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Smartsheet’s Praerit Garg. (LinkedIn Photo)
Praerit Garg is excited about going to work, thanks to artificial intelligence, which he refers to as “a gift.”
The president of product and innovation at Smartsheet, Garg is spearheading the integration of AI into the Bellevue, Wash.-based company’s enterprise work management platform.
The tech veteran has seen his share of life-changing innovation, from personal computers to the internet, to mobile, to cloud.
“Generative AI is one of those kinds of things,” Garg said in a new episode of the Shift AI podcast. “It’s one of the best gifts we could have gotten. We live in amazing times.”
Garg first came to the Seattle area in 1995 to join Microsoft, where he spent more than 12 years. He left to run a startup called Symform for a handful of years before landing at Amazon Web Services. In 2019 he arrived at Smartsheet, which was just acquired by Blackstone and Vista Equity Partners.
Thanks to the innovation that is happening now, Garg believes the future of work will only get brighter.
“If many of the things that humans do today can be offloaded to agents, that means we get more time to apply thought, to apply creativity, to do the things that we are uniquely wired for,” Garg told “Shift AI” host Boaz Ashkenazy. “That makes work that much more delightful, that much more what I want to go do versus what I need to go do.”
Listen below, and continue reading for highlights, edited for context and clarity. Subscribe to the Shift AI Podcast and hear more episodes at ShiftAIPodcast.com.
Generative AI’s impact at Smartsheet
“Our target users are business users. Our users are not sophisticated technologists. Writing formulas requires high cognitive load, and business users don’t wake up in the morning saying, ‘I want to write formulas.’ With generative AI, they can now simply ask questions in natural language.”
“We saw a 40% increase in adoption of our AI capabilities after launching them, and a 20% reduction in formula-related support costs.”
“You can ask your data a natural language question, like ‘Which projects are over budget?’ and it generates a chart for you. It’s incredibly empowering for users.”
Privacy and security in AI
“We’re very thoughtful about how we architect the system. For example, with ‘analyze data,’ we don’t send customer data to the AI model — we send prompts that generate SQL queries within our service environment.”
“Transparency is key. We ensure IT and security teams have full visibility into how our AI features work. It helps them feel comfortable with the process.”
Leadership and mentors
“Leadership is about aligning a band of human beings toward a mission. Everyone has a brain, their own experiences — how do you bring that alignment toward a common goal?”
“I learned from great leaders like Dave Thompson at Microsoft and Charlie Bell at AWS that being approachable and humanizing yourself is critical for leadership.”
The future of work
“Even if agents can do creative work, humans will continue to create their own unique missions. We’ll always come up with new things to pursue.”
“Technology exists to serve us, the humans on the planet. It will free us up to focus on what truly matters—solving problems, creating art, and innovating.”
