Smartsheet tackles execution drift in the age of AI agents

The pace of technological change is relentless. While organisations are under continuous pressure to adjust their strategies, the gap between strategic intent and execution grows. AI is helping organisations to move faster but it is questionable whether they are getting any better at achieving their goals.

Jarrod Kinchington, Smartsheet's APAC leader, calls this 'execution drift'. It is the growing disconnect between corporate strategy and what employees, teams and systems deliver.

This is not a new problem according to Kinchington. He said it has undermined ERP implementations and digital transformation projects for decades, but the proliferation of AI tools and autonomous agents is increasing the speed at which organisations operate. This makes the disconnect harder to identify and correct.

"If you think about an organisation that sets a strategy, it sets targets and then executes against that.  But how do you track that? That's the gap that's in the market," he said.

Kinchington said the challenge is not to replace ERP systems, asset management and operations platforms that work well. Organisations need a single plane of glass that enables better decision-making.  But it's not a reporting tool or a dashboard that merely displays information.

"It's not about having a static dashboard. It's about having a live system that can measure what your strategy is, how you go about executing it, and what are those outcomes."

Dashboards, Kinchington said, only provide point-in-time snapshots. Organisations need systems that put data into a useful context. With context, data can be used to make strategic, rather than reactive, decisions. Often decisions made at the coalface are removed by several layers of management and oversight that create separation between the executive team's strategic intent and execution by operatives whose directions may have been changed as they were passed down the chain of command.

The execution drift is not intentional. It is the result of strategy being decided but not fully translated into operational intent. This is the challenge Kinchington says must be addressed.

"Organisations need a platform or solution that enables them, in real time, to address that drift or gap. They need to course correct before they get to mid-year financial results and find out they have missed targets and end up scrambling to adjust."

Smartsheet's heritage over the last two decades has been in project management. At the company's recent ENGAGE event, it introduced a new tool called vsActual to better support longer-term strategic planning. vsActual connects corporate objectives, performance measures and execution across enterprise applications.

While Smartsheet remains the platform for managing work, vsActual provides an executive-level view of whether that work is aligned with strategic objectives.

"You'll still use Smartsheet to manage the live work systems and the execution of work. vsActual measures, tracks, and reports back at the board level on how you're achieving your goals," Kinchington explained.

Kinchington says organisations face growing pressure to achieve more with existing resources. AI has enabled acceleration that has left teams working in different directions without a clear understanding of how their activities contribute to broader business objectives. As organisations deploy more AI agents, governance becomes increasingly important. They need the ability to track changes made by agents and ensure their actions are transparent, traceable and auditable.

As more agents are deployed, ensuring they are aligned with strategic intent becomes increasingly complex. To assist organisations, Smartsheet is adding a suite of agents that are specifically tailored to the needs of several verticals. And based on customer feedback, Kinchington said the platform will continue to evolve to support organisations as they seek to minimise the drift between strategy and execution.

Kinchington believes the convergence of AI, improved visibility and stronger governance presents an opportunity to address a problem that has plagued enterprise technology projects for decades.

"It's probably the closest I've seen as to how to take a plan, turn it into reality and then measure that success. And I think that's a game changer."