Everything You Need to Know About AWS’ New Q Connector with Smartsheet

On this episode of Six Five Media at Smartsheet Engage, host Keith Townsend sits down with Smartsheet’s VP of Engineering, JB Brown, to take an in-depth look at how Smartsheet and Amazon Web Services are transforming AI-powered decision-making with their brand-new connector for Amazon Q Business.

Their discussion covers:

  • The latest AWS announcement and its game-changing significance
  • Who stands to benefit from this collaboration and the business value it brings
  • How the new connector will impact Smartsheet users
  • Real-world applications of the Smartsheet connector in Amazon Q
  • JB’s personal favorite feature in Smartsheet!

This episode is a must-watch (or listen!) if you’re looking to leverage AI to drive smarter business decisions. Learn more at Smartsheet.

Watch the video below, and be sure to watch all our episodes from Smartsheet ENGAGE 2024.

Transcript

Keith Townsend: All right, so this is the last you’ll see of me from ENGAGE 2024. I know you’re really disappointed, but Smartsheet has saved one of the best interviews, I think for me, JB Brown VP of Engineering. Welcome to the show.

JB Brown: Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Keith Townsend: So. We’ve talked so far about AI at a high level, what you folks have done in the product itself to integrate AI and ability for users to accelerate the creation of formulas really changed business processes. But you’ve made a big announcement around the AI Connector for Q from Smartsheet into Amazon, can you tell us more about that announcement?

JB Brown: Yeah, I would love to. So Amazon and Smartsheet partnered to launch a Smartsheet Connector into Amazon Q Business. If you don’t know, Amazon Q Business is this ecosystem of connectors that allows a generative AI agent on top of your company’s internal information in most of the popular work systems. So, Slack, Teams, Drive, all the AWS systems and now Smartsheet. So you can have a single AI assistant for all of your employees securely and with your own information, it’s kind of like your ChatGPT just for your employee base. And it runs in your AWS account so it’s all yours, you’re not feeding the internet with your prompt data that your employees use, and so it can really give you a boost on their ability to do their job.

Keith Townsend: Now I’ve played around with many of the AI assistants from most of the public cloud providers, and there’s a level of sophistication that’s needed to use this to extend business processes. Amazon Q is targeted to a specific type of user, can you tell us more about why you chose to partner with Amazon Q specifically? There were other AI platforms that were in Amazon, what’s unique about Amazon Q Business?

JB Brown: A couple things were really driving our choice. One is they already have an ecosystem of apps, connectors to the things that our customers also use. Our Smartsheet customers aren’t Smartsheet customers only, they use other systems. Amazon already had that model, had that ecosystem for us so, joining it really gave us an opportunity to help our customers with all their project process and program management needs that they have that they’re managing with Smartsheet, but now with generative AI on top and intermixed with the other data and the other systems that they’re using.

Keith Townsend: So talk to me about the level of effort, am I going to need to go in and hire an SI to come in and bring that connector in? Is this something targeted towards my IT team? Is this something that a business user can do?

JB Brown: A business user with an AWS account can do it. You are setting it up in your own AWS account, which keeps it secure and private to you. So you need that level of information understanding of setting up an AWS account, but then it’s a UI like you are literally going through and saying, “I’m going to add a Smartsheet Connector. I’m going to say I want it to ingest these sheets or this workspace.” And there’s an app that gets built for you that’s a web app, AWS ships it to you essentially. You log in with your credentials from whatever your company’s credential system is, and now you can use an AI assistant on top of all of that valuable information that you’ve already put into Smartsheet.

Keith Townsend: So talk to me about the art of the possible, what are you envisioning customers using this connector to do or to accomplish?

JB Brown: Yeah, so imagine you are a sales team and you use Smartsheet and Salesforce, maybe Teams, Slack and you’re preparing for a customer call. Right now, you’d have to go searching those different information sources sort of to pull all the current bits of information together and have your dossier of, “Okay, sales team, this is what we know. This is what’s recently transpired with this customer, where they’re at.” Now, you can go into our Q app and simply type, “Give me the latest information on whatever this customer is.” And it pulls a generative response from all of those sources and gives you one summary, one synopsis, and links to all of the places that it got that information.

So if you didn’t quite like the summary and you wanted to dig deeper, you just click a link and now you’re in Salesforce, or now you’re in Slack, or now you’re in Teams, wherever that information was including Smartsheet. So now you’re in Smartsheet in the rows that you had entered into Smartsheet system in the past for that customer and whatever actually matters to that call.

Keith Townsend: So I can easily visualize the resource manager or schedules, this text-based data is really easy to index. But there’s this concept of files and content repository, are those also connected to Q?

JB Brown: All of your attachments on your sheets and all of your conversations on your sheets are also ingestible. I’m going to say ingestible clearly, because it’s your choice. You get to decide if you want your attachments and your conversations included or not.

Keith Townsend: So JB, this is an enterprise-grade show, enterprise-grade features, this is an enterprise grade implementation and integration. Talk to me about enterprise-grade security. How are you securing my data when I’m it into Q, ensuring that I don’t leak data from one compartment to another?

JB Brown: Very critical question. So being the enterprise-grade platform for managing work where you plan, do, and scale your work, that is a critical aspect of this solution. Your data is secured in a couple of ways. First, it’s running in your AWS account, not on the public web, not by somebody else and so your data’s not mixing with any other Smartsheet customers. Secondly, all of the permissions that you apply in Smartsheet, say, share a sheet to you, share a workspace to you are adhered to at the time of the generative AI prompt. So you don’t have data leaking into the AI system that you didn’t intend to, it’s all based off of your Smartsheet sharing controls.

Keith Townsend: So you’ve been talking to customers, partners, what are some of your partners excited about when it comes to this integration?

JB Brown: Yeah, partners that we work with that help customers at massive scale, 20,000 projects per portfolio. We are the first to do that, and our customers have many of those portfolios in some circumstances. That is a lot of data to try and understand, and make sense of, and use all of the time. So a generative AI assistant that can synthesize that, recall it without you having to search, there is so much potential about saving people time, making people more efficient. It’s kind of related to the features we’ve already shipped in our platform. Just in the last year, the customers that have used the Smartsheet AI features, generating formulas, generating summaries and charts, have saved a million hours. Now, we just got started, imagine all of our customers using that and imagine them using it to the extent that Q allows them to do. The efficiency gains there and letting people do the more valuable part of their job is just this phenomenal opportunity.

Keith Townsend: So again, I can’t get past this AI moves so fast. I did a hundred days of AI, three months in some of the content was still that I created just three months ago. How are you helping customers keep pace with this connector with the pace of change in AI?

JB Brown: That’s one of the beautiful benefits of our partnership with AWS. They are going to do that for us, right? We’re running this Amazon Q Connector on the Amazon system as they mature their ability to run AI systems, the intelligence of the models that they run in the background, as they grow that and scale that, all of our customers get the benefit because it’s using Amazon scale on the back end with Smartsheet scale of work management on the front end.

Keith Townsend: All right, let’s zoom out all of these product announcements that you’ve made, collections, files, the tabular workspaces, the ability to delete and look at your data in tables. Paint the big picture for me, where is this going when we’re talking about AI integration?

JB Brown: Yeah, when you look at the future of managing work, managing people, managing content, it’s all melding into one thing. Knowledge workers today don’t do just one of those jobs, they skip around and intermix all of them. Now we’ve just launched collections on top of workspaces today. Workspaces become the hub of where all of that happens for one project, one process, one program. You now have resource management capabilities built into workspaces and you have tailored sharing built into workspaces with collections. So long people have been asking us for folder sharing and today we’ve launched something that does that and more. And now you’ve got this centralized spot where all of your activity happens and you can do generative AI on top of it. The power of all of it together, I know we told stories of features launching today, but the power of that future together, it’s just like I can’t wait for customers to use it and unleash it and see what they can do.

Keith Townsend: All right, so the challenge that I’ve asked each guest so far this week has been around, how do you drink your own champagne? You’re obviously passionate about the product, what’s your favorite Smartsheet feature?

JB Brown: So hard because so much of my feature is launched today. I do love collections, there is a big potential in collections and also because as I said, it’s addressed this pain point that our customers have had for a long time with folder level sharing. I think going into the future, scaling that ability to share on a workspace, to be able to share and manage at a portfolio level is the future where we haven’t done that yet, we haven’t announced that yet. But I think more about the future than I think about today about what’s exciting and that future is super exciting.

Keith Townsend: Yeah, just something about this ability to bring Q alongside my Smartsheet portfolio of projects and being able to ask Smart Q about my projects. Let’s say I’m a PMO and I’m able to go into Q Business and ask about trends across projects, is that something that people will be able to do?

JB Brown: Yes, that’s the dream, right? That’s where we want to go. We want to keep taking what we do and adding AI to it in a way that customers already want to use it. They have this demand, they have this need, and we’re bringing AI to solve the problem, not AI for AI sync, right? So something like that is definitely in the path of where we want to go.

Keith Townsend: So I’ve been talking to customers this week about their AI initiatives. I’m going to take a little bit of my question from you and just talk to myself, people are really doing AI like this is not just pie in the sky. At this show are operators, they’re people working in strategic roles and organizations, doing disaster recovery, scheduling and they’re using AI for these functions. What have they come to you with and asked you to push the envelope more for and how does Q answer that call?

JB Brown: That is quite a diverse set of answers.

Keith Townsend: We have time.

JB Brown: We are always listening to our customers, right? In every possible way. I would say they get a taste of it and then want to do more of that same thing, so expand that same thing to do more. Generating formulas is great, “But I want to generate a formula that becomes a column formula.” That’s a natural ask, right? “I created these dashboard widgets with analyzed data, but now I want to save them to be a live dashboard widget on a dashboard.” That’s an obvious ask that is just a natural progression of needs that we hear them, we pay attention to it, it becomes a prioritized thing that we go after and then bring it out a little bit later. Going from projects to portfolios, a very sensible thing for us as a scaled work management system to want to pursue.

Keith Townsend: We appreciate you coming and watching coverage. It’s not just this technical view that we’ve covered, my good friend Dave Nicholson has talked to executives in the project management side, he’s talked to customers. Watch more of this content, learn how this work management product that surprisingly is being used for way more than work management is able to meet the demands of the modern enterprise grade. For my guest, JB Brown, JB, thanks for joining us. I’m Keith Townsend, stay tuned for more coverage from ENGAGE 2024 in Seattle, Washington.

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