Smartsheet used its ENGAGE 2026 keynote in Seattle on November 4 to launch vsActual, a planning and execution product aimed at the CEO, CFO and COO. With it, Smartsheet moves up from the project managers who built the company to the decision makers above them, and it reaches those executives through the AI tools they already use every day. Its agents can now be called from Smart Assist or from a connected AI assistant, and its MCP server already works with ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and Gemini. The direction is right. The keynote undersold the strongest reason for existing customers to buy in, and vsActual gives Smartsheet the opening to separate its company brand from its product.
From the Project to the Decision
vsActual turns strategy decks, budget memos and spreadsheets into one plan, tracks work against it across systems, and flags when the two drift apart. The demo ran a full planning cycle: 45 initiatives scored against a $42 million funding line, 37 funded and $800,000 held back. Six weeks into the quarter, a field operations team posting in Slack surfaced a new subcontractor portal that would push a go-live date out by nine weeks. vsActual caught that the new scope never reached the other systems, proposed three recovery options, and sent the recommended one, six contract engineers paid from the held-back budget, to the CEO because it touched spend. Smartsheet put the sequence from alert to approved fix at about 30 minutes.
Every step in that demo is a decision an executive makes. Project managers have used Smartsheet for 20 years to run the work, and vsActual is built for the people who decide which work gets funded and what happens when it slips. Those decisions are also where enterprises have the least evidence that AI pays off. In our E/AI Index V2 survey of 200 CIOs and CTOs, 48% said no workflow yet shows measurable AI value, and only 33 measure AI return against full cost.
AI Where Executives Already Ask Questions
The most important choice Smartsheet made this year is to plug into the AI models its customers already use. Its MCP server opened to Claude in March and to ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini in June, and the agents announced at ENGAGE can be called from a connected assistant as well as from Smart Assist. In the keynote demo, when the executive wanted to test a pet project against the plan, the question went through Claude. Executives spend their day in email, documents and, more and more, a general-purpose assistant. Few of them open a project sheet. Showing up inside ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot is how a work management vendor gets in front of a decision maker.
Smartsheet also made the case for why the model alone is not enough. Smartsheet CEO Rajeev Singh said on stage that the gap between plan and actual cannot be closed with a transformer model, and the presenter in the demo acknowledged that a company could connect its own LLM to all of its systems but would lack the context of Smartsheet's Execution Graph and an approval process tied to a named person. In vsActual, agents can flag drift but cannot change the plan, and anything that touches spend goes to an approver. Our data backs that design. Cost-level returns rise from 6% of CIOs with no agents to 50% where agents run narrow workflows with a human signing off, and 67% of 61 CIOs report measured value when business units fund AI with IT or security review, against 6 of 21 when business units go alone.
The Better-Together Story
Singh told the audience that companies do not need to work in Smartsheet to get value from vsActual, because it reads from the systems they already run, including SAP, Workday, Jira, ServiceNow and Slack. I appreciate the candor, and it matches what customers asked for. Kevin Blanco, a global CIO and one of vsActual's 12 design partners, said on stage that his goal is to get more from the tools his company already owns without adding to its technology footprint.
Smartsheet still missed the chance to tell a better-together story, and that story is there. A company that has run its projects in Smartsheet for years holds a record of how its own plans met reality: which estimates held, which teams delivered on time, where scope tends to creep. vsActual's value rests on context, and few sources of context are more useful to a planning tool than an organization's own history. The keynote touched on this once, in passing. Making it the case for existing customers would have given the PMO teams in the room a reason to bring vsActual to their executives, and it would have given Smartsheet an edge that a general model connected to the same systems would lack.
Time for a Company Brand
Singh closed the keynote by pointing out that a year ago Smartsheet the company and Smartsheet the product were the same thing. Today the company sells three: Smartsheet, where the work gets done; Brandfolder, where assets live; and vsActual, where leaders run the business, with the Execution Graph underneath all three. My read from the room is that much of the existing user base saw vsActual as something separate from the product they know, and they are right.
vsActual gives Smartsheet the opportunity to separate the company brand from the product. Smartsheet can remain the brand of a product its core audience loves, while the company picks a name that signals the broader play to the executives vsActual is built for.