April Question of the Month - Join the conversation and receive a badge

TomG

I am completely on board with the suggestions related to improving,creating formulas (@LizTo, @Jenn Hilber), helping create complex workflows(@RebSchr), voice interactions (multiple folks above), building dashboards(@RebSchr) and creating a complete set of project sheets based on a few key parameters (@MikeWhite).

Some other ideas:

• Equip the AI with the vast amount of information that exists today on Smartsheet's web site and community forums. Improving how we as a community can find and interact with forum data would improve the user experience and increase the speed at which the knowledge base grows.
• Provide enhanced analysis on a sheet or workgroup level and suggest additional data insights (metrics, reports, etc.)
• Another application would be to see if the AI can figure out a solution so the greatness of Smartsheet could be applied when using it to plan work that depends on both date and time with short duration tasks that require calculations of time. If users have to solve that today using formulas, perhaps the AI can find a code-based solution that would render all of our formulas and helper columns obsolete!
• Or in general, can the AI be applied to those pesky issues from the user community that don't seem to get enough traction to move through from roadmap to development and release? I know all development teams are stretched (my own included). But if applying AI to those issues that are victim of resource constraints would allow those to resolved, then it's a win both for Smartsheet and the user community.

MCorbin

I'd like to see Generative AI help with my Bridge workflows.... Create the JavaScript if needed, troubleshoot and tell me if a step is missing or in the wrong order.

Genevieve P.

Oooh, @MCorbin AI helping with Bridge workflows is a great shout! To add to this, it would be cool if AI could help us build out API calls 🤓 (next-level formulas).

Personally I could sometimes use help determining a colour pallet & hex codes, such as for a Dashboard set-up... especially with the new Dashboard colour enhancements!

Sherry Fox

Some great conversations and ideas so far!!! I know one of my issues is with some of the features that Excel has and Smartsheet doesn't. I would use a feature like Generative AI or ChatGPT to find other ways to accomplish my goal in Smartsheet. Such as using INDEX/MATCH instead of XLOOKUP (since it doesn't exist in SS). And help when I receive errors about too many links in my sheets. This is especially a major issue as I am creating calculation sheets that link from multiple sources.

JLewis6316

While I like the idea of AI to help make the product better, I still think there are a lot of suggestions and concerns listed in the forums and has been submitted as Enhancement Requests that the team could focus. That said, I would rather Smartsheet to use that AI to help fulfill those requests better. If the AI is wanting another add-on to the user pricing or utilizes a 3rd party function; then I feel that would be less than useful to the user.

On this conversation already is numerous great examples. I have found wonderful solutions in the Community from other users and unfortunately the way users ask/explain may not be worded correctly for another user. Would be advantageous if the AI was able to look in the forums and re-ask/re-answer those solutions. With that if the Ai would be able to know what the users Plan account (Business) was so it would suggest that level of answers before suggesting another plan (Enterprise) or 3rd party approach.

Brian_Richardson

@Alison Clancy haha you know I have thoughts.

However, I think most people already hit this on the nose (mixed metaphor?). I played around a little with using Bridge to shoot over questions to ChatGPT and get answers back. Where we found it really useful was in summarization. So...sending over a list of risks and getting back a 3 sentence summary. Or sending over several paragraphs of vendor background and getting an executive brief back.

As others mentioned, less useful was Smartsheet-specific suggestions. Right now ChatGPT doesn't seem to know about Smartsheet functions and kept handing me Excel formulas, even if I told it "You are a Smartsheet expert builder and can use only functions listed at this site..".

For internal Smartsheet AI enablement, I'd love to see:

• Generative summarization of data across multiple cells. In other words read a data set from a sheet and perform some summarization of it into "everyday" words and paragraphs. Would need to be able to set tone and length.
• Tag and index creation. For example, hand Smartsheet a sheet full of risks and have it tag them for future searches. This would also need the Search to be updated to allow tag-based searching
• Enhanced automated alerts and notifications - instead of fixed text for the alerts, have Smartsheet generate appropriate text based on selections for tone and length
• Dashboard auto-creation - give Smartsheet a set of sheets and have it create reports, then put those reports onto dashboards and generate charts automatically. Then the job is so much easier...could simply adjust and tweak the content provided instead of spending all the time generating report after report
• Image creation - given a prompt, create a work-appropriate image to use on dashboards and forms

Brian_Richardson

Oh, something I forgot to mention.... one key limitation of using ChatGPT is that you cannot send sensitive or confidential data without that data becoming available to the world. So it puts a HUGE dampener on leveraging it for work. So any solutions that Smartsheet uses needs to incorporate the security model of Smartsheet...basically not sharing the data outside the account.

adam.b

As I am unfamiliar with using AI in my Smartsheet usage, I am however interested to see how it pans out. It would be nice to provide what I am trying to accomplish, and to have AI build it with the fundamentals I provide. I would also like to have questions answered when I am stuck or I cannot build what I need to give me guidance if there is something already built I do not know about.

I am excited to see the next phases roll out.

Keechia Traub

I love all of the suggestions so far! I’m going to pull a few concepts that would be of great use in my day to day work in SmartSheet…

• An “Ask SmartSheet” function to help figure out tricky nuances. I use the community but sometimes it’s hard to find the exact issue I’m having.
• AI that learns my style and can help customize/learn/anticipate needed changes
• Support for complex formulas
• Recommended “sharing” of specific reports/dashboards

Paul Newcome

The best idea I have seen so far is using it to reach out to Alexa in the living room to quiet down the kids when you're on a work call. 🤣

As for process improvements such as dashboard suggestions or overall solution suggestions, those would all put me out of a job. They sound really awesome, and I can certainly see the benefit for most users, but the selfish side of me says we don't want it. Haha.

Dawn_ATX

I would love to see some functionality where you could ask it to help with products that don't have a ton of help articles (such as how to create a trigger with RM by using Bridge).

StevenBlackburnMBA

We created an HR talent acquisition and comp analysis system. This system could utilize generative AI by using the job title database, along with pay scales to calculate when certain candidates are expected to be on the higher range versus the lower range based on their resume qualifications. This could help quantify in numbers the qualification of a candidate, and help give employers non-biased and standardized salary payouts.

Kyle Chipman

All the detailed responses to this question are thoughtful and exceptional, and feel like more than a sufficient range of jumping off points. Genuinely, I found myself saying "Yep!" to majority of the long-form responses, and littered the thread with upvotes. Time to start applying story and value points to these bad boys :)

One specific contribution I did not already see posted:

• AI-managed conditional formatting systems, built either for scaled implementation or for recommendation, where conditional formatting is tethered to column type parameters based off sheet-or-workspace-defined primary, secondary and tertiary hex codes, where things like dropdown list responses, numerical heat maps, time-based criteria, etc, can be quickly attributed at scale. The mindset can be close to the current rule-by-rule system, but following defined groups of column types. Added benefit of applying this approach at the Control Center-level, across a deployed structure

Otherwise, following any other community member's dashboarding recommendations is clutch - Dashboards have so much air to pull out in their current configuration steps that you might as well tackle that redesign with an AI-centric mindset.

Super excited to see what develops on this front and, honestly, to start to incorporate AI-thinking into my daily efforts, while maintaining yoga, meditation, nature and journaling as parts of my non-screen living.

akrenek

COMPLEX SMARTSHEET NESTED FORMULAS--PERIOD!!

Jamie Koch

Generative AI could be a gamechanger for Smartsheet. Here are some areas I could see using it.

• Writing advanced formulas to automate my sheets or roll up key data metrics
• Creating project summaries or status updates for dashboards
• Spinning up new project folders or workspaces based on templates (including renaming the assets for the new project!)
• Suggesting charts for displaying report data on dashboards
• I'd also like to be able to ask how to display specific metrics or charts on a dashboard. For example, "Smartsheet, how can I show the average number of tickets handled by team member per hour/day/week?"