The work management revolution has blossomed in tandem with its UC and collaboration equivalents, similarly turbocharged by the past half-decade’s hybrid and remote working boom.
Project management, task management, portfolio management. Sales systems, IT projects, and marketing campaigns. All of it falls under the broad work management umbrella, and all of it has seen a competitive and wildly innovative market emerge to accommodate such demand.
Even the shrewdest and most innovative businesses need a compelling USP to stand out and thrive in this environment. What is Smartsheet’s?
“Enterprise-grade scalability,” Sarfraz Ali, Vice President and General Manager of EMEA at Smartsheet, told UC Today. “But those become important only if we can grow with the organisation.”
Ali affirms that the nature of collaborative work management is that vendors often start with a small unit within a company and try to solve a specific problem. “Unless we can meet that department or team member where they’re at, which is often a very narrow-scope use case, make them successful, and grow with them, it’s very hard to support them,” Ali elaborates.
“As we grow with them, it becomes important for us to be enterprise-grade. It’s important for us to be scalable to billions of data units, for example. But it’s a combination of meeting a user in that initial use case and growing with them to become enterprise-grade.”
Smartsheet’s Innovative Approaches to Scalability and Digital Transformation
Ali has been with Smartsheet for nearly 11 years, witnessing its evolution from a 100-person startup to a global leader in work management. Starting as a Product Manager, he later joined Smartsheet’s London expansion in 2018. With 25 years in tech, his expertise spans product management, engineering, consulting, and go-to-market strategy.
While Ali highlights scalability as Smartsheet’s major market differentiator, the platform is also AI-powered and geared around driving projects, portfolios and programmes that instrument change in organisations across 13.5 million users in 190 countries worldwide.
“If you look at our current economic and geopolitical environment, you see a lot of really positive, disruptive innovation,” Ali said. “So when customers come to us, they’re really trying to figure out how to transform and change rapidly. Typically, that transformation comes down to a few key projects, programmes, and portfolios, which, if executed well, will truly define their trajectories in the market.”
“As an example, I’ll quote Sodexo,” Ali continued. “They’re one of our biggest customers in EMEA. They are a food and facilities management company operating in 53 countries via 23,000 sites. So, it’s a pretty big enterprise-grade scalable operation with about 400,000+ employees.”
What they’re really using Smartsheet for is taking 15 global transformation initiatives and delivering them to the sites via projects, programmes, and processes. We’ve enabled the employees on their sites to drive work and execute their core workloads. But as a result, a lot of the data created in those sites starts surfacing across the different levels of the company, enabling reporting and understanding of how those transformation initiatives are landing.”
Sodexo also embodies what Ali calls the “end state” of a company’s Smartsheet journey in scalability: “They started with us in a certain use case, but they’ve seen enough confidence in us to grow the platform and the use case. Now they’re involved in those 15 global transformation initiatives on the platform.”
AI and Automation are Transforming Work Management
Just like in UC and collaboration, AI and automation are changing the game in work management—is Smartsheet also exploring these technologies’ potential?
“That idea of adaptability, scalability, flexibility, and configuration is core to our support of our customers at scale,” Ali said. “What I think AI has is that turbocharge effect. So, our ability to support those users and enable them to have a conversation with Smartsheet becomes incrementally or substantially more.”
“We’re really taking the concept of AI and going more from, ‘It’s not just about taking a paragraph, summarising it, or taking a document, creating a title,’ to saying, ‘Here is an AI agent that can almost serve on my behalf and potentially be a proxy, can make decisions on my behalf.'”
At last year’s Smartsheet Summits, which took place in London and Seattle, the company launched the initial capabilities to propel that vision, with one of the most eye-catching being a formula builder.
“Formulas are often central to driving workflows,” Ali added. “They are the central capability that decides the routing of logic and the decision-making in workflows. Often, formulas take time for users to build. There’s a pretty high threshold in users understanding that and, as a result, building them into the system.”
Even for a pretty long-time user like me, if I go back into Smartsheet and try to build a formula before AI, it would take me 60-plus minutes or an hour or two. Now, using the AI builder, I can potentially build a formula in two to three minutes—a substantial savings. So, not only am I saving time, but I’m also reducing the threshold to build a capability like that.”
“So those are really the concepts about thinking about AI as an assistant, an intelligent assistant to users and strategic decision-makers who use Smartsheet as a platform.”
An EMEA Team Fit to Meet Customer Demand
Smartsheet EMEA, in particular, has grown exponentially. Ali outlines that the EMEA team has grown by about 60x in staff, a rapid growth necessary to properly support its customers in the region—the number of customers has grown by 200x in that time. The company has signed up 100-plus partners across 30 countries across the region, too.
A big aspect of how we support our customers is making sure that we have the right human capacity, so to speak. We have teams that support our UK customers, our French customers, our Nordic customers, our German customers, our customers in Southern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, etc. Building a diverse team to support a very diverse market has been a really important aspect of our growth over here.”
“The second aspect is that we are a pretty full-functional and full-stack team in that we have sales, regional operations, customer success, consulting, channel partnerships, and face marketing,” Ali continued. “We also have an engineering team across the UK. So, it’s that mix of making sure that we have the right capabilities required by our customers to give them the confidence to grow and invest in Smartsheet.”
Are there any unique regional specificities that Smartsheet has had to address?
“One of the ongoing themes we hear is that digital transformation is an important area of focus for companies in the UK and EMEA,” Ali answered. “Again, this is something that we’ve learned working with our customers like Sodexo, who say that strategy is only as good as execution. It is really important to distil strategy down to the level of execution—in Sodexo’s example, those 23,000 sites.”
“Removing any friction that comes from taking a strategy down to execution is where a lot of the work that we’ve done comes to fruition. That means, for example, automating the instantiation of a project. Make sure that the project is surrounded by the context of strategic inputs, best practices, and learning. So that the person who inherits that project and starts executing that project has already had a leg up.”
Ali emphasises that all of that innovation is not just based on one particular feature or capability. It’s across what Smartsheet has built in its AI-powered portfolio management and resource management solutions, as well as its reporting and dashboarding capabilities.
“Then, ultimately, bringing all of these features and capabilities together in a few use cases,” Ali expanded. “One of the things that we have seen is because collaborative work management is a pretty broad concept, it was important for us to distil those into a few use cases like project management, portfolio management, and IT project management, for example. Marketing campaign management. That then reduces the learning curve for a lot of our users to onboard to the platform and start seeing value.”
How Smartsheet Aims to Innovate in 2025 and Beyond
If scalability and digital transformation innovation are where Smartsheet particularly excels, what is the business’s strategy for 2025 and beyond?
We are in the process of defining that, and a large part of it involves acknowledging the changing nature of work. Work is asynchronous, distributed, and no longer anchored in time or location, which offers so much opportunity for productivity and collaboration worldwide.”
“I’ll give you an example here as well,” Ali added. “The McLaren Formula One racing team is one of our marquee customers in EMEA. If you follow the sport, it is hyper-competitive. It involves literally thousands of parts going from the factory in Surrey to circuits across the world. A lot of that collaboration across the planning, technology, and operations teams are using Smartsheet.”
Ali stressed that this is an example of work that is disconnected from time, region, and geography. As a result, people tend to focus more on the results or the input versus the output.
“That, along with the incremental improvements required for a hyper-competitive space like McLaren, is what’s really driving the success,” he concluded. “A large part of our vision is continuing this process of understanding how collaboration and productivity can continue without being anchored in time or a place.”
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