This post was created in partnership with Zeta Global
Identity, intelligence, and superintelligent agents are redefining the marketing ecosystem.
During a CES 2026 ADWEEK House session co-hosted with Zeta Global, Jenny Rooney, chief brand and community officer at ADWEEK, sat down in conversation with David Steinberg, CEO, co-founder, and chairman of the board of Zeta Global, and Roman Gun, VP, product at Zeta Global. Together, they explored how Athena by Zeta, a new AI-powered operating model, helps marketers accelerate decision-making and activate smarter performance at scale.
From conversation to activation
Steinberg began by sharing the recent announcement that Zeta Global has partnered with OpenAI to power Athena by Zeta. He explained that Zeta Global will be native to OpenAI’s application layer and vice versa.
Steinberg said latency can destroy a marketer’s ROI. “What we did at Zeta, starting in 2017, was we rearchitected our entire platform to put data and artificial intelligence as native to the application layer. Now that allows us to make decisions across multiple attributes in milliseconds.”
Steinberg explained that Athena is a conversational AI super agent that removes the friction between humans and the platform.
“Conversation is important. Strategy is important, but execution is key,” Steinberg explained. “So, not only does Athena become your strategic planner and your virtual data scientist, she does all of your activation as well, and then gives you the reporting in real time.”
Athena in action
As part of the session, Roman Gun, VP of product at Zeta Global, showcased a live demo of Athena. Gun gave Athena conversational prompts about marketing spend, the competitive landscape, and campaign performance, and Athena delivered with reports and analysis.
Gun asked Athena to build an email broadcast campaign for a “super exclusive CES after party.” Athena’s screen took Gun to the campaign editor page to customize and optimize the schedule before launch.
Steinberg shared that the more intelligence that can be put into the platform, the more clients can focus on other things, like strategy and messaging. “We’re here to empower enterprises to create a better ROI, but ultimately they’re going to be using their people to do those things, but that frees up a lot of budget for them to be even better on those types of things.”
With Athena, Steinberg said Zeta Global has created a machine with curiosity. “The machines don’t wake up in the morning and say, I want to learn how to play chess today. We have to give it a hypothesis, and I will tell you Athena’s goal is to help humans move faster from hypothesis to action.”
“I believe the next evolution in artificial intelligence will be the creation of curiosity, where the machines themselves will begin to wonder, ‘how can I make XYZ companies’ marketing 20% more efficient?’ and do it,” said Steinberg. “That’s really what we’re all moving to.”
