Smartsheet launches vsActual AI agents to chase strategy drift

Smartsheet has launched vsActual, a standalone AI-native application that monitors corporate strategy execution and recommends fixes, with general availability planned for early 2027. Pricing was not disclosed. The company confirmed only that billing will be usage-based.

Smartsheet announced the product Wednesday at its Engage event. vsActual sits outside Smartsheet's core work management platform and pulls data from Oracle, Salesforce, SAP and Workday, plus work management tools including Smartsheet itself.

The tool runs AI agents that act on behalf of users. They respond to natural language prompts or run automatically in the background.

What do the agents actually do?

The roster includes five named agents. Each covers one stage of the planning-to-execution cycle.

• Intake agent: builds a "plan of record" from existing documents such as presentation decks and spreadsheets, including goals, timelines, and budget and capacity limits.
• Planning agent: handles capacity planning and scenario modelling, invoked when a plan changes.
• Drift agent: scans connected applications, including Slack conversations, for budget overruns, schedule delays and resource conflicts.
• Data quality agent and reporting agent: keep users current on changes across projects.

Agents can recommend corrective actions, such as reallocating staff to a project facing a predicted delay. They rely on Smartsheet's Execution Graph, a knowledge graph mapping relationships between tasks, projects and strategic goals.

The agents can act autonomously and update data in third-party applications when granted permissions. Human approval is required by default — a default that buyers can presumably change, and Smartsheet said nothing about audit trails.

Who is the buyer?

"vsActual is aimed at the C-Suite, specifically the CFO and COO, who are often battling the issue of budget creep and timeline drift," said Liz Miller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research.

Miller said the gap between strategy and outcomes — what Smartsheet calls "execution drift" — typically surfaces only in PowerPoint slides at quarterly planning sessions or in emailed Excel spreadsheets. "vsActual proactively approaches decision-making, hunting for 'drift' and raising recommendations rooted in the context of operations of that business," she said.

Keith Kirkpatrick, vice president and research director at The Futurum Group, called it "the company's clearest move yet from managing tasks to governing strategy, budget, and capacity" in a Wednesday blog post.

That shift has commercial risk attached. "The concept is sound, but the launch asks Smartsheet to sell to a new buyer and to sell a product unlike the one it is known for," Kirkpatrick said. Smartsheet's historical adoption has been bottom-up, among project managers and operations teams. vsActual targets senior executives and strategy offices instead.

What are the caveats?

Miller stressed that output quality depends on input quality. "The tenet that AI is only as good or as accurate as the data, prompts, and guardrails in which it operates is certainly true here," she said. She noted that scenario recommendations are grounded in live project and business data via the Execution Graph.

She advised organizations to establish guardrails and processes ensuring agents are "tested, trained, and grounded" before working autonomously, and to keep systems in place for human intervention and judgment.

The competitive field is crowded. vsActual goes up against existing strategic planning, financial operations and OKR tracking tools. Miller said those competitors pull in strategy data but are "largely tethered to the primary platform," such as an ERP or HCM system, and "can fall short of establishing workflows that actually recommend or act." That claim is Miller's assessment, not benchmarked evidence; buyers will need to test it against their own stacks.

What is the timeline?

vsActual is available now in early access. General availability is planned for early 2027. Usage-based pricing is confirmed, but no figures, tiers or per-seat structures have been published.

The launch builds on Smartsheet's earlier moves: scenario modelling and portfolio tracking tools arrived at last year's Engage. vsActual is a larger bet — a separate product for a separate buyer, sold under a pricing model the company has not yet quantified.