Zeta Global NYSE: ZETA executives said the company is moving beyond its core marketing technology positioning and toward what they described as an AI infrastructure and business intelligence platform, supported by recently announced partnerships with Palantir, OpenAI and Snowflake.
Speaking during a webcast discussion hosted by Ron Josey, Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO David Steinberg and CFO Christopher Greiner did not provide an update on second-quarter trends, with Josey noting that Zeta was entering its quiet period. The discussion focused instead on Zeta’s product strategy, partnerships and longer-term positioning.
Palantir Integration Expected Within Weeks
Steinberg said Zeta expects to complete the first phase of its Palantir integration within “30 to 40 days,” with existing Data Cloud clients moving onto Palantir’s Foundry platform. He said the migration should be seamless for clients and is expected to improve the speed of intelligence within Zeta’s platform.
“All our existing clients that are using the Data Cloud will move over to Foundry in the next 30 to 40 days,” Steinberg said. He added that Zeta expects to have “at least one joint launched enterprise client” from Palantir’s side during the current quarter.
Steinberg described Foundry as a new foundation for Zeta’s broader platform ambitions, saying it would allow the company to combine Zeta’s Data Cloud with clients’ business data for real-time decisioning. He said the company is formally adding a fourth use case, called Zeta Business Intelligence, or ZBI, alongside customer acquisition, customer retention and customer monetization.
According to Steinberg, ZBI is aimed at a U.S. business intelligence market that he said IBIS estimates at $35 billion annually. He said current business intelligence tools often rely on historical data, while Zeta aims to use its Data Cloud and client data to help forecast future business outcomes.
Athena Positioned as Interface for AI Workflows
Zeta’s Athena product, which Steinberg said became generally available earlier this year, was presented as a key interface for the company’s platform. Steinberg said Athena is intended to reduce friction between users and enterprise software by allowing customers to ask questions conversationally, either by voice or through a chat box.
He said Athena can help clients access more of Zeta’s feature set and data sets without manually navigating multiple screens. As an example, Steinberg said a client could ask Athena how to create incremental customers while lowering marketing costs, and Athena would generate recommendations within the platform.
Steinberg said some clients that have adopted Athena are seeing returns on marketing spend of more than 1,400%, while also emphasizing that not all clients are at that level. He said Zeta’s broader return on marketing spend was measured at more than 600% in an independent Forrester survey.
Greiner said customers using Zoe, an earlier generation of Zeta’s automation and voice capabilities, spent “between 200% and 350% more” on the platform when they leveraged automation.
OpenAI Partnership Expands Across Products and Internal Tools
Steinberg said Zeta’s relationship with OpenAI began with the company seeking a voice engine for Athena. He said Zeta uses OpenAI’s voice capabilities while continuing to run its Data Cloud on Zeta’s own proprietary models, which he said the company has been developing since 2017.
“We never use any large language model to see any data in our Data Cloud,” Steinberg said. He described Zeta’s future in business AI as focused heavily on inference-based artificial intelligence rather than relying only on large language models.
Steinberg also said Zeta recently expanded its OpenAI relationship by making ChatGPT available to all global employees, replacing Microsoft Copilot internally. He said Zeta also works with other AI models and tools, including Claude, Gemini and Cursor.
The OpenAI relationship also extends to advertising, according to Steinberg. He said OpenAI awarded Zeta “a meaningful component” of its marketing serving business after initially working with Zeta as a technology partner.
Gap Win Cited as Evidence of Platform Shift
Steinberg pointed to Gap as a major recent customer win, saying Zeta displaced four vendors, including Salesforce and Braze, and became Gap’s system of record for a contract focused on CRM and monetization.
He said Zeta had bid on Gap requests for proposal at least twice in prior years and finished second, but that Athena helped change the outcome this time. “I am 100% confident that Athena was the reason we went very quickly from this very long RFP process to them saying, ‘Okay, send us pricing,’” Steinberg said.
Steinberg said Zeta is working with Publicis Sapient on the Gap engagement and has built a forward-deployed engineering team working with Gap, Palantir and OpenAI personnel.
Executives Discuss Revenue Model and Long-Term Targets
Greiner said Zeta’s revenue mix remains partly recurring software and partly utilization-based. He said recurring software represents about 60% of revenue, while utilization represents about 40%.
Greiner said the model remains predictable because more than 90% of revenue comes from customers that have been with Zeta for more than one year, and nearly three-quarters comes from customers that have been with the company for more than three years. He said recurring revenue has grown 36% over a multi-year period, while utilization revenue has grown 25%.
Steinberg said Zeta has reported 19 quarters as a public company and has “beat” and raised guidance 19 times. He also said the Palantir agreement’s expenses have already been budgeted for this year and future years, with spending shifted from other vendors to Palantir. He said the partnership should be additive to operating margins in future years.
Greiner said the Palantir partnership increases confidence in Zeta’s long-term model, including the company’s ability to reach its targets early. He said the company is ahead on the operating metrics it has published for its 2028 targets, including scaled customer growth, customer spend growth and net revenue retention.
Steinberg said Zeta’s largest competitive advantage is its Data Cloud, citing 535 million consented individuals, an average of 5,000 to 7,000 data elements per person and first-party relationships with more than five million publishers. He said the company’s goal is to embed more deeply into enterprise technology stacks and be viewed as mission-critical infrastructure rather than a software expense.
Zeta also previewed its Zeta Live event, scheduled for Oct. 8 in New York City. Steinberg said the company plans additional product roadmap updates at the event and reiterated that Zeta’s goal is to turn Athena into “a full operating system” for clients’ businesses.
About Zeta Global NYSE: ZETA
Zeta Global, founded in 2007 and headquartered in New York City, is a leading data-driven marketing technology company. The firm's mission centers on helping brands acquire, grow and retain customers through a unified customer lifecycle management platform. Over the years, Zeta Global has built a reputation for leveraging big data and predictive analytics to power digital marketing programs across multiple channels.
At the core of Zeta's offering is the Zeta Marketing Platform, which combines identity resolution, audience insights and real-time engagement capabilities.
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