Zeta Global’s David Steinberg on AI, Data & the Future of Marketing Technology

4 Jun 2026 · 35 min
35:24

In this Speed of Culture podcast episode, host Matt Britton interviews David Steinberg, CEO and chairman of Zeta Global. Steinberg recounts his entrepreneurial journey from telecom startups to building Zeta’s AI‑driven marketing platform. He explains the "triangulation" research method that led him to recognize the need for a data‑cloud and AI foundation in 2017, and how Zeta’s architecture embeds AI natively to eliminate latency and drive massive ROAS (600‑700% per dollar spent). Steinberg outlines Zeta’s business model—serving large enterprises with a unified acquisition‑retention‑monetization flywheel, leveraging first‑party data, a consumer data platform with 5‑7k data elements per person, and a proprietary algorithm. He differentiates Zeta from competitors by owning first‑party data, being a revenue‑center, and maintaining a partnership‑first approach with OpenAI, AWS, Azure, etc. The conversation dives deep into Athena, Zeta’s voice‑enabled AI copilot, its evolution from the earlier Zoe prototype, its rapid 10‑month development, and its goal to deliver up to 1,000% ROI while reducing user friction. Steinberg describes internal change‑management tactics that forced AI adoption across the workforce, resulting in a 125% increase in engineering output. He discusses how AI democratizes marketing tool usage, shifts consumer reach from search to AI‑generated answers, and anticipates future ad‑tech dynamics with OpenAI and Google. The episode closes with Steinberg’s advice for young professionals: pursue non‑traditional paths, build soft‑skills, and treat crises as opportunities, encapsulated in his mantra “Never waste a crisis.”

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