Enterprise buyers don’t double their research activity without a reason. In January 2026, the number of businesses actively evaluating project and task management platforms did exactly that.
According to Techtelligence data, demand for PTM platforms is running at +89% above the 2025 baseline. That’s a sign of a market that has decided, collectively, that now is the time to make a decision.
The reason behind the move isn’t hard to find. monday.com, Asana, and Smartsheet all arrived into 2026 after a series of major AI commitments made in the second half of last year: new architectures, new agents, and new philosophies about what work management software is actually supposed to do.
Here is our assessment of where each one stands.
monday.com: Broad AI across a proven platform
monday.com closed FY2025 with $1.232 billion in revenue, up 27% year-on-year, with 250,000 customers across its Work Management, CRM, Service, and Dev products.
It is the largest of the three vendors by both revenue and customer count, and that scale matters in enterprise procurement: it means a mature integration ecosystem, a large implementation community, and a company with the commercial stability to support long-term contracts.
The AI strategy is platform-wide: a single AI layer runs across all products, handling task creation, assignment, summarisation, and workflow automation without requiring users to switch context. The ambition is that AI becomes invisible infrastructure rather than a discrete feature set. At its Partner Summit in Prague this month, monday.com confirmed that AI adoption is now a central commercial priority, with the company incentivising its partners to embed AI capabilities into customer deployments.
The possible limitation is depth. monday.com’s AI performs well at the process layer (automating routine tasks, generating summaries, and routing work) but the company has not yet produced substantive evidence of AI driving measurable outcomes at the enterprise level beyond efficiency gains. For organisations whose evaluation criteria extend to strategic impact, that gap is worth probing.
Asana: The clearest AI philosophy, with a leadership caveat
Asana’s product story is arguably the most considered of the three.
Its AI framework is built around context, checkpoints, and controls: a deliberate response to enterprise concern about AI operating without governance inside sensitive project environments.
That framework underpins AI Teammates, the headline feature from Asana’s Fall 2025 release: AI agents that receive task assignments like any other team member, act on them, and report back within existing team channels. In beta as of November 2025, AI Teammates span campaign management, product launches, and strategic planning workflows.
The same release brought AI risk reports — automated weekly assessments that surface project blockers before they affect timelines — multilingual semantic search, and a Timesheets and Budgets add-on that pushes Asana into financial resource management. An Amazon Q Business integration extends its AI workflows across third-party enterprise data. Taken together, it is a coherent upmarket push.
The caveat is leadership. In March 2025, co-founder Dustin Moskovitz announced he was stepping down. Dan Rogers, formerly of ServiceNow and Rubrik, took the role on July 21, with Moskovitz remaining as board chair. The product Asana is selling today reflects Moskovitz’s vision. Rogers has not yet articulated a distinct strategic direction, and for enterprise buyers taking a multi-year view, that is a variable worth factoring in.
Smartsheet: Enterprise depth, with a delivery timeline to watch
Smartsheet’s starting point is different from the other two.
85% of Fortune 500 companies already use the platform, which means for many large enterprises, the question is not whether to adopt Smartsheet but how far to extend it.
At its ENGAGE event in November 2025, Smartsheet introduced Intelligent Work Management: a platform architecture built on a proprietary Smartsheet Knowledge Graph. Rather than applying AI generically, the Knowledge Graph gives Smartsheet’s AI access to each organisation’s specific project history, terminology, and workflows. The practical intent is AI that reflects a particular enterprise’s context rather than producing generic outputs. Built on that foundation are Smart Assist, Smart Flows, Smart Columns, and Smart Agents — the last of which monitors project progress continuously and flags risks without being prompted. A centralised control panel, Smart Hub, is due later in 2026.
The PwC UK partnership, announced in January 2025, adds a further enterprise dimension. PwC is embedding Smartsheet as standard within transformation engagements across public sector and financial services clients. When a Big Four firm makes a platform the default in its client delivery, that changes the procurement dynamic considerably — enterprises encounter Smartsheet as an established baseline rather than a vendor on a shortlist.
The risk is timing. Several key features — Smart Agents, Smart Flows, Smart Columns — were still in early adopter or private beta as of November 2025, with Portfolios targeting general availability in Q1 2026. The architecture is credible. Whether the delivery matches the announcement is the question near-term evaluators need to ask.
One number to watch
Outside the three-platform comparison, Techtelligence recorded a +2,347% intent spike for Nintex — a low-code workflow automation platform — in the same January window. Productivity and Automation intent rose +193% over the same period. Some enterprise buyers are not choosing between these three platforms; they are asking whether workflow automation addresses their requirements more directly. That question is worth answering before shortlisting project management tools.
Need more help making the most out of your choice? Check out our guide to maximizing the ROI of collaborative workplace management systems here.
