ONWARD17: The Intelligent Transformation

This afternoon, ONWARD started off with an opening keynote on the Intelligent Future. Together, Yext Founder and CEO Howard Lerman, and Chief Strategy Officer Marc Ferrentino, provided more than 700 guests with insights into how the expanding universe of intelligent services is creating competitive advantages for brands that embrace Digital Knowledge Management.

During the talk, Lerman focused his attention on the current state of intelligent services and devices — like Alexa, Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant, and others — and their effect on businesses today.

"Billions of people around the world are being connected by intelligent services," he said. "This is the intelligent transformation."

A lot has changed, and more changes are on the way. And while you can't control the AI or the UI of those intelligent services that consumers use to search for businesses like yours, you can control the information they know about you — so you can can control what they say about you.

"Gone are blue links, web pages of strings. Replaced with smart answers, made up of things."

During the keynote, Ferrentino unveiled three pivotal updates to the Yext Knowledge Engine. The new features are Yext for Events, Yext Knowledge Assistant, and Yext's WeChat Mini-Programs integration.

• **Yext for Events:**You can now manage the public knowledge about your events across the marketing team with a single source of truth‚ and get your events discovered, by publishing to top event-discovery sites like Google, Facebook, Eventbrite, Eventful and more, and through your own intelligent events calendar.

• **Yext Knowledge Assistant:**A breakthrough conversational UI designed to help you manage all the public data about your businesses. Now you can text or message updates directly to the Yext Knowledge Manager — without having to log in or download an app.

• **WeChat Mini-Programs integration:**You can now use Yext to reach Chinese consumers in Mandarin on their platform of choice, whether they are in China or traveling around the world.

"We see an Intelligent Future where knowledge is synced in every service around the world. And not just the Western services like Google, Facebook or Apple. But also synced in Eastern services like Baidu, WeChat, and Yahoo Japan. And also synced in vertical services like in healthcare or menus and events. We see an Intelligent Future with you in control everywhere."

Together, these updates will allow businesses to manage an entirely new type of knowledge, update their knowledge faster than ever, and expand the places their knowledge gets published.

"Intelligent services require new types of digital knowledge, which means there's an opportunity for businesses to highlight things like events for the very first time," said Ferrentino. "We've seen that businesses need powerful tools to control this dynamic information across the web, and to deliver it to consumers around the world."

Ferrentino unveils Yext for Events at ONWARD

Feel like you're missing out?

Tune in to day 2 of ONWARD to hear what experts from today's leading brands and tech companies have to say about the Intelligent Future. Join the live stream at Yext.com/Onward.