Zeta Expands Beyond Marketing With AthenaOS To Challenge Enterprise AI Giants

If your marketing software knows where customer demand is heading, you might want its advice before you decide what to sell. You might also ask whether your inventory is in the right place to meet that demand. Zeta Global is betting it can build a broader business around that opportunity. The company has moved from calling itself an “AI marketing cloud” to an “intelligent AI infrastructure company.”

CEO David Steinberg wants to turn the platform’s knowledge of consumers into intelligence that helps enterprises run more of their operations. Its newly unveiled AthenaOS can connect a company’s internal data with Zeta’s consumer intelligence, then organize work around the objective a user wants to achieve.

Steinberg says customers pushed the company in that direction, asking whether its data could help them plan new locations or move inventory to meet demand.

“Through our work with Palantir, we recognized that business intelligence represented a substantial new addressable market for us in its own right. As we expanded into that market, describing ourselves as a marketing technology company or an intelligent AI marketing cloud began to feel outdated,” he told me in an exclusive interview. “Those descriptions no longer captured the direction of the business.”

The ambition puts Zeta into closer competition with Salesforce and Adobe, which also want enterprises to rely on their software to coordinate AI-driven work. Zeta brings intelligence on more than 245 million U.S. consumers to the contest. The question is how far that knowledge can take it beyond the marketing decisions it already supports. The company expects AthenaOS to enter beta later this year, with general availability planned for the first half of 2027.

AthenaOS Connects Consumer Data to Business Decisions

Athena MCP uses the Model Context Protocol to connect that intelligence with external tools, including ChatGPT and Claude. Steinberg credits the Palantir partnership with making broader enterprise work practical.