• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, January 5, 2026

Imagine having a verbal conversation with an AI chatbot -- a brainstorming session about a project or campaign running across connected TV that links with a five-year strategy for the enterprise. Not a written conversation, but verbal.

You talk with the chatbot as you would another human, but this chatbot interface pulls in data and information in real-time to support suggestions for changes to projects or campaigns based on company data and analysis.

Zeta Global made this a reality on Monday through a partnership with OpenAI that now powers conversational, intelligence, and agentic applications supported by “Athena by Zeta." Those agentic applications include "insights" and "Advisor." Both were released this afternoon.

A transcription feature of the verbal conversations is being tested now, and some may see it this week during CES in Las Vegas.

Christian Monberg, CTO and head of products at Zeta, told MediaPost that “Insights” and “Advisor" are now available as part of Athena by Zeta's agentic offerings. 

“These conversations are not rules-based, so sometimes you get slightly different feedback based on the context of the question,” Monberg said.  

Athena also can give clients software on demand, meaning that the AI will build the exact type of capabilities that companies need to do the job through brainstorming with the technology.

For decades, companies have asked the consumer to accommodate software from SAP, Excel, and others, he said. “The software has already been built for you and it’s not going to change," he said. "Those days are nearly gone.”

Two weeks before Christmas Zeta received a request for a specific report. Using the request for proposal (RFP) from the enterprise client, a developer managed to build the agentic application in less than a weekend, powered by Athena. The application did exactly the types of requirements the client asked for.

OpenAI’s large language models (LLMs) will support Athena by Zeta’s next phase of development. The companies plan to work together in aligning Zeta's product roadmap with advances in OpenAI models. The partnership will give Zeta developers early access to new models and features. 

The partnership gives OpenAI access to more users, while Zeta gains access to some of the most sophisticated LLMs in the market.

The voice interface in particular caught my attention, because marketers across enterprises can now have a verbal conversation with conversational AI as it pulls data and analyzes it in real-time from anywhere across the enterprise.

TKO Group Holdings, a sports and entertainment company that comprises UFC and WWE, was part of Athena's Early Access Program. 

“Tasks that once required significant manual effort, like comparing performance across segments or identifying creative optimization opportunities, now happen instantly,” said Deborah Cook, vice president of data intelligence at TKO Group Holdings. 

Cook plans to use Athena to expand into deeper geographic and performance insights to gain potential for broader adoption across the company's business.