Zeta Global CEO David Steinberg Talks AthenaOS Evolution at Zeta Live '26
Interviews
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6m 45s
Zeta Global Co-founder, Chairman and CEO David Steinberg joins NYSE Floor Talk from Zeta Live at New York City’s Lincoln Center to discuss the company’s new Athena OS intelligence operating system and its proprietary Athena inference models.
Zeta Global is an NYSE-listed company. Its annual Zeta Live conference is the setting for new AI initiatives that extend the Athena intelligent agent first announced at last year’s event.
Steinberg describes a busy week for the company. Attendance at Zeta Live grew from 1,200 last year to over 3,000, so many guests that organizers added screenings in a neighboring restaurant. He says the decision-makers present represent more than $200 billion in combined annual marketing and technology spend.
On Athena OS, Steinberg explains that clients pulled the company toward building it. He describes a platform that brings the operations of a business into one place, with early use cases in cybersecurity and fraud detection. He also discusses how proprietary data, combined with a client’s first-party data and the company’s partnership with Palantir, supports an AI infrastructure in which each decision informs the next.
He also explains why Zeta built its own Athena inference models rather than feeding proprietary data into third-party models. He says the models, developed with NVIDIA and Fireworks AI, are 65% more efficient and 12% more accurate than foundation models.
The conversation also covers this year’s partnership announcements with OpenAI, Snowflake, Palantir, NVIDIA and Fireworks AI, and how the company began focusing on AI in 2017 to turn large volumes of raw data into actionable information. Looking ahead, Steinberg says Athena OS will be generally available in the first quarter of next year, with a goal of having all of the company’s clients use it.
Disclaimer: Informational content only. NYSE does not endorse or recommend investments, strategies, companies, products, or services discussed.
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