Athena by Zeta brings answer-driven marketing to your workflow
Zeta Global announced a strategic collaboration with OpenAI at CES 2026 to advance Athena by Zeta - its superintelligent agent for enterprise marketing. The partnership brings more natural conversational intelligence and agentic capabilities into daily workflows, with the first two apps, Insights and Advisor, now in expanded beta. The goal is simple: ask a question, get a decision-ready answer, then act on it - without waiting on threads of reports or complex handoffs.
As part of the collaboration, Zeta will align Athena's roadmap with OpenAI model advancements and gain early access to new features. This tight integration is built to help marketing teams move faster with answers they can trust.
Why this matters for marketers
- Ask once, get an answer: Insights turns prompts into instant dashboards, trends, and audience opportunities - complete with the drivers behind performance.
- Act on goals, not guesses: Advisor scans campaigns against objectives like revenue growth, operating efficiency, retention, and engagement, then recommends next best actions or executes them automatically.
- Less manual work: Cut the back-and-forth on reporting, ad hoc analysis, and routine optimizations. Shift the team's energy to strategy and creative.
- Built on strong models: Zeta deepens integration with OpenAI to improve conversational reliability and speed inside enterprise workflows.
What you can do with Insights
- Pull trend analyses and growth segments in seconds, not days.
- Generate user-ready dashboards from a single prompt.
- Surface audience opportunities with clear "why it's happening" explanations.
- Answer leadership questions on demand with decision-ready context.
What you can do with Advisor
- Set goals (e.g., revenue lift, CAC efficiency, retention) and let Advisor prioritize actions.
- Continuously scan campaigns and surface optimizations or auto-execute within guardrails.
- Examples: shift budget to winning segments, launch creative tests, tune lifecycle journeys, or pause wasteful spend.
Early results: TKO Group
TKO Group Holdings (UFC and WWE) reports that Athena is already changing how their team operates. Generating segment-based reports from a simple prompt and running ad hoc analysis in seconds replaced work that previously took significant manual effort. Tasks like cross-segment comparisons and creative optimization opportunities now happen instantly, with deeper geographic and performance insights on the way.
How Athena fits your stack
Athena sits on the Zeta Marketing Platform and acts like an intelligent operating system for growth - one that can listen, reason, and act on behalf of marketers. With expanded beta access for Insights and Advisor, teams get direct, answers-first workflows instead of fragmented tools and static dashboards. The outcome: faster decisions, smarter spend, and more clarity across channels.
Access and timeline
Zeta is expanding beta access now and plans to launch Athena to all customers by the end of Q1 2026. Learn more or request access here: Athena by Zeta.
Practical next steps for your team
- Define 1-2 primary objectives (e.g., ROAS improvement, churn reduction) that Athena will optimize against.
- Start with simple prompts: "Which segment drove week-over-week revenue?" "What creative variants underperformed in EMEA?" "Where can I reallocate 10% of budget for the highest lift?"
- Set execution guardrails: budgets, channels, approval thresholds, and brand rules.
- Instrument feedback: accept/reject recommendations, then review what changed and why.
- Upskill your team on AI-driven workflows so they can ask sharper questions and validate outcomes.
Want to sharpen AI skills for marketing?
If your team is building AI fluency, explore practical learning paths like the AI Certification for Marketing Specialists or browse the latest AI courses.
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