Zeta Global has announced its strategic partnership with OpenAI to enhance its marketing agent, Athena by Zeta.
The AI Marketing Cloud provider revealed that the collaboration would utilize OpenAI’s models to power conversational intelligence and agentic functions into the product.
This partnership will further enable Zeta to increase the speed at which it understands the customer market and how its strategies are driving meaningful engagement.
David A. Steinberg, Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Zeta Global, explained how this collaboration would allow Zeta to expand its vision for Athena and its role in the enterprise marketing sector.
“AI is moving from the edges of marketing to the center of how enterprises operate, and Athena embodies that shift,” he said.
“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.”
By utilizing OpenAI’s models for Athena, this will allow Zeta Global to input more natural conversational responses and decision-ready answers directly into marketing workflows.
Athena is embedded within the Zeta Marketing Platform, meaning that when in use, marketers are not required to switch between analytics tools, dashboards, or reporting systems, allowing analysis and execution to remain connected.
Athena will interpret the data and present possible conclusions that turn raw metrics into summarized insights with clear implications. This allows marketing teams to ask Athena questions on audience responses, email performance, or conversion rates declines, and in return receive actionable insights without needing multiple tools.
Furthermore, Zeta will also be expanding early beta access for its two Athena applications, Insights and Advisor, responding to customer uptake in adoption interest.
So, let’s take a closer look at what customers can expect from these solutions:
Insights with Athena
This application can be used by marketers as a conversational analytics assistant. Marketing teams can ask audience and product performance-related questions, as well as research possible trends and opportunities in plain language to receive instant, insight-heavy results.
Athena utilizes OpenAI’s models to pull relevant data, trends, and insights to generate answers, visualizations, and dashboards.
It can also identify shifts in customer behavior and engagement patterns across multiple channels, eliminating the need for manual database creation or navigating multiple tools for faster, more intuitive insight gathering.
Advisor with Athena
This app functions as an AI marketing strategist, utilizing goal-driven optimization capabilities to review ongoing marketing campaigns, performance metrics, and historical data. From here, it can recommend next steps to adjust targeting, modify creative content, or budget reallocating to improve outcomes.
In limited circumstances, Athena can automatically execute actions in configured accurately, including sending revised campaigns to selected audiences or launching follow-up sequences.
By automating analysis and decision-making, the app can advise marketing teams to act on insights quickly without waiting for manual reports to come in.
Giancarlo ‘GC’ Lionetti, Chief Commercial Officer at OpenAI, emphasizes how this partnership will allow Zeta Global to expand its data analysis capabilities with AI.
“Zeta shows how advanced AI moves beyond insight and into action,” he said.
“By working together, we are bringing agentic intelligence directly into everyday marketing workflows, helping enterprises move faster and act with confidence.”
What This Means For The Customer Journey
By implementing the Insights app, marketing teams can now deliver faster insights into customer trends, behavior, and campaign performance.
Decisions regarding targeting, messages, and offers can now also be made in near real-time, allowing campaigns to be optimized quickly during the conversion stage and increasing the likelihood of purchase.
This ensures that delays between observation and action are minimized, enabling marketing to respond faster to changing customer behavior throughout the journey.
Advisor ensures that customers are receiving more personalized engagement during the customer journey. By recommending actions targeted toward the consumer, the app can tailor campaigns automatically to an individual customer or segment, enhancing customer relationships throughout the journey and increasing loyalty post-purchase.
This can also be accomplished with Open AI’s capability to reduce manual work for faster execution.
By reducing report and planning creation, marketing teams can focus on strategy and optimizing customer journey success, improving efficiency and customer retention levels.
This partnership moves marketing toward an AI-assisted, insight-driven process, improving decision-making, speed, and ability to closely align with customer needs at each journey stage.
