In this article, the existing range of publications about the smart enterprise as a basis for the digital economy is analyzed. The principles of creating a smart enterprise as a way of adapting traditional enterprise to the peculiarities of the external environment are outlined and presented. An approach to solving the problems of a traditional enterprise in the form of its transition to a rational enterprise making decisions adequate to the conditions in which it exists is proposed. Adequacy is determined by the following parameters: a smart enterprise interacts with the environment, a smart enterprise responds to the environment and this allows it to adapt to the reality.