individual level and not translating to a team and organization level,” she said.

VsActual is designed to operate across existing enterprise applications rather than require organizations to consolidate work onto a single platform. It can connect to applications from Oracle Corp., SAP SE, Workday Inc., Atlassian Corp. PLC and ServiceNow Inc. to gather information about budgets, schedules, staffing and project dependencies.

Smartsheet said AI agents can turn strategy documents, spreadsheets and budget proposals into structured plans, model alternative scenarios and monitor execution against those plans. A drift-detection agent (pictured) continuously searches for emerging problems, while other agents generate executive reports and recommend changes as business priorities evolve.

The system can also trace the consequences of disruptions across organizational hierarchies. “If there is a delay in a Jira ticket that has impact five levels up, we can detect it and tell you what is happening,” Arora said.

Historical data advantage

Smartsheet said its historical workflow data provides an advantage over competing planning and work management products. Execution Graph builds on an existing Amazon Web Services Inc. Neptune knowledge graph containing approximately 100 million nodes and incorporates information about workflow patterns, dependencies and collaboration, Arora said.

The company uses multiple foundation models, selecting them based on workload requirements and cost. AWS and Databricks Inc. are its major underlying technology providers. Arora said Smartsheet isn’t training its own large language models.

The announcements also expand Smartsheet’s existing AI capabilities. New Agentic Workflows allow users to schedule recurring activities such as status reports and risk assessments. Specialized creation and data-quality agents can generate project structures, dashboards and reports or identify problems in underlying data.

New integrations include native connections to ServiceNow, Microsoft Corp. Dynamics 365, HubSpot Inc. customer relationship management, Workday Inc. human resources software and Intuit Inc.’s QuickBooks. Conversational integrations with GitHub, Zendesk Inc., Airtable and Monday.com Ltd. are entering early access, with additional AI-assisted integrations planned for early 2027.

Arora emphasized that agentic workflows combine conventional automation with AI rather than relying exclusively on large language models. “This industry overuses LLMs sometimes where it is just simple deterministic action,” she said.

Although some agents can execute scheduled tasks automatically, Arora said human approval remains the default approach for consequential actions. “Our default stance is human in the loop,” she said.

The compay also announced International Organization for Standardization/International Electrotechnical Commission 42001 certification, security event streaming and data classification capabilities intended to strengthen oversight of AI operations.

Smartsheet developed vsActual with about a dozen enterprise design partners. The company publishes pricing on its website.

Image: Smartsheet

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