What I Actually Learned On Stage At The Smartsheet Summit
A few weeks back, I sat down for a fireside chat with Ben Saville, Regional VP EMEA at Smartsheet, in front of a room full of people who live and breathe the same problem I do: how do you run transformation at scale without breaking the business while you’re doing it?
I’ve been thinking about that conversation ever since. Because of what it forced me to say out loud.
Merlin is a genuinely global operation. Multiple brands, multiple geographies, and every one of them mid-transformation at the same time. Process changes. People changes. Technology changes. All at once. You can have the sharpest strategy on the planet. It means nothing if you can’t deliver it. That’s the bit nobody puts on the slide
The honest answer about friction
Where’s the friction? Everywhere, if I’m honest. Stakeholders want everything done today. Today, today, today. Every single one of them believes their thing is the priority. It’s not malice, it’s just how large organisations work. The job isn’t to say yes to all of it. It’s to look at the data, make the hard call, and keep the business running while people are carried through the change. Nobody claps for that part. That’s fine. It still matters more than most of what gets a round of applause.
Killing the PowerPoint deck
Here’s the story I’m proudest of. When I joined, Smartsheet was already in the building, but barely used. People logged in, updated a report, and nothing happened with the information afterwards. That’s not a technology problem. I said as much on stage. Bring in a shiny tool and bolt it onto a broken process, and all you’ve built is a faster way to produce the same mess.
So the first thing I fixed wasn’t the tool. It was the delivery framework underneath it. Once that was solid, we moved every piece of governance reporting in Tech off PowerPoint entirely. My project managers were thrilled, and honestly, you know the feeling. Building a forty slide deck, then watching the numbers go stale three hours after you hit send. Now my execs log straight into Smartsheet and see live data. Portfolios, sub-portfolios, drill-down into red, amber, green, and straight into why it’s red. No stale decks. No translation layer between the work and the report.
Where it's still hard
I won’t pretend it’s solved. Data quality is the real fight now. Garbage in, garbage out. Old phrase. Still true. We’re working through getting the data credible enough that people can actually act on it with confidence. And there’s a second, quieter challenge sitting right underneath: organisational maturity. You can roll out too much, too fast, and I said this on stage, it’s a bit like being handed the keys to a candy shop. You stuff your face, and only later do you realise it wasn’t a great idea. Pace matters as much as ambition does.
Where AI actually fits
We’re early in our AI journey at Merlin. I said that plainly on stage, and I’ll say it again here. But listening to what’s coming, particularly around AI layered on top of live data, genuinely got me excited. I was texting my team mid-session. The opportunity isn’t AI replacing judgment. It’s AI surfacing the themes we currently can’t see fast enough: emerging risk, resource strain, demand building up before it becomes a crisis.
People ask me this all the time now. Is AI coming for their job. I give them the same line I gave on stage at Smartsheet: AI isn’t going to take your job. Your job will be taken by someone who knows how to use it. That gets a laugh every time. It’s also just true.
Twelve months from now
If I’m back on that stage next year, here’s what success looks like to me: the whole enterprise, not just Tech, running on one live view. Data I trust. And an AI layer that makes my team faster without making the work less rigorous.
That’s the goal I’m holding myself to. Everything else is detail, and I’m fine being judged on the parts that aren’t.
Want to see the live dynamic on stage? You can check out the full video shared on my LinkedIn page to see the conversation in action.