This put up was created in partnership with Zeta Global
Identity, intelligence, and superintelligent brokers are redefining the advertising ecosystem.
During a CES 2026 ADWEEK House session co-hosted with Zeta Global, Jenny Rooney, chief model and group officer at ADWEEK, sat down in dialog 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 brand new AI-powered working mannequin, helps entrepreneurs speed up decision-making and activate smarter efficiency at scale.
From dialog to activation
Steinberg started by sharing the current announcement that Zeta Global has partnered with OpenAI to energy Athena by Zeta. He defined that Zeta Global will probably be native to OpenAI’s utility layer and vice versa.
Steinberg mentioned 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 defined that Athena is a conversational AI tremendous agent that removes the friction between people and the platform.
“Conversation is important. Strategy is important, but execution is key,” Steinberg defined. “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 motion
As a part of the session, Roman Gun, VP of product at Zeta Global, showcased a reside demo of Athena. Gun gave Athena conversational prompts about advertising spend, the aggressive panorama, and marketing campaign efficiency, and Athena delivered with reviews and evaluation.
Gun requested Athena to construct an e-mail broadcast marketing campaign for a “super exclusive CES after party.” Athena’s display took Gun to the marketing campaign editor web page to customise and optimize the schedule earlier than launch.
Steinberg shared that the extra intelligence that may be put into the platform, the extra purchasers can deal with different issues, like technique 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 mentioned 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,” mentioned Steinberg. “That’s really what we’re all moving to.”