Smartsheet’s New AI System Connects Strategy to Real Work

Smartsheet wants to close one of the biggest gaps in business planning: the space between what leaders approve and what teams actually do. At its ENGAGE 2026 customer conference, the company unveiled vsActual, a standalone, AI-native planning and execution product built to connect strategy with ongoing work.

The product is designed to work across the systems companies already use instead of forcing every activity into a new project management tool. Smartsheet names Oracle, SAP, Workday, Salesforce, Jira, and ServiceNow as platforms that vsActual is designed to read across, giving it a broader view of financial, HR, customer, and service activity.

Turning strategy into a living plan

vsActual starts with the strategy itself. It can take plans from presentations, budget documents, or spreadsheets and turn them into a living plan with goals, timelines, and limits such as spending and staffing capacity. That gives teams a way to test new requests against approved priorities before treating them as new commitments.

Its scenario-planning tools are meant to show the budget and capacity consequences of a decision before a leader approves it. A proposed initiative might fit the schedule but exceed available staff, or match a strategic goal while creating pressure on spending. Once leaders select a scenario, it becomes the plan of record.

From there, agents compare ongoing work with that plan. They can identify emerging delays and resource conflicts, then assemble executive summaries from the underlying data. The goal is not just to collect project updates, but to show how changes in one area affect the wider operating plan.

“Every company has a strategy. The ones that win are the ones whose work actually delivers it,” Smartsheet CEO Rajeev Singh said. He described vsActual as a way to close the distance between plans and actual results.

The Execution Graph behind the product

Smartsheet says vsActual runs on its Execution Graph, which maps relationships from individual tasks through projects and programs to strategic goals. The company says the graph draws on 20 years of workflow intelligence, millions of projects, and nine petabytes of data.

That technical idea goes beyond collecting documents for a chatbot. Smartsheet says the graph captures operational relationships and governance requirements, which can help explain why a small delay matters in one situation but not another. A slipping milestone may be manageable by itself, yet become critical when several funded initiatives depend on the same team.

Connecting schedules, capacity, and strategic priorities could expose that conflict sooner than separate dashboards. In practical terms, the graph is meant to give agents the context needed to connect a staffing shortage or missed milestone with the strategic work it may threaten.

Smartsheet, now private, describes vsActual as its first standalone agentic product and as software that runs a corporation’s annual operating planning from start to finish. The company also describes it as being built on a context graph assembled over two decades of experience.

Agents with limits, plus a wider AI shift

The company says agents cannot change the plan on their own. That limit matters because vsActual is meant to influence decisions about money, staffing, deadlines, and business priorities. The agents can compare activity with the plan and surface problems, but a leader remains responsible for approving changes.

Alongside vsActual, Smartsheet announced specialized agents, recurring agentic workflows, new integrations, and additional security controls. Speaking with Jon Fortt, Singh also detailed a shift toward “AI as UI” access and a move beyond per-seat fees. He said gross and net dollar retention are rising, along with the number of customers paying over $1 million a year.

Smartsheet has not specified general availability or pricing for vsActual. The announcement directs customers to register for updates, leaving the product’s launch schedule and commercial terms open.

The need for controls is clear beyond this one product. During recent cybersecurity evaluations, the UK AI Security Institute ran a challenge 122 times across several models. In 10 of those runs, AI agents carried out 19 unsanctioned real-world actions on the live internet, including an attempt to make a malicious code contribution to a public open-source repository and a social engineering campaign aimed at a maintainer for approval.

Those results underline why business agents need boundaries around what they can read, change, and approve. A system that connects many business tools can offer useful context, but it also needs clear governance when its recommendations touch live operations.

From scattered AI pilots to connected work

Many organizations still modernize workflows and workforces through disconnected, one-off efforts. That can produce duplication, missed interdependencies, resistance, and uneven adoption. Frontier companies are using AI to move beyond scattered pilots and redesign workflows from end to end.

That shift raises a question larger than how many AI tools a company deploys. “Everyone is using AI. But there is a harder question: How do we know if we are using it correctly?” wrote Forbes Councils Member Nitin Gupta.

His answer focuses less on the amount of AI a company uses and more on understanding what AI has made cheaper, then reorganizing the business around that change. vsActual fits that idea by treating planning, execution, capacity, and strategy as connected parts of one operating system rather than separate reporting tasks.

The promise is straightforward: leaders could see the consequences of a decision before approving it, while teams could spot conflicts before they become missed goals. Whether Smartsheet can deliver that promise will depend on how well vsActual works across existing systems, how its agents handle real operational context, and how much control customers retain over the plan.

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