SOCi’s Genius Agentic Workforce now executes more than 27 million localized marketing tasks a year, has eliminated over 5 million hours of manual marketing work ,and delivers conversion rates more than 2x the industry benchmark for multi-location businesses — all without added headcount.

SAN DIEGO, Sept. 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — SOCi Inc. today announced it has surpassed 412,000 deployed Genius Agents™, commanding the largest deployed agentic workforce in localized marketing and accelerating the shift from manual local marketing execution to autonomous operations at enterprise scale. SOCi’s agents now execute more than 27 million localized marketing tasks annually on behalf of enterprise brands — delivering measurable visibility and revenue gains across thousands of locations. At the current growth trajectory, SOCi’s agentic workforce is on pace to surpass half a million deployed agents before year-end.

The deployed agent base grew 37% in the most recent quarter alone, from just over 300,000 agents in May to more than 412,000 today. Enterprise brands are moving localized marketing execution away from overstretched teams and toward autonomous systems that run continuously across traditional and AI search, social, reputation, and customer engagement channels.

“Enterprises added more than 100,000 agents in a single quarter. That is not experimentation. That is brands deciding local marketing is work that has to get done continuously, at every location, and staffing it with SOCi’s Agentic Workforce. The question stopped being whether agents work. It is now how fast a brand can put them to work.”

Afif Khoury, Chief Executive Officer, SOCi

Local Discovery Has Changed. The Execution Hasn’t Caught Up.

SOCi’s 2026 Local Discovery Index, a survey of more than 1,000 U.S. consumers, found that local discovery no longer moves in a straight line. Consumers discover a business through search or AI, verify what they find through reviews or social media, then check another source before deciding. The path to purchase has become a loop — and brands have to be present, accurate, and consistent everywhere that loop touches.

The numbers show how fast that loop is expanding. Search remains the anchor at 84%, but 55% of consumers now turn to social for local recommendations, and AI usage for local business discovery jumped from just 9% a year ago to 52% today. That is not a gradual shift. It is a structural change in how customers find and choose local businesses, and most brands’ execution hasn’t kept pace.

In AI search, that gap has direct consequences for visibility. AI engines surface businesses based on the consistency and accuracy of signals across listings, reviews, and local content — not on a single authoritative source. A brand that keeps its hours current, responds to reviews, and publishes fresh local content continuously earns placement. One that doesn’t gets passed over, before a customer ever considers reaching out. That reality is reflected in the data: 81% of consumers take an additional step to verify an AI recommendation before trusting it, in part because 67% say an AI tool has already given them wrong information about a local business.

Reviews are where trust converts to preference. 98% of consumers read reviews before a first visit, and 72% say a business that responds to reviews earns their preference over one that doesn’t. That response has to happen at every location, in the brand’s voice, at the pace customers expect.

This is the work SOCi’s agents execute continuously, across every location. The Genius Local Search Agent maintains and optimizes the structured data (i.e. local business profile data in places like a Google Business Profile and other directories) that AI engines, maps, and search results pull from. The Genius Social Agent keeps the content layer (i.e. social media posts and visual content) current and locally relevant. The Genius Reputation Agent responds to reviews in the brand’s voice which turns the signal that drives AI visibility into the trust that drives customer decisions.  Across SOCi’s deployed customer base, that execution translates directly to revenue performance: agent-powered locations run at an 8.9% annual conversion rate — more than double the industry benchmark for multi-location businesses, and a 17.5% improvement over those same customers’ pre-agent performance.

Source: SOCi 2026 Local Discovery Index and SOCi platform metrics

The shape of the workforce today

Where the Genius Agentic Workforce stands as of September 2026:

Milestone Summary
          412,000+ Genius Agents™ deployed, up 37% in the most recent quarter
          27 million+ localized marketing tasks executed annually
          5 million+ hours of manual marketing work eliminated
          2x the industry benchmark conversion rate, with a 17.5% lift vs. pre-agent baseline
          98.7% publish-ready acceptance rate

Enterprise brands are seeing measurable impact

SOCi’s agentic workforce now serves category leaders across virtually every major consumer industry, including QSR, Retail, Financial Services, Hospitality, Auto, Home Improvement, Grocery and more.   In each case, agents are delivering real outcomes across the customer base in a manner where local execution directly drives revenue.

Top 3 Sandwich Chain in the U.S. scales customer care to thousands of locations

One of the largest sandwich chains in the U.S. tapped SOCi’s Agentic Workforce to solve a review problem no human team could solve at scale. The brand had accumulated four times the review volume of its nearest competitor across thousands of locations — but was responding to just 1%. Considering that star rating and review response are among the strongest ranking signals in both traditional local search and AI search, the brand’s lack of response and resulting 3.8 average star rating were as much a visibility problem as a trust one. Within a single quarter of deploying the Genius Reputation Agent, SOCi had responded to more than 100,000 reviews in the brand’s local voice. In under a year, the brand’s average local rating climbed above 4 stars and its response rate surpassed 40% — turning one of its most visible competitive liabilities into a measurable trust and visibility advantage.

Top 3 Global Money Transfer Brand drives increased visibility in just two months

The world’s leading money transfer brand operates hundreds of thousands of locations globally — a footprint that made local search visibility a persistent operational challenge. Years of relying on a traditional enterprise listings management tool had produced stagnating local search performance despite the brand’s scale. After switching to SOCi’s Genius Local Search Agent, the impact was immediate: within two months, the brand saw a 43% increase in verified listings across its network. Greater listings coverage means more locations appearing accurately in AI search results, maps, and local directories — turning a stalled visibility program into one that is actively expanding where and how customers find the brand.

Scooter’s Coffee scales 900 locations without adding headcount

Scooter’s Coffee, a drive-thru coffee franchise that has grown to nearly 900 locations, deployed the Genius Reputation Agent and Genius Local Search Agent to extend local marketing across its franchise system. Franchisees publish localized, brand-safe content inside built-in guardrails for tone, voice, and approvals, while the agents handle review response at scale. Year over year, the brand has seen a 38% increase in direction requests, a 13% increase in Google Business Profile leads, a 75% decrease in unresponded reviews, and a 17% increase in positive sentiment.

“We could not be responding to reviews as our main priority, but we knew how important it was. Genius Reputation Agent allowed us to take a step back, set the tone and voice, and automate it in a much better way.”

Shoshannah DiDomenico, Senior Manager of Field Marketing, Scooter’s Coffee

Affordable Care replaces traditional SaaS tool and drives 20% more leads

Affordable Care, the retail healthcare company behind Affordable Dentures & Implants, replaced their traditional SaaS tool with SOCi’s Genius Agents across more than 400 practices in 40 states. The agents optimize listings, publish localized updates, and continuously learn across locations — operating inside brand and compliance-aligned guardrails enforced by SOCi Shield. The result was a 20% increase in leads from listings, stronger local attribution, and expanded distribution across more listing channels than their previous vendor supported.

“The best is that we saw a 20% lift in our leads coming from listings. That’s patients walking in the door that we’re able to attribute to the actual listing as a result of SOCi’s agents optimizing us across more channels than our prior program.”

Valerie Stover, Senior Manager of Digital Marketing, Affordable Care

Expanding autonomous execution and measurable visibility

With Genius Agents™ operating across growing enterprise footprints, SOCi is introducing new Skills in the next few months that expand what agents can autonomously execute and new visibility intelligence that connects that execution to measurable business impact.

Three new Skills extend autonomous execution across high-impact local workflows. The Dynamic Pages Skill uses search, engagement, and AI visibility signals to generate, optimize, and maintain high-performing local pages within brand approval rules. The Conversational Surveys Skill replaces static surveys with adaptive, two-way conversations that generate 3.5 times more responses and three times more resolutions compared to traditional survey formats. The Media Essentials Skill creates on-brand image variations and AI videos from top-performing content, driving greater reach and engagement at every location.

Alongside these Skills, SOCi is introducing Local Visibility — a new intelligence layer that brings years of benchmark data from SOCi’s Local Visibility Index directly into the platform. The LVI Score benchmarks a brand’s visibility performance against its industry, while the Genius Score surfaces specific recommendations and measurable results from deployed Genius Agents™, turning ongoing execution into a continuously updated view of competitive position and opportunity.

Together, these additions strengthen SOCi’s compounding execution model: as new Skills are introduced, the Genius Agentic Workforce expands the volume and complexity of marketing work that can be autonomously executed — without adding operational overhead or requiring brands to manage new tools.

Learn more

To learn more about SOCi’s Agentic Workforce and how it drives multi-location visibility across AI search, GEO ecosystems, social, and reviews, visit www.soci.ai 

About SOCi

SOCi is redefining how multi-location enterprises achieve local and AI search visibility with the industry’s first agentic workforce. Built specifically for distributed brands, SOCi’s brand-trained agents are guided by a unified visibility engine that autonomously executes and optimizes local marketing work across AI search, GEO ecosystems, social, and reviews, ensuring every location is visible, discoverable, and growing in today’s geo-driven landscape. Trusted by leading brands like Ford, Ace Hardware, and Liberty Tax, and recognized by Fast Company as one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies, SOCi transforms marketing from software you manage into work that gets done, intelligently, consistently, and at scale.

Learn more at www.soci.ai or contact hello@soci.ai.

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