Streamline work insights with the Amazon Q Business connector for Smartsheet

Amazon Q Business is a fully managed, generative AI–powered assistant that empowers enterprises to unlock the full potential of their data and organizational knowledge. With Amazon Q Business, you can quickly access answers to questions, generate summaries and content, and complete tasks by using the expertise and information stored across various data sources and enterprise systems within your organization. At the heart of this innovative solution are data source connectors, which seamlessly integrate and index content from multiple data sources and enterprise systems such as SharePoint, Confluence, and Smartsheet.

This post explains how to integrate Smartsheet with Amazon Q Business to use natural language and generative AI capabilities for enhanced insights. Smartsheet, the AI-enhanced enterprise-grade work management platform, helps users manage projects, programs, and processes at scale. By connecting Amazon Q Business with Smartsheet, business users, customer solutions managers, product managers and others can gain deeper understanding into their work by asking natural language questions.

The following are examples of questions you can ask Amazon Q Business to gain actionable insights:

• Project status updates – Get quick insights into project health
  • What’s the status of the website redesign project?
  • Is the mobile app launch on track for the planned date?
  • Which projects are currently behind schedule in the Q3 roadmap?
• Task management – Find information about tasks and action items
  • What tasks are assigned to John Doe?
  • Has the marketing plan been completed?
  • What’s the due date for the customer research presentation?
• Resource allocation – Understand resource distribution and workload
  • How many resources are allocated to the product launch project?
  • Which projects require additional staffing based on current task loads?
• Budget tracking – Monitor project and departmental budgets in real time
  • What is the current budget status for the marketing campaign?
  • How much budget is remaining for the customer service training initiative?

Overview of Smartsheet

Smartsheet combines the simplicity of a spreadsheet with powerful features for collaboration, workflow automation, content management, and reporting. Smartsheet powers mission-critical work securely and reliably at scale for thousands of organizations worldwide, including over 85% of Fortune 500 companies. Customers rely on Smartsheet to open thousands of new restaurant locations, distribute vaccines, build rockets, and more.

In this example, we’re using Smartsheet to track tasks for a software development project. This sheet includes columns for Task, Owner, Team, Stage, Start Date, End Date, and more.

Overview of the Smartsheet connector for Amazon Q Business

By integrating Smartsheet as a data source in Amazon Q Business, you can seamlessly extract insights. For example, service operations managers can use the new connector to deliver complex projects more efficiently and consistently. By asking the Amazon Q Business intelligent assistant specific questions, the team can access insights from multiple data sources, including sheets, conversations, and attachments in Smartsheet that have been connected. The generative AI–powered assistant performs deep searches within the data while respecting access and permission levels, saving valuable time and enhancing project oversight. This streamlined process improves client retention, increases accuracy, and elevates overall service quality.

You can integrate Smartsheet to Amazon Q Business through the AWS Management Console, AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI), or the CreateDataSource API.

The Amazon Q Business Smartsheet connector understands user access permissions and strictly enforces them at the time of the query. This makes sure that users can’t access content they don’t have permissions for. For managing security, refer to Identity and access management for Amazon Q Business.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure that you have completed the following prerequisites.

• In Smartsheet
  • Have access to the Smartsheet Event Reporting API. Use the Events API Access Request form to request access for your organization, illustrated by the following screenshot.
    
  • A Smartsheet access token. You need this to connect Smartsheet to Amazon Q Business. For generating a token, refer to Authentication and Access Tokens. Keep note of the generated access token because you’ll need to store it in AWS Secrets Manager as part of configuring your Amazon Q application.
    
  • In your AWS account
    • Create an Amazon Q Business application.
    • Create an Amazon Q Business retriever and add an index.
    • Create an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) role for your data source and, if using the Amazon Q API, note the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of the IAM role.

For detailed guidance on completing these steps, refer to Prerequisites for connecting Amazon Q Business to Smartsheet.

Configure and prepare the Amazon Q Business Smartsheet connector

Follow the steps below to create the retriever and data source:

1. Under Enhancements in the navigation pane, select Data sources. Then choose Add an index, as shown in the following screenshot.
   
2. Under Index provisioning, select Enterprise and then choose Add an index, as shown in the following screenshot. The Enterprise option is ideal for workloads requiring maximum update performance.
   
3. Under Enhancements in the left navigation pane, select Data sources.
4. On the Data sources page, choose Add data source, as shown in the following screenshot.
   
5. On the Add data source page, in the Data sources section, add the Smartsheet data source to your Amazon Q Business application and follow the steps at Connecting Amazon Q Business to Smartsheet using the console.
   
6. On the Smartsheet data source page, select and enter the following information:
   • Data source name
   • AWS Secrets Manager secret
   • IAM role and Role name
   • Sync scope
   • Frequency

Creating the data source should only take a few minutes. After it’s set up, you’ll notice a green success notification on the console and the data source will be displayed in the Data source details section, as shown in the following screenshot.

Next, you need to sync the Smartsheet data source. In the Sync history section, choose Sync now to initiate the process of crawling and ingesting data from your source into Amazon Q Business. After the sync job is complete, your data source will be fully ready for use, as shown in the following screenshots.

Amazon Q Business and Smartsheet connector in action

After creating your Amazon Q Business application, and successfully syncing the Smartsheet data source, you can test the integration. Ask questions related to a project and observe how the app responds in real time. Follow these steps:

1. In the left navigation pane, select AmazonQ-smartsheet-connector application and choose Deployed URL, as shown in the following screenshot.
   

In our example, we asked the following questions regarding our project captured in Smartsheet, and Amazon Q Business generated responses for the project owners regarding status and provided additional information for each task.

Question 1 – What is the project status for creating the UI?

Amazon Q Business response – As shown in the following screenshot, Amazon Q Business generated a response identifying the status as in progress, the name of the team member performing the work, and the scheduled completion date.

Question 2 – List all the projects with their deadlines

Amazon Q Business response – As shown in the following screenshot, Amazon Q Business generated an answer and listed the projects with their deadlines, including citation links from the Smartsheet.

Question 3 – What project is Chloe Evans handling? Can you provide more information about it?

Amazon Q Business response – As shown in the following screenshot, Amazon Q Business generated an answer summarizing the tasks that Chloe Evans is handling.

Troubleshooting

If you encounter issues while asking questions in Amazon Q Business, the problem might be due to missing permissions required to access certain information. Amazon Q Business strictly enforces the document permissions set in its data source. Follow these steps to troubleshoot:

1. Check indexing status – Confirm whether the Smartsheet connector has been successfully indexed in the Amazon Q Business application. This makes sure that the data source is properly integrated.
2. Verify user permissions – Make sure that the Smartsheet user account has the necessary permissions to access and read the information from the sheet. Proper permissions are critical for enabling Amazon Q Business to retrieve and process the required data.

Additionally, as an administrator managing the Amazon Q Business application, you can troubleshoot these issues by following these steps and using the document-level sync reports, which enhance visibility into data source sync operations. These reports provide comprehensive and detailed insights integrated into the sync history, including granular indexing status, metadata, and access control list (ACL) details for every document processed during a data source sync job.

The detailed document reports are stored in the new SYNC_RUN_HISTORY_REPORT log stream under the Amazon Q Business application log group, making sure that critical sync job details are available on demand when troubleshooting. For more information, refer to document-level sync reports.

As shown in the following screenshot, we used Amazon CloudWatch Logs Insights to query the SYNC_RUN_HISTORY_REPORT log stream, which meant we could review the sync status in detail.

Clean up

Complete the following steps to clean up your resources:

1. Select the app you created earlier, then choose Delete.
2. On the Amazon Q Business console, choose Applications in the navigation pane.
3. Select the application you created, and on the Actions menu, choose Delete.

Conclusion

In this post, we explored how Amazon Q Business can seamlessly integrate with Smartsheet to help enterprises unlock the full potential of their data and knowledge. With the Smartsheet connector, organizations can empower their teams to find answers quickly, accelerate project tracking, streamline task management, automate workflows, and enhance collaboration.

Now that you’ve learned how to integrate Amazon Q Business with your Smartsheet content, it’s time to tap into the full potential of your organization’s data. To get started, sign up for an Amazon Q Business account and follow the steps in this post to set up the Smartsheet connector. Then, you can start asking Amazon Q Business natural language questions and watch it surface insights in seconds.

---

About the Authors

Brandon Seiter is a Senior Director, Corporate Development at Smartsheet. He has 15+ years of experience helping companies develop their inorganic growth strategies and overseeing their Corporate Development activities, including mergers & acquisitions, strategic partnerships and new business incubation. At Smartsheet he plays a pivotal role in nurturing relationships with Smartsheet’s technology partners and developing joint partner initiatives.

Aidin Khosrowshahi is an Amazon Q Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS, where he brings his passion for generative AI and serverless applications to life. As an active member of the AI/ML and serverless community, he specializes in Amazon Q Business and Developer solutions while serving as a generative AI expert. He helps customers implement best practices while fostering collaboration and driving innovation across the AI/ML ecosystem.

Chinmayee Rane is a Generative AI Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS, with a core focus on generative AI. She helps Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) accelerate the adoption of generative AI by designing scalable and impactful solutions. With a strong background in applied mathematics and machine learning, she specializes in intelligent document processing and AI-driven innovation. Outside of work, she enjoys salsa and bachata dancing.

Lokesh Chauhan is a Sr. Technical Account Manager at AWS, where he partners with Enterprise Customers to optimize their AWS journey and drive cloud success. He is a member of the AI/ML community and serves as a generative AI expert. As a 12x AWS-certified TAM, he brings deep technical expertise across the AWS platform. Prior to joining AWS, he held leadership positions including Project Lead and Sr. Database admin, building extensive experience in database and operations across multiple organizations.