The real ROI of AI is coordination, not in speed

Most of the organizations we work with, especially ones operating globally, arrive with a similar starting point: a disparate set of systems, manual processes, scattered data, and inconsistent reporting.

Some companies try to bridge that gap by deploying AI tools but end up widening the gap instead because they’re not tackling the core issue. AI tools, as most companies deploy them, serve one employee or optimize one platform, while work that decides whether a company hits its number each quarter still runs across multiple systems at once. So even as one part of the organization moves faster, it simply ends up waiting on another slower, disconnected part. AI is the most helpful when it helps coordinate the people and systems that sit between those platforms. Applied without a strategic approach, AI accelerates the chaos instead of fixing it.  

A connected layer, not another tool

The organizations that break through this cycle are the ones fixing the underlying architecture, so that data, decisions, and people can move together. That's the problem Smartsheet is built to solve.

Rather than adding another AI tool to an already crowded stack, Smartsheet acts as the connective layer underneath it. It pulls information from across a company's environment, everything from its customer relationship management (CRM) system to its enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform. An AI prompt is enough to surface an insight or push an update out, at a speed that wasn't possible before.

Used this way, AI stops being just a personal productivity tool. It understands the structure and context of your projects, workspaces, and team activity for more seamless collaboration. Coordinating updates across a project, flagging risk before it becomes a problem, keeping people aligned without anyone having to chase colleagues down manually. It isn't answering a question for one person; it's helping orchestrate the work of many.

Zalaris is a useful example of this in practice. The global SAP HR payroll and consulting firm processes monthly payroll for 1.8 million employees across a dozen countries. It uses Smartsheet AI across nearly every part of its operation, not as a personal productivity add-on, but as the layer that lets its teams engage with clients in real time. Each customer now has direct access to a live project dashboard, showing real-time status and schedule health, rather than waiting on a periodic report from their account team.

What we've learned along the way

Working with organizations at every stage of this journey has taught us a few consistent lessons about what separates the ones that succeed from the ones that stall.

The first key is collective ownership. It's tempting to treat AI strategy as something that belongs to one function: the CTO, an innovation team, or IT. But organizations that succeed are the ones where governance starts at board level and passes all the way down through the executive team into every business unit, with everyone aligned on the outcomes required and taking collective ownership.

The second crucial insight from our customers is that none of this works without people. A dashboard or a status report doesn't make a decision on its own, however good the underlying data is. It's people who take that information, understand what it means, and use it to have the conversation that actually moves a project forward. The real risk with AI is people treating it as an always-on answer machine, thinking it can replace the support that only a colleague or a mentor could genuinely provide. At Flight Centre Travel Group, which runs project delivery across its global PMO, this is treated as a first principle: AI's real value is getting the right information in front of people fast enough that they can spend their time on the human conversations that actually drive a project forward, not on assembling the information itself.

Where to start

For businesses wondering where to begin, the starting point doesn't need to be complicated. AI can be used to think through what a solution should look like before anything is built: describe the problem, have the conversation, and treat it like a personal coach that helps shape the approach. Once that shape feels right, the same conversation can be used to build the solution directly inside Smartsheet.

Another question we hear constantly is how to stop AI from making changes an organization didn't intend. At Smartsheet, we’ve built in a lot of checks and balances. This means that there's always a human in the loop verifying information before anything is written. If someone doesn't have access to a sheet, AI doesn't either. Trust in the outcome depends on trusting the process that produced it, and that's the frame that makes AI adoption sustainable rather than a one-off experiment.