Enterprise work management vendor Smartsheet Inc. today unveiled an overhauled platform that delivers what it calls AI-driven data insights and massive scalability improvements.

Generative artificial intelligence capabilities, which are now in beta test, will conduct data analysis from conversational prompts, initially across individual sheets but eventually across thousands of active projects and data stores. An AI-powered assistant will deliver customized, natural language responses tailored to individual customers.

Generative AI will also create tailored workflows based on a user’s response to the question, “What do you want to do?” as well as generate formulas, sheet summaries and translations based on a natural-language description.

More projects, bigger sheets

The new platform will support 20,000 active projects per business program when it’s available in January. The company said that’s a 20-fold increase over the previous version. Every sheet will also support up to 5 million cells and allow for 5 million sheet links, which are links to other worksheets in a flow. That’s an increase of 250 times current levels.

“This scale is greater than any other collaborative workflow platform on the market,” said Ben Canning, senior vice president of product experiences.

Smartsheet said it will also soon offer new ways to visualize data with a timeline view of date-based work. The feature lets project managers organize data into visual groups by criteria such as assignee or status, highlight major milestones and make it easier to see key dates. The company also plans to release refreshed grid and card views, which are different ways to view project elements.

Other new features let users create customized thematic dashboards and simplify the process of laying out widgets with alignment indicators and sizing guides. Multi-widget editing and new scaling optimizations allow for wider dashboard canvases. Smartsheet will also release dashboard snapshots that allow users to schedule regular, automatic delivery of any dashboard.

Heightened security

Customers on business and enterprise license plans will have access to a resource management panel with new workload heatmap and workload schedule features to enable project managers to quickly identify current assignments, address over-allocations and make better staffing decisions.

“Every department will have the ability to see who is working on what and address over-allocation directly with project sheets,” Canning said.

Security-conscious enterprise plan customers can purchase Smartsheet Safeguard, a collection of advanced security and governance controls that includes customer-managed encryption keys, data egress policies, event reporting and data retention controls.

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