Analyst(s): Dion Hinchcliffe
Publication Date: December 22, 2025

What is Covered in this Article:

• The key Smartsheet platform announcements from an IT perspective, including new agentic AI capabilities, automation enhancements, and enterprise-grade governance and security features.
• How Smartsheet’s Intelligent Work Management positioning maps to CIO priorities around strategic execution at scale, portfolio visibility, and measurable outcomes is now under accelerated AI infusion.
• Architectural implications for CIOs: How AI agents, cross-work knowledge, and workflow automation change integration patterns, operating models, and data stewardship requirements across the enterprise.
• The governance and risk posture implied by Smartsheet’s responsible AI messaging and new security capabilities, including what’s table stakes vs. what still needs proof in real deployments.
• Competitive and ecosystem considerations for collaborative work management as Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and fast-moving specialists converge on “AI for work execution.”

The Event – Major Themes & Vendor Moves: Smartsheet used its annual ENGAGE conference in Seattle to launch and formalize a strategic repositioning: “Intelligent Work Management” as a new AI-based operating model for modern enterprises, going well beyond the category’s traditional work-tracking focus.

The announcements cluster into three themes that matter to CIOs evaluating platforms for strategic work at scale:

1. Agentic AI moves from “assist” to “operate”: Smartsheet is expanding beyond embedded genAI assistance into agentic behaviors that monitor work, surface risk, and recommend actions continuously. One example highlighted in the release coverage is a “Project Manager” Smart Agent that monitors progress, flags and prioritizes risks, and recommends plan improvements.
2. Equally important: Smartsheet previewed “Smart Hub” (targeted for next year) as a central control center to manage/configure AI building blocks, create custom agents, and gain clarity into how data is used—signaling an intent to treat AI as a governed capability, not scattered features.
3. Workflow intelligence + automation as the scale lever: Alongside agents, Smartsheet now emphasizes intelligent automation and “work knowledge” as the mechanism to translate strategy into execution. Platform updates described in the release coverage include new AI-driven and automation enhancements, such as dynamic dropdowns (to improve consistency at scale) and broader automation patterns that aim to reduce what it calls execution silos.
4. Enterprise controls become first-class (security, posture, and readiness): Smartsheet is pairing AI expansion with enterprise safeguards. The release coverage highlights additions such as a “Security Score” for posture measurement and multi-factor authentication improvements, along with responsible AI framing around customer data ownership and transparency about when AI is active.
5. For CIOs, the significance is not any single feature; it’s the overall pattern: Smartsheet is asserting it can deliver broad-based AI acceleration for workers without relinquishing enterprise-grade governance.

Context: Smartsheet’s new private ownership, and why it matters

Smartsheet’s direction today is also being shaped by its move to private ownership (Vista Equity Partners and Blackstone). The transaction closed on January 22, 2025, where they cashed out at $56.50/share and delisted from the NYSE.

From a CIO lens, this can cut both ways: Private ownership can support longer-horizon product investment and faster operational change, but it can also heighten buyer scrutiny around packaging/pricing stability and roadmap discipline, especially as AI capabilities expand. For now, the company appears poised to invest in a major way in new intelligent capabilities and catch up on needed security upgrades like two-factor authentication.

CIO Take: Smartsheet’s Intelligent Work Management as a Strategic Execution Platform

Analyst Take: CIO Implications of Smartsheet’s Intelligent Work Management Push

Smartsheet is making a credible attempt to claim a higher layer in the enterprise stack: An execution platform for strategic work that unites people, data, and AI. For CIOs, the relevant question is not “does it have agents,” but whether Smartsheet can become a dependable execution layer across portfolios and operations without creating new fragmentation, governance gaps, or platform lock-in.

Smartsheet’s leadership posture in CWM is now being re-litigated in the AI era

Smartsheet has long been viewed as a category pioneer in collaborative work management, with a broad enterprise presence. The new announcements are best interpreted as a bid to defend that leadership as the market shifts from “project tracking” to “AI-mediated execution.

CIOs should read this as a move to compete at a higher abstraction level: not against a single rival, but against suites (Microsoft), workflow incumbents (ServiceNow), and adjacent execution systems (Salesforce), while also fending off fast product-led specialists (Asana/monday.com/Airtable/ClickUp).

Where the Strategy Aligns with the CIO’s Needs

1. Execution visibility and outcome accountability: A recurring CIO pain point is demonstrating that strategic work is translating into measurable outcomes. Smartsheet’s messaging—agents that surface risk, automation that reduces friction, and security posture visibility—maps directly to the operational reality that AI adoption is easy, but AI impact is hard to prove and govern at scale.
2. Governed AI, not AI everywhere: Smartsheet’s preview of a centralized Smart Hub for controlling and configuring AI building blocks is directionally aligned with how CIOs actually need to deploy AI: Centralized policy, distributed enablement, auditable usage, and clarity on data flow.
3. An emerging “work graph” problem, approached pragmatically: Smartsheet is implicitly targeting an enterprise-wide work intelligence layer, connecting tasks, artifacts, dependencies, and decisions. Whether the underlying approach becomes a true enterprise work graph (and how interoperable it is) will determine whether Smartsheet is a point solution or a platform CIOs can standardize on.

The Hard Parts CIOs Must Test (before scaling)

1. Data trust and context quality: Agentic behavior is only as good as the underlying context. CIOs should pressure-test how Smartsheet’s agents and automation behave with messy, multi-source, multi-permission enterprise data, especially where “truth” is distributed across systems of record (ERP/CRM/ITSM/PLM) and collaboration tools.
2. Governance overhead vs. governance outcomes: Smartsheet is leaning into responsible AI language (customer data ownership, transparency, and control). CIOs should translate that into operational requirements: logging, policy controls, exception handling, model behavior boundaries, third-party risk, and evidence for audit/compliance. The gap between “features exist” and “controls are usable at enterprise scale” is where many AI-enabled platforms stumble.
3. Platform scope creep and “too many layers”: As Smartsheet climbs toward being an execution layer, it risks overlapping with adjacent stacks (M365/Teams/Planner/Project; ServiceNow for operational workflows; Salesforce for front-office execution). CIOs should evaluate whether Smartsheet complements these ecosystems cleanly—or becomes yet another “shadow orchestration layer” that increases complexity.

What to Watch:

• Whether Smartsheet’s agentic layer becomes genuinely governable at scale: (Smart Hub maturity, auditability, data lineage, and role-based control), versus remaining a set of helpful-but-fragmented AI features
• How convincingly Smartsheet can anchor “intelligent work” in enterprise data realities: integration depth, identity/permission propagation, and consistent outcomes across heterogeneous systems.
• Enterprise confidence signals post-take-private: Packaging/pricing stability, roadmap clarity, and supportability as the platform expands into higher-stakes operational use.
• Competitive convergence: Microsoft and others will increasingly treat “work execution” as a native layer of productivity or workflow suites. Smartsheet’s differentiation must remain clear: where it is uniquely better for strategic work at scale, not just “also has agents.”
• Proof of measurable outcomes: Smartsheet’s own research points to a gap between AI adoption and readiness/impact. CIOs should demand ROI narratives backed by instrumentation, not anecdotes.

Disclosure: Futurum is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.

Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum as a whole.

Other insights from Futurum:

The Biggest Takeaways from Smartsheet ENGAGE

Smartsheet Enhances Enterprise Scalability, Automation, Security

Smartsheet Implements Gen AI-Powered Assistant for Its Employees

Author Information

Dion Hinchcliffe

Dion Hinchcliffe is a distinguished thought leader, IT expert, and enterprise architect, celebrated for his strategic advisory with Fortune 500 and Global 2000 companies. With over 25 years of experience, Dion works with the leadership teams of top enterprises, as well as leading tech companies, in bridging the gap between business and technology, focusing on enterprise AI, IT management, cloud computing, and digital business. He is a sought-after keynote speaker, industry analyst, and author, known for his insightful and in-depth contributions to digital strategy, IT topics, and digital transformation. Dion’s influence is particularly notable in the CIO community, where he engages actively with CIO roundtables and has been ranked numerous times as one of the top global influencers of Chief Information Officers. He also serves as an executive fellow at the SDA Bocconi Center for Digital Strategies.