A lot landed across the monday.com platform in the first quarter of 2026 that has not yet been covered on this blog. Rather than let it sit, this post rounds up the meaningful changes from late January through 25 March: the continued build-out of monday service, cross-board structure work, AI additions, and a handful of CRM and administrative updates that are worth knowing about if you are running or planning a monday.com implementation. Subsequent posts will cover late March onwards and then return to a weekly cadence.
monday service matures
Three updates reshape what monday service can do for customer-facing teams.
Customer Portal gives your clients a logged-in destination where they can submit tickets, track the status of their open requests, and read any knowledge articles you have published. The portal is branded to your account and sits separately from the internal monday service board where your support team works. For businesses that have been managing client communications through shared inboxes or external help desk tools, this is the piece that makes monday service viable as a front-door support channel rather than just an internal ticketing workflow.
Multiple Customer Portals extends that capability on the Enterprise plan, so you can run distinct portals for different client segments, product lines, or brands. Each portal has its own branding, its own knowledge base, and its own routing rules back into monday service. This matters for agencies with multiple client brands, for software companies supporting several products, and for parent companies with subsidiaries that need to feel separate from the customer side but share the support operation behind the scenes.
"My tickets" is the end-user side of the portal: the view a customer sees listing every ticket they have raised, the status of each, and the conversation history. Before this, customers often had to email support to ask where a ticket stood. The self-serve view removes that friction and cuts down inbound status chasing.
Taken together, these three updates move monday service past a "new product, let us know what you need" stage into something closer to a proper helpdesk suite. If your team has been on Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Intercom and the renewal is coming up, this is the point at which a serious comparison becomes worthwhile.
Cross-board and cross-project structure
Three updates in this area speak to a common scale-up problem: once you have 30 or 40 boards with related work, keeping them coherent gets harder.
The Connect Boards Column lets you link a column on one board to items on another board. It is the building block for a lot of cross-board reporting and has been in monday.com for a long time, but the recent support article update signals ongoing refinement in how the column handles bidirectional linking and filter behaviour. If you have not used it, the pattern is: a column in your Accounts board links to items in your Contacts board, so an account row shows all its associated contacts inline without duplication.
Dependencies on monday.com is the within-board version: a dependency column that ties one item's timeline to another's. Task B cannot start until Task A is done, and if A slips, B shifts. Foundational project management behaviour, available on Pro and Enterprise plans.
Cross-Project Dependencies is the enterprise-scale version: dependencies that cross board boundaries. If your teams are running several projects in parallel and handoffs between projects are a real bottleneck (engineering waiting on design, delivery waiting on procurement), this is what lets those handoffs show up on the Gantt. Enterprise plan only.
For teams migrating from Salesforce or HubSpot, the relevant question is whether your current CRM's reporting layer is what you need, or whether you actually need the flexible board-and-column structure that monday.com offers. The Connect Boards Column is often the answer when someone asks "can monday.com handle our data model".
AI additions: WorkForm generation and service assistant
Two AI features were added that are worth understanding.
Build a WorkForm with AI lets you describe the form you want ("a client intake form with contact details, project scope, budget range, and timeline") and the AI generates the field structure, logic, and connected automations. Previously, building a good WorkForm meant configuring each field manually and wiring up conditional logic by hand. This is aimed at the "I need this form live today" use case rather than a polished permanent intake.
AI assistant on monday service is an agent for support teams. It drafts replies to common ticket types based on your past responses and knowledge base content. It is not auto-send (you review and edit before sending), but it removes the blank-page problem on tickets that have been asked before in slightly different ways. For teams handling high volumes of repeat queries, this is the difference between a support rep writing 40 fresh replies a day and editing 40 suggested drafts. See our AI automation service for how we implement these kinds of AI-backed workflows inside monday.com builds.
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Two updates in the CRM workflow are worth knowing.
Activity tracker widget is a board widget that displays activity volume (calls, emails, meetings) across your sales team or accounts. You place it on a dashboard and it shows at a glance who has been active and who has gone quiet. For managers running weekly pipeline reviews, this removes a step that often involved exporting activity data to a spreadsheet.
Mass emailing in monday CRM lets you send one-to-many emails from a contact list while logging each send against the relevant CRM record. It is available on Pro and Ultimate plans. The practical distinction from a bulk email tool like Mailchimp is that mass emailing here is for sales outreach, not marketing campaigns: the emails come from the rep's own email account via the connected mailbox, they are logged to each contact's activity history, and they respect suppression flags on individual records. For teams that have been doing this manually by sending the same email to a dozen contacts one at a time, this is hours saved per week.
WorkCanvas, GitLab, and staying organised
Three updates that do not fit a bigger theme but are worth flagging.
Plans and features for WorkCanvas in monday is a documentation update on how WorkCanvas (monday's collaborative canvas product) is available across Freemium, Pro, and Enterprise plans. If your team is evaluating WorkCanvas alongside tools like Miro or FigJam, this is the plan breakdown to check first, because canvas limits and participant seats differ meaningfully between tiers.
Create a GitLab on premises connection is a niche one: for customers using GitLab Self-Managed, there is now a documented pattern for connecting monday dev boards to a self-hosted GitLab instance. This is relevant to regulated industries or large enterprises where GitLab Cloud is not an option.
How to keep your account organized is a refreshed best-practice guide covering workspace, folder, and board structure, and when to archive versus delete versus leave alone. If your account has grown beyond 50 boards and things have started to feel unmanageable, this is worth a read before you start restructuring from scratch.
What this means for migrations
The shape of the Q1 updates points to monday.com filling in two areas where migration buyers have historically pushed back. The service portal updates address the "we also need helpdesk functionality" objection without requiring a second tool. The cross-board and cross-project dependency work addresses the "can it handle our scale" objection, particularly for teams running many parallel projects. Neither was a gap that blocked most migrations, but both were gaps that made the scope harder to draw.
If you are evaluating monday.com against your current CRM or project tool, these Q1 additions change the feature matrix meaningfully. A free consultation is the fastest way to work through which of your current capabilities map to monday.com natively and where you might need a workaround.
