Putting AI to Work: How Smartsheet is Tapping Into the Power of GenAI to Create Business Value for its Customers

David Nicholson: Welcome to Seattle, Washington. We’re here at Smartsheet ENGAGE. I’m Dave Nicholson with Six Five Media On the Road, and I’m here with a very special guest, Urmila Kukreja. How are you?

Urmila Kukreja: I am good. How are you, David?

David Nicholson: I’m doing well. What do you do at Smartsheet?

Urmila Kukreja: Well, I’m a Director of Product here. I call myself the spiritual AI leader. I lead all of our AI initiatives at Smartsheet.

David Nicholson: AI, do you say? There might be some interesting things to talk about in that regard. So I’m going to start out with an easy question. Tell me about Smartsheet. From your perspective, what is Smartsheet? What is it all about? What’s the value proposition?

Urmila Kukreja: Smartsheet helps everyone work better, it’s enterprise grade, it’s AI powered, and it scales. So when Overlake Medical Hospitals and Clinics, that are right here in the Seattle area, they provide healthcare to a lot of our community here. When they had to think about their strategic initiatives on how they want to transform healthcare, they use Smartsheet for that. And they were building this brand new campus. It’s the biggest campus ever. It’s got the state-of-the-art Child Care Center in it. They were using Smartsheet to plan and build it. And what made it magical with Smartsheet is, whether you’re collaborating with your internal teams or whether you’re reaching out to vendors external to your organization, this collaboration’s super seamless.

And the healthcare providers are also using Smartsheet. And what that means when they’re able to power a bunch of automation on Smartsheet is that they’re saving 15, 20 minutes every day. And this is time they’re able to give back to their patients because they’re not on their computers. And, of course, this is a super simple story of saving time and the impact of time saving. But it’s not just Overlake. There’s McLaren. There’s Uber. There’s Krispy Kreme Donuts. There’s Lego. It’s all of these enterprises. When they have to run their projects at scale, they’re using Smartsheet for it, and everything that they can do is only about to become faster, better, cheaper with the AI power it’s going to have on it.

David Nicholson: Well, I’m a huge Formula One fan, and I think a credible case was made during the keynote that McLaren’s recent results have been driven primarily by Smartsheet. I accept that completely.

Urmila Kukreja: Of course. There is no other reason, yeah.

David Nicholson: So we talked about where Smartsheet has come from and where we are today. How does that change from a customer perspective when AI enters the picture?

Urmila Kukreja: Yeah, we think of AI as the technology that’s helped us almost accelerate our core mission. Our mission has been to enable anyone to drive meaningful change. You don’t have to be a programmer to be able to drive a particular mission. You don’t have to feel compelled to reach out to IT to get some work done. If you have an idea and you want to move it forward, you should be able to. And that’s been what we’ve been working at Smartsheet for the longest time.

David Nicholson: writing. Is that what you’re alluding to?

Urmila Kukreja: Absolutely. So the idea is you no longer need to be a power user to get the power from Smartsheet. All you have to do is be able to talk to your computer in a natural language in terms of what you are trying to achieve, and it’s going to build it for you. And we’ve already seen some of that with Formula Generator. You go and you talk about the KPIs you want to calculate, and AI Formula Generator is going to generate it for you. But there’s more that we’re building on top of this. We want to be able to spin up an entire solution based on what someone’s described. We want to be able to update and build automations based on what someone said. You’re talking about a workflow you want to have and AI is going to be like, “All right, when this is complete, I’m going to go complete this.”

So this is how it’s going to make building easier and enable people to get in at the ground floor easier too. And then there’s the teammates. We also want people to feel like their teams have superpowers. The most annoying part of, I’ll say, most project managers is writing those status reports. It’s really mundane, it’s boring. And so we wanted to use AI to remove the boring from work. All of this repetitive work is wonderful to pass on to your AI teammate. And again, with that, we’ve already launched the ability to create text and summaries. Help is available in the product. When you’re stuck, you’re able to get answers in context. And we want to take it further with writing those status reports for you automatically so you don’t have to do that over and over.

David Nicholson: Well, I think I heard two different pieces of the puzzle. I differentiate between building and using. And if I’m a user and I’m using plain language to ask for something, I need to trust that it’s being translated properly so that I’m getting the right information. That’s one level of trust that must exist. But if I’m using plain language to build something using the Smartsheet platform, I really have to trust that. Because if I’m asking for something to be built that includes things like formulas, if that gets baked in there and it’s wrong, then garbage in, garbage out. So what’s your position on this concept of trust? Not necessarily from the security perspective, but just from the user’s trusting that this translation that AI is providing, if it’s making it easier, but then you’ve got to go back in and edit everything, then it’s not useful. So how do you get people to trust?

Urmila Kukreja: It’s a great question. There’s a lot we’ve done in the realm of trust just for people to be able to really feel like what’s being suggested by AI is the right thing, and the operative word here being suggested. The way we’ve enabled AI into our platform is where it’s like your buddy, your teammate, your assistant suggesting answers to you, but there’s still a human in the loop accepting it and saying, “This is what I really want to apply.” Another feature that our customers really love is we added the ability for AI to explain your work. So when you ask it, “Build me this chart of everything that’s incomplete,” I think it’s going to come back and tell you, “Well, I looked at this sheet and I looked at all the tasks that were assigned to you, and I looked at everything that was not started and in progress, and that’s why I came up with, Urmila, you’re really behind. There’s 52 items you have to do.”

And because I see that, I can come back and say like, “Oh, I actually didn’t want to call the not-started tasks. I really just want incomplete.” So because it’s explaining the results, you have a chance to go in and adjust what you were asking for. That’s been a big part in building trust with our users. I know you said you weren’t really thinking about security, but that is really a big part of using our AI tools in Smartsheet. If it’s got the stamp from your CISO, if it’s approved by your organization, that really does go a long way in adoption. People are feeling a lot more confident. To that effect, we wrote a white paper that’s been received really, really well that we’ve heard from some of the CISOs at our customers’ organizations that this is the best documentation they’ve been able to get, which is really good. It goes a long way in allowing for these AI tools within their organizations.

David Nicholson: So when a system is making a recommendation, there are varying views on how much a user needs to be able to see inside the black box to understand the inner workings. Do you think that, given the choice, Smartsheet users would rather be able to ask the system, “Show me how to build the following functionality that I need”? Or do you think people are beyond that, or will they quickly get beyond that where all they want is, “No, no, no, don’t show me how to do it. Just do it for me”? Where do you think we are in that evolution?

Urmila Kukreja: I think this is where people are in their Smartsheet journey, but more where they are in their AI journey at this point. They do want AI to suggest stuff for them, but then very quickly they’re like, “Well, can you go build this for me? And then now that you’ve built it, explain to me why this is your recommendation. And then don’t go off and take a bunch of actions. I still want to stay in control.” Personally, I think this is going to change once they’ve built a lot more trust in the systems. But at this point, my expectation is that people still want to feel like they want to be able to approve or at least understand why certain results were suggested to them.

David Nicholson: Now, you’re part of the marketing organization.

Urmila Kukreja: I’m part of the product organization.

David Nicholson: Product organization, so you’re thinking of it from a product perspective. Put your closet marketer hat on for a moment. We all want what we deliver to have a certain stickiness associated with it that’s derived from the true value of what we’re offering. You want people to want it and want to hang on to it because they really appreciate the value of it. Do you think that making it so simple to use that people don’t have to have any understanding of the underlying tool set, is that a good thing for a company because you’re helping the customers? Or does it make you more replaceable at a certain level? I don’t know if this is something you think of in product specifically, probably thinking of making the best product possible, but I wonder if, when you are using AI to do something for you as opposed to show you how to do it, it doesn’t connect you as much as showing you how, which could then make a bunch of power users. Am I misguided there? Or are people just saying, “Look, I want you to be able to do it for me. Don’t explain it to me. Just do it for me”?

Urmila Kukreja: I think right now people are very much wanting to see the explanation. I think it comes from a place of, what it helps validate is, did I even ask the right question? Because when you’re writing these prompts, you’re just not even sure. When we talk to each other, we have this multi-tone conversation that will go back and forth, and I think people are starting to use AI like that where they’ll go ask the first question, it’ll go do something, and when it can explain why it suggested what it suggested, you can go back and ask it the next question. And I think that’s how it’s going to continue to be, at least these conversational AI interfaces.

David Nicholson: So in that regard or having to do with anything related to Smartsheet, do you have a favorite feature or function that people say they love or that you particularly like, especially if it’s something that not a lot of people are aware of? What’s your favorite hack or trick?

Urmila Kukreja: I’d be surprised if not a lot of people are aware of this, but I’m really passionate about saving people time so automation is a feature that I deeply, deeply care about. I think we have so many examples of people telling us they’re able to save these 20, 30 minutes in meetings because they decided to use automation.

David Nicholson: Well, what’s a concrete example of something I could automate?

Urmila Kukreja: Let’s look at Krispy Kreme Donuts. I love donuts. So what Krispy Kreme Donuts has done for their meetings is, just before a project meeting, the way they’ve got their project set up is they send out update requests to everyone on their team to come in and provide their updates. And then the project manager receives a notification whenever those updates are made. So now when they go in a meeting, you’re not going around the room asking everyone, “What’s the latest on this project?” All the information’s right there and they’re saving time in these meetings. And just coming back to AI, we’re about to make automation even better with AI. You asked a great question, what is something I can do with automation? And we found that a lot of people, they know where automation exists in the product, but they’re not able to find exactly the right use cases for it or maybe they feel a little intimidated building it.

We talked about, do you want to just build this for me or explain to me? And so with AI, they’ll be able to just explain the process that they want automated and Smartsheet AI will go in and build out the automation for you. And as it’s building it, you’ll be able to see, this is the trigger condition. So if you wanted to go in and adjust it or tweak it, we talked about, well, maybe it didn’t get my prompt correct, you’d be able to go tweak it right in there. There’s also, I think, multiplicative impact with just the way we’d be able to scale the usage of automations with AI. So you can imagine there’s this sheet that’s got lots of stuff in one language and you’re like, “I’m going to apply AI across all of it.” And so anytime a new submission comes in like, “Let’s just translate it into another language so it’s available to more people,” is something you’d be able to do with automation and AI. I’m really excited about all the time we’ll save with that.

David Nicholson: I think a lot of people are excited about all of the possibilities that AI represents. Urmila, great talk on AI. Smartsheet seems to be doing the right things, collaboration with Amazon, securing people’s data, which is always a good thing. I’m looking forward to more natural language processing because people who know me know that I love the sound of my own voice. Sad but true. So from Dave Nicholson. Urmila, thanks for joining us today. Stay tuned for more for Smartsheet ENGAGE.