Executive Summary
- Independent Planning Platform: At ENGAGE 2026, Smartsheet introduced vsActual, a standalone executive planning product designed to solve enterprise strategy execution drift.
- The Execution Graph: Powered by an architectural knowledge graph trained on two decades of enterprise workflow telemetry, millions of projects, and petabytes of historical project data.
- Unstructured Document Ingestion: The platform reads unstructured strategy decks, budget memos, and spreadsheets, synthesizing them into a dynamic plan of record.
- Cross-Platform Telemetry: Evaluates live execution across diverse enterprise tools (Jira, ServiceNow, SAP, Oracle, and Workday) without requiring users to adopt core Smartsheet.
- Hybrid Consumption Pricing: Accompanies a corporate pricing evolution combining seat licenses with usage-based credits for AI operations, API calls, and automated workflows.
Table of Contents
- The Strategy Execution Drift Crisis in Enterprise PMOs
- The Execution Graph: Leveraging 20 Years of Workflow Data
- Connecting Jira, ServiceNow, SAP, and Workday
- Scenario Modeling and Automated Executive Risk Summaries
- Standalone Independence and Consumption-Based Pricing
- Technical Factsheet: Smartsheet vsActual Architecture
- Frequently Asked Questions
The Strategy Execution Drift Crisis in Enterprise PMOs
Every fiscal year, executive leadership teams spend months formulating corporate strategies. Board presentations outline multi-million dollar transformation objectives, revenue growth targets, and capital allocations. Yet by the second quarter, those ambitious plans frequently diverge from operational reality.
This organizational breakdown is known in enterprise project management as execution drift. Finance and executive leadership track high-level budgets in ERP systems, while ground-level software and engineering teams manage daily sprints across disparate issue trackers, spreadsheets, and support portals.
By the time quarterly business reviews reveal that critical initiatives are three months behind schedule or 40% over budget, remediating the project requires disruptive emergency reorganizations. At its annual ENGAGE conference, Smartsheet unveiled vsActual (pronounced versus actual) to resolve this persistent disconnect.
The Execution Graph: Leveraging 20 Years of Workflow Data
The technical backbone of vsActual is the Execution Graph. Rather than functioning as a superficial conversational skin layered over existing database tables, the platform leverages Smartsheet proprietary corpus of historical enterprise telemetry.
Over two decades, Smartsheet has accumulated petabytes of project management data across millions of corporate deployments. The Execution Graph maps dependencies between top-level corporate objectives, budget limits, operational milestones, and ground-level task velocity:
- Unstructured Document Parsing: Executive leaders upload strategic PowerPoint decks, PDF memos, and budget spreadsheets. Machine learning parsers extract core goals, completion dates, and resource constraints automatically.
- The Dynamic Plan of Record: The parsed goals merge into a single living plan that links executive expectations to operational capacity benchmarks.
Connecting Jira, ServiceNow, SAP, and Workday
Historically, enterprise software vendors required customers to migrate all company workflows onto their proprietary platform to achieve end-to-end visibility. Smartsheet designed vsActual to dismantle this barrier.
The platform operates as an independent telemetry mesh that reads across diverse enterprise tools:
- Developer Work: Pulls real-time sprint progress and code deployment statuses from Atlassian Jira and GitHub.
- IT and Operations: Monitors enterprise ticket resolutions and operational service milestones via ServiceNow.
- Finance and Human Capital: Cross-references actual financial burn and employee capacity allocations against SAP, Oracle ERP, and Workday.
Because the platform reads across existing software investments, enterprises can deploy vsActual without disrupting ground-level team workflows.
Scenario Modeling and Automated Executive Risk Summaries
A critical capability of vsActual is predictive scenario simulation. When market conditions shift or budget cuts loom, executive leaders can simulate trade-offs in conversational natural language:
If a finance leader asks, “What happens if we reduce external contractor spend by 20% across our cloud migration initiative?” the AI simulates the downstream impact across linked Jira epics, projected launch milestones, and dependency handoffs. Leadership evaluates real-world impacts before authorizing budget adjustments.
Continuous background agents track execution velocity, alerting leadership when a milestone begins to drift rather than waiting for formal monthly reviews.
Standalone Independence and Consumption-Based Pricing
In a major commercial departure, Smartsheet architected vsActual as an independent product. Organizations do not need to use the core Smartsheet spreadsheet interface to purchase or deploy vsActual.
This allows Smartsheet to market vsActual directly to chief financial officers and heads of enterprise project management offices as an executive governance suite. Smartsheet also introduced a modern consumption-based credit model alongside traditional user seats, allowing enterprises to scale machine learning usage and automated cross-system API queries flexibly.
Technical Factsheet: Smartsheet vsActual Architecture
The factsheet below details the core architecture and enterprise integrations supported by vsActual:
| System Feature | Technical Implementation |
|---|---|
| Data Foundation | Execution Graph trained on 20 years of Smartsheet workflow data |
| Document Ingestion | Parses unstructured PowerPoint decks, PDFs, and Excel spreadsheets |
| Third-Party Integrations | Atlassian Jira, ServiceNow, SAP ERP, Oracle, and Workday |
| Smartsheet Requirement | Completely standalone; core Smartsheet product not required |
| Pricing Structure | Hybrid user seat licensing plus consumption credits for AI/APIs |
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is Smartsheet vsActual?
Smartsheet vsActual is a standalone strategic execution platform that maps corporate executive plans against ground-level operational progress to eliminate strategy execution drift.
2. Do companies have to use Smartsheet to deploy vsActual?
No. vsActual operates independently and connects directly to external enterprise systems like Jira, ServiceNow, SAP, and Workday without requiring core Smartsheet.
3. What is the Execution Graph?
The Execution Graph is a proprietary knowledge graph trained on two decades of workflow data that models relationships and dependencies between budgets, teams, and deliverables.
4. What is strategy execution drift?
Strategy execution drift describes the common divergence between high-level executive plans and actual ground-level task delivery caused by fragmented enterprise software tools.
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