Envision 2026 Recap: The Agent Harness, Paid Media, and Brand Visibility in One Platform

TL;DR: At Yext Envision NYC 2026, Yext announced the evolution of Scout into a multiplayer agent harness, signed a definitive agreement to acquire Flamel.ai to bring paid media into it, and introduced brand-level Scout capabilities to bring brand and location-level AI visibility together. We also presented Envision Awards to customers leading in AI and agentic marketing. Speakers from Google, LVMH, NYSE, Dentsu, Pizza Hut, Publicis, First Command Financial Services, Beltone, and Janney Montgomery Scott shared what agentic search means for brands.

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Almost all CMOs (96%) acknowledge that AI is already driving end-to-end transformation of their function. The challenge is understanding what to do next— and how to make productivity gains driven by AI translate into actual business growth.

That was one key focus of Yext Envision 2026, which brought together 100+ marketing and AI transformation leaders to learn how brands are actually tackling questions of AI visibility, customer acquisition, and driving ROI in the age of agentic search. However, we took a bit of a different approach to other industry events. We didn't just talk about these problems and questions that every enterprise-level marketer is facing. We showed them.

Featuring speakers from Google, LVMH, NYSE, Dentsu, Pizza Hut, Publicis, First Command, Beltone, Janney, and more, here’s a recap of the conversations and announcements that took place — and what you need to know about shift happening from both sides: how customers now discover brands through AI, and how agents are changing the work of marketing itself, why brand and local visibility should work together, and how Yext is preparing brands for the future.

Announcement 1: Scout becomes a multiplayer agent harness

Mike Walrath's closing keynote opened with a line that set the tone: "We love marketers."

Why that framing? Well, it's a deliberate contrast with this year's industry pitch, which says “agents can do your marketing team's job.” At Yext, we disagree. We're building to scale what a marketing team delivers by 10x, 20x or 30x — not to replace it.

His reasoning is that the “early adopter edge” never lasts in technology, and AI agents will be no different. What does last? Good judgment, and judgment needs context. Look at it this way: an agent pointed at the wrong work or acting on the wrong information does the wrong work beautifully, thousands of times.

Marketing runs on three kinds of context.

1. Brand context is your own operation, which Yext holds in the Knowledge Graph.
2. Market context is everything outside your walls, which Scout covers with 10 billion signals.
3. Working context is the one that breaks today: the hour you spend with your AI never reaches your colleague's agent. Add the fact that a brand lives market by market (“Delta” means one thing in Atlanta and another in Seattle), and you can see why Mike says all marketing becomes local marketing.

That's where the harness comes in. A harness is the structure around a model that makes it reliable enough to trust with real work. Claude and ChatGPT are harnesses, and Yext has been building one for marketing for about a decade under names like the Knowledge Graph and Brand Facts. The new version runs on memory, skills (hundreds ship with it), and connections that let Scout act in the Yext platform and beyond. It relies on verified data, keeps a person in the loop where risk or regulation calls for one, and logs every action.

But a “multiplayer" harness is what’s truly revolutionary for multi-location brands.

Typically, strategy gets set globally, but nuance lives in the local market, and different people own each level in different tools, dashboards, and routines. Every location, agency, and franchisee you add makes that harder to manage. But in a multiplayer harness, the whole team works in one place on shared context, from corporate to regional leads to local operators. A regional lead sees what corporate approved without anyone sending a document. Agents working a local opportunity already know the brand standards, because the context that governs global strategy governs local execution too. The harness is proactive as well, surfacing what matters at every level, from the full portfolio down to a single location.

Mike’s announcement: “Today, we're announcing the evolution of Yext Scout into the game-changing multiplayer agent harness, built for marketers."

Then he showed it. A video followed Organic Krush, whose founder and CEO, Michelle, gave Yext complete access for several weeks of real work. Internal Yext team leads then ran a live demo on a real problem: the local market was getting more competitive, so Organic Krush wanted to go harder on local paid media. Scout built a paid plan for each of the five locations and carried the goal of driving direct ordering through Toast forward from memory. When a teammate corrected the budget from $18K to $10K, the plan updated live. The same approach scales from five locations to 5,000.

The waitlist is open now, with invites rolling out in the next few weeks.

Announcement 2: Yext signs definitive agreement to acquire Flamel.ai

The Organic Krush plan ended on a practical question: you have the local paid media plan, so how do you run it?

Mike's answer starts with a trend. The lines between organic and paid are blurring, which makes it hard for teams to balance different data and systems. Brands need one place to act on both.

So, Yext announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Flamel.ai. Flamel helps multi-location brands run localized paid campaigns across Google, Meta, and ChatGPT, and it was designed for brands with hundreds or thousands of locations. Brand teams set campaigns and guidelines once, and the platform adapts each one to every local market, with brand control and location-level reporting in one place.

Flamel CEO Paul Ehlinger and CTO Matt Sichterman showed what that looks like on stage. Strategy lives at headquarters, but ads have to run across hundreds or thousands of trade areas, each with its own radius, budget, creative, and results. Doing that by hand takes a large team. Scout handles the part nobody had automated, understanding a brand's presence at each location and producing a local media plan. Paul took the Organic Krush plan from the demo and showed the campaign setup Flamel generated from it. Creative, keywords, budget, and unique landing pages for each location came straight from Yext, and everything was queued for review and approval. He called it "the gap we're closing between strategy and execution."

Why it matters: Scout already sees where each location is winning and losing against competitors. Bringing in paid execution lets brands "spend where it changes the outcome," as Mike put it, with ad claims validated against verified Yext data and results feeding back into the next decision. Paid joins search, listings, reviews, intent pages, and social as channels the harness can act on.

Announcement 3: Brand-level Scout capabilities put brand and local in one place

Sam Davis and Melissa Todisco picked up a question Yext hears in customer meetings every week: what about brand-level visibility? Brand and local are usually treated as two conversations, run by two teams with two dashboards and sometimes two vendors. Nobody sees the whole picture.

Melissa's point is that they really are different problems, because scanning and citation methods differ. Her team learned that when the market was saying Reddit was the top citation source in AI search. Yext Research, which started from location, found that websites, location pages, and listings make up most citations. Where you start changes the strategy. And you can't pick one channel the way teams once chose Google over Yahoo, or Facebook over MySpace. AI search draws on websites, listings, reviews, social, news and forums, and all of it has to stay consistent and fresh.

Most teams are stuck watching. According to Corporate Ink's 2026 report, 88% of marketers say AI visibility is a strategic priority, but only 34% have a strategy ready to execute. Melissa's line: "AI search requires a continuous operating system, not a channel playbook."

Following Yext's acquisition of GoShine earlier this year, Scout now manages brand-level and location-level visibility together. You can see where competitors are winning the AI conversation by topic, then prioritize the queries where you're invisible. Agents read the top 20 cited sources for each query and write a brief and article that follow your guidelines and GEO standards. Every published piece is tied to a lift in visibility.

The proof: Yext was GoShine's first customer after the acquisition, and it went from third to first for "agentic marketing" in two weeks with two pieces of content. AI visibility rose 76% overall and 147% on unbranded queries. Another Scout customer, Playdigo, went from 0% visibility to 30% overall and 51% on DSP queries, and its inbound leads doubled.

The harder test came from Janney Montgomery Scott. Chris Johnson explained that for years, its advisors were the brand, with almost no corporate marketing behind them, and Janney started investing in its own brand in late 2024. A brand-level Scout capabilities pilot made the firm AI-ready in four weeks. The team mapped real customer queries into four content pillars aimed at Affluent Gen X, then found its site had been blocking AI crawlers. Fixing that took two weeks and produced a 96% lift in brand visibility. As Chris put it, "AI visibility isn't really an AI project. It's a content, data, and authority project."

Speaker session highlights

Now, a few highlights from individual speaker sessions:

The market view. Google Cloud's Surya Kunju said search is shifting from answering to acting, and showed a live voice-booking demo. Mandi Ciocca of Publicis Media showed that intent changes the evidence: national category prompts cite Reddit and earned media, while local prompts cite brand.com URLs (46%) and review sites.

Customer stories. LVMH's Luciana de Goes made the case to augment, never automate with AI, and noted that 55% of luxury clients use AI for purchases. First Command's Claire Browning said paid spend had been funding the competition, so advisors now earn local media dollars by following a visibility formula first. Her 12 pilot districts saw twice the visibility of the rest. Pizza Hut's Young Truong said more than 60% of searches are now zero-click, and the team built one page per intent. Beltone's Leonard Sullivan gamified Scout audits at the National Meeting, and two months later, unbranded AI citations were up 681%. His takeaway: "Don't just give owners data. Give them a reason to act."

The board-level view. Lynn Martin of NYSE and Beth Ann Kaminkow of Dentsu, moderated by Wendi Sturgis, gave attendees language for AI conversations in their own boardrooms.

The Innovation Floor. Stations were co-built with customers and run by Solutions Engineers. Sam Davis called it a science fair where "the outcomes are real."

The 2026 Envision Awards

Nine Envision Awards went to customers leading in AI and agentic marketing.

IHG Hotels & Resorts won Agentic Visionary. It was one of three major hotel brands live at launch for Google AI Mode hotel booking, built a ChatGPT plugin, and added natural-language search to its app and website.

Wells Fargo won Brand Visibility Innovator for turning its branch and ATM locator into a high-intent channel built for LLM citation, then extending it to Merchant Services and Wealth Advisors.

Beltone won Best Use of Data, Intelligence & Insights for its Scout-led "Defend Your Territory" campaign.

The AI Innovator awards went to First Command in financial services (engagement up 58%, digital lead conversion doubled), Pizza Hut in restaurants (intent pages and the Pizza Calculator), Albertsons in retail (Yext APIs and MCP plus its own LLM to scale local content), Neighborly in services (Scout visibility scores and dashboards for each franchise) and Luxottica in EMEA (Scout across its optical banners, plus dozens of custom connectors). IHG, Wells Fargo, Pizza Hut, and Luxottica have each been Yext partners for 10 years or more.

The Executive Customer Advisory Board was also recognized, and credited on stage with shaping the day's direction.

Built for marketers

Mike's closing thought tied it together: the advantage that lasts is marketers' judgment, supported by shared context.

With the harness, Flamel.ai and brand-level Scout, teams can now go from strategy to execution, brand to local, and organic to paid all in one place — with Yext.

Ready to learn even more? Click here to watch Yext Envision 2026 on demand.