Zeta Global has announced a strategic partnership with OpenAI to enhance its AI marketing agent, Athena by Zeta. This collaboration leverages OpenAI’s models to infuse conversational intelligence and agentic functions into Athena, enabling Zeta to more rapidly understand the customer market and evaluate how its marketing strategies drive meaningful engagement. David A. Steinberg, Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Zeta Global, highlighted that AI is shifting from peripheral marketing roles to the core of enterprise operations, with Athena exemplifying this transformation. He described Athena as turning the Zeta Marketing Platform into an intelligent growth operating system that listens, reasons, and acts on behalf of marketers. Partnering with OpenAI makes adopting and scaling this approach easier, helping brands move faster, spend smarter, and seize critical moments. Integrating OpenAI’s models enables Athena to deliver natural conversational responses and decision-ready insights directly within marketing workflows. Because Athena is embedded into Zeta’s platform, marketers avoid toggling between analytics tools, dashboards, or reports; analysis and action remain connected seamlessly. Athena interprets raw data and generates summarized insights with clear implications, allowing teams to ask questions about audience behavior, email performance, or conversion rate changes and receive actionable guidance without juggling multiple systems. Zeta is also expanding early beta access for two Athena applications—Insights and Advisor—in response to growing customer interest. **Insights with Athena:** This conversational analytics assistant empowers marketers to query audience and product performance and explore trends in natural language, receiving fast, insight-rich answers.

By leveraging OpenAI’s models, Insights pulls relevant data, detects shifts in customer behavior and engagement across channels, and generates visualizations and dashboards. This eliminates manual data compilation and tool-hopping, streamlining insight gathering. **Advisor with Athena:** Functioning as an AI marketing strategist, Advisor analyzes ongoing campaigns, performance metrics, and historical data to recommend optimization actions such as adjusting targeting, creative content, or budgets. In some cases, it can even automatically execute actions—sending revised campaigns or launching follow-ups—when properly configured. This automation accelerates decision-making and reduces reliance on manual reporting. Giancarlo ‘GC’ Lionetti, Chief Commercial Officer at OpenAI, emphasized that the partnership helps Zeta advance from generating insights to taking direct action, embedding agentic intelligence into everyday marketing workflows to boost speed and confidence. **Impact on the Customer Journey:** With Insights, marketing teams gain rapid visibility into customer trends, behavior, and campaign effectiveness, enabling near real-time decisions on targeting, messaging, and offers. This minimizes delays between detecting changes and acting, optimizing campaigns during conversion phases and increasing purchase likelihood. Advisor enhances personalization by recommending targeted actions that tailor campaigns to individual customers or segments, strengthening customer relationships and loyalty after purchase. It also reduces manual workload through automation, allowing marketers to focus on strategy and improving the overall customer journey success and retention. In summary, the Zeta Global and OpenAI partnership advances marketing toward an AI-powered, insight-driven approach that improves decision-making speed, operational efficiency, and alignment with customer needs across every stage of the journey.