Over 200 CMOs, VPs of Marketing, growth leaders, investors and technology builders gathered for INDEX'26 New York, the second edition of Pepper's GEO Growth Summit.
Consensus across boardroom and brand team discussions: AI has structurally rewired organic discovery; Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is climbing, traditional SEO signals are weakening, and buyer journeys now span seven or more touchpoints before a decision.
AI models are forming brand opinions from reviews, citations, third‑party content and web authority before a human ever searches, making Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) a business‑continuity issue rather than a content‑only initiative.
Pepper CEO Anirudh Singla emphasized that the summit aims to help operators rethink growth in an AI‑first discovery world.
KPMG US CMO Lauren Wagner Boyman described the evolving CMO role as shifting from traditional brand stewardship to a speed‑agility‑content‑efficiency focus.
Unilever Global VP Marketing Deepak Subramanian noted that when AI compresses buyer choice to a single recommendation, the brand the model trusts wins, not necessarily the one with the biggest media spend.
Pepper unveiled Atlas, an agentic operating system for organic growth designed to own traffic, citations, velocity and pipeline in the AI era.
Webflow’s Guy Yalif introduced an AEO Maturity Model, a diagnostic framework based on data from millions of B2B websites to benchmark organizational readiness.
Additional participants included leaders from DTCC, Arbor Realty Trust, Uber, Major League Soccer, Samsung Ads, RocketReach, Optimizely, Stacker and G2, providing practical insights into the current GEO stack.
The summit follows a sold‑out San Francisco edition in April that featured senior leaders from Salesforce, NVIDIA, Intel, Snowflake, Gong and Demandbase, with future editions planned for other markets.
