Work management software company Smartsheet unveiled its next-generation platform today, debuting features designed to provide users with new generative-AI powered capabilities at scale.
Work in the Smartsheet platform centers around “sheets” that contain information relating to a particular project or projects, within which users can include a variety of details such as a description, status, due dates, and which workers have been assigned to complete a task.
“Our goal is to make our platform not only powerful, but intuitive, beautiful, and delightful to use. And with this announcement, we’re giving customers more and better ways to visualize their work in Smartsheet,” said Ben Canning, senior vice president of product experiences at Smartsheet, during a press conference. The company is taking a very practical approach to AI, he said.
“We want to make sure that we are providing practical capabilities that use AI to empower our customers to achieve their goals faster and remove some of the drudgery from work,” he said.
Available from today in private beta, the revamped Smartsheet allows customers to use conversational prompts to generate data insights and visual charts, a capability that is currently limited to individual sheets but in the future will be derived from thousands of active projects and data stores.
Users will be able to offer up simple descriptions in order generate formulas or content such as sheet summaries, translations, and image captions through its digital asset management tool, Brandfolder. Additionally, users will be able to create custom solutions simply by responding to questions posed by the platform.
Smartsheet’s new AI-powered assistant can also provide customized, natural language responses to questions posed by customers.
“Smartsheet is being pragmatic with its AI capabilities focusing them on addressing common friction points in the Smartsheet user experience like working with formulas and more quickly building custom solutions,” said analyst Chris Marsh, who leads workforce productivity and collaboration research practice in S&P Global Market Intelligence.
He added that the company had opted to apply AI where there is scale advantage such as analyzing large volumes of data in its grid and autocaptioning images, and focus less on text generation.
Building out the platform at scale
In addition to the AI capabilities now on offer from Smartsheet, the updated version of the platform is also designed to make it easier for users to work at scale. By January, the Smartsheet Control Center will support 20,000 active projects per business program, a 20-fold, year-over-year increase, and in 2024, every sheet will also support five million cells and allow five million sheet links — a 250-time increase above the current level — per sheet.
A new timeline view will give teams a big-picture look into date-based work and allow data to be organized into visual groups or by project…
2023-09-20 04:48:02
Original from www.computerworld.com rnrn