Zeta Global has announced a strategic collaboration with OpenAI to power the conversational intelligence behind its superintelligent marketing agent, Athena by Zeta™. The partnership, revealed at CES 2026, will leverage OpenAI models to enable more intuitive and answer-driven experiences for enterprise marketers. Zeta is also expanding beta access to Athena's first two agentic applications following strong early demand, signaling a shift from insight-based analytics to actionable, AI-driven execution within marketing workflows.
Zeta Global announces a strategic technical collaboration with OpenAI to power its Athena AI marketing agent.
The partnership provides Zeta with early access to new OpenAI models to accelerate conversational intelligence and agentic applications.
Athena's first two agentic apps, Insights and Advisor, are now entering expanded beta access.
The Insights app delivers conversational, answers-driven analytics for instant trend and audience discovery.
The Advisor app functions as a goal-driven optimization tool that recommends or executes campaign actions automatically.
General availability of Athena for all Zeta customers is planned for the end of Q1 2026.
The collaboration aims to deeply integrate OpenAI's advanced model capabilities into the Athena platform, aligning its product roadmap with the latest AI advancements. This technical partnership is designed to move AI from the periphery to the core of marketing operations, transforming the Zeta Marketing Platform into what the company describes as an intelligent operating system for growth. The focus is on enabling agentic intelligence that can listen, reason, and act within marketers' daily workflows.
Leadership from both companies emphasized the transformative potential of integrating agentic AI directly into marketing operations. David A. Steinberg, Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Zeta Global, stated, “We’ve formed many partnerships throughout Zeta’s history, but none will be more instrumental than the one we are embarking on with OpenAI. AI is moving from the edges of marketing to the center of how enterprises operate, and Athena embodies that shift. It transforms the Zeta Marketing Platform into an intelligent operating system for growth – one that can listen, reason, and act on behalf of marketers. Together with OpenAI, we’re making this new way of working easy to adopt and scale, so brands can move faster, spend smarter, and win the moments that matter most.”
Giancarlo ‘GC’ Lionetti, Chief Commercial Officer at OpenAI, added, “Zeta shows how advanced AI moves beyond insight and into action. By working together, we are bringing agentic intelligence directly into everyday marketing workflows, helping enterprises move faster and act with confidence.”
The expanded beta introduces Athena's first two specialized agentic applications, designed to move from questions to executable answers.
Insights with Athena: This application functions as a conversational analytics engine. It allows marketing leaders to ask plain-language questions and receive instant, decision-ready answers about trends, audience segments, and performance drivers, complete with user-ready dashboards.
Advisor with Athena: This is a goal-driven optimization engine that continuously scans marketing campaigns. Based on predefined business objectives like revenue growth or customer retention, it either recommends the next best actions or executes optimizations automatically.
The announcement follows significant early interest from enterprise clients. TKO Group Holdings, Inc., parent company of UFC and WWE, participated in the Early Access Program. Deborah Cook, Vice President, Data Intelligence at TKO Group Holdings, Inc., noted, “Athena is already transforming how our team works. Generating segment-based reports from a simple prompt and running ad hoc analysis in seconds has been a game-changer. Tasks that once required significant manual effort, like comparing performance across segments or identifying creative optimization opportunities, now happen instantly.”
Driven by this demand, Zeta Global plans to launch Athena to all customers by the end of the first quarter of 2026. This partnership with OpenAI positions Athena as a platform designed to simplify sophisticated marketing by unifying intelligence and omnichannel activation through advanced, conversational AI.
About Zeta Global
Zeta Global is the AI Marketing Cloud that leverages advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and trillions of consumer signals to make it easier for marketers to acquire, grow, and retain customers more efficiently. Through the Zeta Marketing Platform (ZMP), our vision is to make sophisticated marketing simple by unifying identity, intelligence, and omnichannel activation into a single platform – powered by one of the industry’s largest proprietary databases and AI. Our enterprise customers across multiple verticals are empowered to personalize experiences with consumers at an individual level across every channel, delivering better results for marketing programs. Zeta was founded in 2007 by David A. Steinberg and John Sculley and is headquartered in New York City with offices around the world.
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