Smartsheet in 2026: Smart Agents, AI Formulas, and the Shift to Intelligent Work Management

The $8.4 Billion Platform Bet

In January 2025, Smartsheet went private in an $8.4 billion deal led by Blackstone and Vista Equity Partners. That number tells you everything about how the acquiring firms see the platform's trajectory.

Blackstone and Vista didn't pay $8.4 billion for a spreadsheet tool. They bought a platform with 16.7 million active users, over $1 billion in annual recurring revenue, and 85% Fortune 500 penetration. The AI investment is the thesis — transform Smartsheet from "a tool people use" into "an intelligent system that manages work."

Free from quarterly earnings pressure, the company is executing aggressively. More than a third of dashboard elements are now AI-generated. Formula support inquiries dropped approximately 50% since the AI formula generator launched. CEO Mark Mader has been explicit: AI is non-optional for the platform's future.

This article maps what is available today, what is coming in 2026, and what it means for anyone who manages work at scale.

What's Live Today

AI Formula Generator

This is the standout feature — the one that delivered measurable impact immediately.

How it works: Open the AI tools panel, click Generate Formula, and describe what you want in plain language. The AI understands your sheet's column names and types.

Examples of what it generates accurately:

• "Count rows where status is blocked and priority is high" → =COUNTIFS([Status]:[Status], "Blocked", [Priority]:[Priority], "High")
• "Calculate business days until due date" → =NETWORKDAYS(TODAY(), [Due Date]@row)
• "Flag rows where actual cost exceeds budget by more than 20%" → =IF([Actual]@row > [Budget]@row * 1.2, "Over Budget", "Within Budget")
• "Show the project phase from the parent row" → =PARENT([Phase]@row)

The generator works because it has access to your sheet's column names and types. Descriptive column names matter — "Due Date" produces better results than "Col_D."

Bottom line: Production-ready. Use it today, especially for users who understand what they want logically but struggle with Smartsheet's syntax differences from Excel.

Generate Text and Summaries

AI can generate or summarize text within cells. Select a cell → AI Tools → Generate Text.

Use cases: summarize project descriptions for executive updates, draft update emails based on row data, create acceptance criteria from a brief task title. The AI references your adjacent column values for context.

This feature is most useful for teams that use Smartsheet for documentation alongside tracking — PMs writing status updates, customer success managers drafting client communications.

Intelligent Form Fill

Authenticated users submitting Smartsheet forms can paste text or use voice input, and the AI maps content to form fields automatically.

Example: paste a paragraph of meeting notes into the form's description area. The AI extracts the project name, due date, assigned person, and priority into the correct fields — eliminating manual field-by-field entry.

This is particularly valuable for mobile workflows where typing into individual fields is friction-heavy.

AI-Powered Chart Generation

Describe the chart you want in natural language → Smartsheet generates it from your sheet data and adds it to the dashboard builder.

"Show me a bar chart of budget by department sorted by largest to smallest" produces a draft visualization. You review, adjust, and publish.

What's Coming in 2026

The following features are in various stages of Early Adopter Program (EAP) or preview. Do not build critical processes on them yet — they will change before general availability.

Smart Assist

An AI companion that scaffolds entire projects from text descriptions.

The workflow:

1. Open Smart Assist
2. Type: "I need a product launch tracker with phases, tasks, owners, and budget tracking"
3. Smart Assist creates: sheet structure, column types, sample hierarchy, suggested automations, and a starter dashboard

You review and customize. The AI does the initial build.

Smart Assist also answers questions in natural language: "Which tasks are overdue?" "What's the total budget for Phase 2?" "Who owns the most at-risk items?"

And activates automations via conversation: "Set up a weekly reminder for all incomplete tasks assigned to the engineering team."

For organizations that currently spend significant time setting up new project sheets from templates, Smart Assist could eliminate that overhead entirely.

Smart Columns

AI-powered column types that continuously process row data. You define the column's purpose once; Smartsheet applies it to every row automatically, including new rows added in the future.

Real-world configurations:

• Sentiment Smart Column on a customer feedback sheet: auto-classifies each row's comment as Positive, Neutral, or Negative
• Category Smart Column on a support intake sheet: auto-tags tickets based on description text — "Password Reset," "Billing Issue," "Technical Bug," "Feature Request"
• Summary Smart Column: generates a one-sentence summary of long description fields for quick scanning
• Translation Smart Column: automatically translates content for multilingual teams

The competitive implication: any team currently spending time manually categorizing or tagging incoming data will be able to automate that entirely.

Smart Flows

Natural language automation builder. Describe complex multi-step workflows; Smart Flows builds the entire automation chain.

Example input: "When a new row is added with Priority = High, assign it to the on-call person from the Roster sheet, send them an alert, set the due date to 3 business days from today, and post a Slack notification."

What Smart Flows generates: A multi-action automation with conditional logic, a cross-sheet lookup for the on-call person, a NETWORKDAYS-based date calculation, and an external Slack integration — from one natural language description.

This extends beyond current automation capabilities with more complex conditional logic and cross-platform actions.

Smart Agents: The Project Manager Agent

This is the most significant development on the roadmap — and the most important to understand clearly.

What the PM Agent does:

• Continuously monitors project progress across your sheets
• Identifies schedule risks before they become visible delays
• Suggests plan optimizations: resequencing tasks, reallocating resources, adjusting dependencies
• Proactively flags delayed tasks and their downstream impact
• Recommends resource reallocation when team members are over-capacity

What the PM Agent does NOT do:

• It does not auto-execute changes to your project
• All suggestions are presented to the PM for review and acceptance
• The human maintains full control over every project decision

This human-in-the-loop design is deliberate. The PM Agent is a monitoring and advisory system, not an autonomous actor.

Future agents are planned for finance (budget monitoring), HR (workforce planning), and IT operations (incident management). The pattern is consistent: specialized domain intelligence, presented as suggestions, requiring human approval.

Smart Hub

Central governance and control for all AI features across the organization:

• Configure which AI features are enabled and who has access
• Set data governance rules for which sheets AI can reference
• Audit trail for all AI-generated actions and suggestions
• Manage AI capacity and usage across teams

Smart Hub addresses the enterprise concern that always follows AI adoption: "How do we control this?"

Honest Assessment

| Feature | Status | Recommendation |

|---------|--------|----------------|

| AI Formula Generator | GA | Use in production now |

| Text Generation | GA | Use in production now |

| Intelligent Form Fill | GA | Use in production now |

| AI Chart Generation | GA | Use in production now |

| Smart Assist | EAP | Pilot in new project setup workflows |

| Smart Columns | EAP | Pilot on non-critical classification tasks |

| Smart Flows | EAP | Pilot on low-risk automation scenarios |

| Smart Agents (PM) | EAP | Monitor announcements; do not use for critical projects |

| Smart Hub | EAP | Evaluate for enterprise governance planning |

On data privacy: Smartsheet states it does not use customer data to train public models. AI processing happens within Smartsheet's secure infrastructure. Review Smartsheet's Data Processing Agreement and your organization's data governance requirements before enabling AI features on sensitive sheets.

On plan availability: AI features are primarily available on Enterprise and Advanced Work Management plans. Business plans have limited access. The cost of the full AI feature set is a meaningful increase from base Smartsheet pricing.

How to Prepare

The AI features deliver more value when your sheets are well-organized:

1. Use descriptive column names. "Task Name," "Assigned To," "Due Date" — not "Col A," "Col B," "Col C." The AI formula generator and Smart Columns map to column names.

1. Apply correct column types. Date columns should contain dates. Contact columns should contain user emails. Dropdown columns should have consistent option values. Smart Columns work best when source data is properly typed.

1. Maintain consistent dropdown values. "In Progress" in every row, not "In Progress," "In-Progress," and "in progress." Smart Columns and automations perform exact string matching.

1. Build meaningful hierarchies. The PM Smart Agent understands parent-child structures. A flat list of 200 undifferentiated tasks gives the AI less to work with than a well-structured phase → task → subtask hierarchy.

1. Use Sheet Summary fields. The summary section at the top of each sheet is an ideal place to document the sheet's purpose — and an excellent source of context for AI features.

Sheets built with these practices today will get significantly more value from Smart Agents and Smart Columns when they reach general availability. The investment in clean sheet architecture pays dividends before and after the AI features land.

The Bigger Picture

Blackstone and Vista's bet is that intelligent work management is a separate category from both spreadsheets (Excel) and project management software (Jira, Asana). Smartsheet's position — familiar enough for business users, powerful enough for enterprise programs, and now AI-native — is their thesis for what wins that category.

Whether or not that thesis plays out, the practical reality is that the platform is investing heavily in making common PM tasks faster and more automated. For the 85% of the Fortune 500 already using Smartsheet, that is worth paying attention to.