At the center of several trends we’re watching is Yext. The company embodies fundamentals in presence management – a core subset of local media & marketing – while also being at the vanguard of AI. When we look at how AI enters the Localogyverse, presence management is a prime territory.
Much of this has been top of mind as AI integrates in various ways with local media. It’s also been echoed in public comments by Yext CEO Mike Walrath. For example in a guest spot on the After Earnings Podcast, Walrath unpacked the fundamentals of presence management and how AI accelerates it.
Taking those one at a time, presence management for local businesses and big brands is all about proactive rigor and data management. This is made more challenging and critical in a fragmented media landscape where consumers are getting their local business information from many sources.
Meanwhile, practical outcomes of making sure business information is updated and optimized include boosting revenue and preventing revenue loss. The latter is notable in that consumers sometimes only notice business information when it’s wrong. And when that happens it’s a bad customer experience.
That in turn creates negative brand association and lost revenue. Those negative impacts occur at greater scale for big brands and multi-location businesses, so having structures to optimize it is a business imperative. Yext’s value proposition is to provide that structure and simplify the complexity.
“The money you leave on the table when this doesn’t work is extraordinary,” said Walrath.
Highly Tuned
Most of the above is fundamental to presence management. It shifts with the current inflections in AI, and its infusions in businesses of all shapes and sizes. The way that specifically manifests for businesses like Yext is to enable further levels of automation for its customers… usually a welcome thing.
Here, it’s all about having a baseline of good data to train AI systems to do their thing. As we recently examined, this is one of the biggest detriments to AI actually working for tech companies. And it’s one area where Yext is advantaged: highly tuned data has been its core competency from the start.
Put another way, data integrity has always been fundamental to Yext’s business. But that goes into hyperdrive in an LLM-driven world, where data is the main ingredient in AI training. Downstream, that unlocks the value proposition that businesses (Yext’s customers) really understand: automation.
For example, Yext’s knowledge graph is a robust database of local business information and variables.
That includes structured data (e.g., hours of operation) and unstructured (e.g., free-form reviews). Altogether it’s one of the best AI training sets you could ask for. This primes Yext for the AI era.
As for challenges, capital allocation and opportunity cost are always moving targets. The same can be said for the longer-term road map. There, Yext has to both follow customers’ explicit needs, and lead them where they need to go… which they may not know yet. So it’s all about striking the right balance.
Right now, that balance is dominated by questions of how and where AI plays in. But if it’s anything like past tech revolutions (e.g., web, mobile), it won’t always be a new separate thing. It will be integrated into the fabric of everything as basic plumbing, rather than dominating every strategy discussion.
“At a certain point, you stop talking about it and you’re just living in it,” he said.
