Zeta Global Holdings Corp. (ZETA) shares climbed Tuesday after the company announced it's deepening its relationship with OpenAI to supercharge its marketing intelligence platform. The partnership centers on Athena by Zeta, an enterprise marketing agent designed to help brands stop drowning in data and start making faster decisions.
The collaboration, unveiled at CES 2026 in Las Vegas, addresses a problem familiar to anyone who's ever worked in marketing: you have mountains of data, but turning that data into something you can actually act on takes forever. Zeta says enterprise teams want intelligence that converts questions into immediate action, and that's exactly what Athena is built to deliver.
How Athena Actually Works
OpenAI will support Athena's conversational intelligence and agentic applications, which are designed to streamline complex marketing tasks. The platform adapts to each user's goals and communication style, instantly converting queries into actionable insights across campaigns and data workflows.
Two agentic apps have entered beta testing as part of Athena's rollout to early access customers. The Insights app gives marketers instant access to trends, audience opportunities and dashboards with answer-ready data. Meanwhile, the Advisor app constantly reviews campaigns and can recommend or even automate actions to hit specific business goals like revenue targets and customer retention.
David A. Steinberg, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Zeta Global, said this partnership will reshape how brands interact with AI for growth. Giancarlo 'GC' Lionetti, chief commercial officer at OpenAI, said the alliance brings agentic intelligence directly into everyday marketing workstreams.
Real-World Results From Early Testing
TKO Group Holdings, Inc. (TKO), the sports entertainment powerhouse that includes UFC and WWE, participated in Athena's early access program and reported significantly faster insights and analysis generation. Deborah Cook, vice president of data intelligence at TKO, said Athena cuts hours of work into seconds with simple prompts.
That's the kind of time savings that matters when you're managing marketing campaigns across multiple brands and trying to optimize performance in real time. Instead of waiting for analysts to pull reports and crunch numbers, marketers can ask questions in plain English and get answers immediately.
Driven by strong interest from leading brands and agencies, Zeta is expanding beta access and plans to make Athena available to all customers by the end of the first quarter of 2026.
ZETA Price Action: Zeta Global Holdings shares were up 4.80% at $22.71 at the time of publication on Tuesday.
