David A. Steinberg, co-founder and CEO of Zeta Global, discusses how his company uses agentic AI to enhance marketing personalization while improving efficiency and reducing technology costs.
Zeta Global’s AI-powered Marketing Cloud automates workflows and messaging, aiming to create customer interactions that feel like conversations with a trusted friend. Steinberg emphasizes the importance of high-quality data, combining what consumers read and research with location-based data to predict future behavior.
Agentic AI enables automated actions on behalf of marketers. Steinberg explains that linking multiple AI agents produces exponential improvements. For example, distinct agents can manage creative decisions, audience building, targeting, and real-time attribution, refining one another’s outputs.
Regarding human involvement, Steinberg notes clients can choose their level of manual control—from full automation to human oversight with AI feedback guiding decisions.
He advises marketers to deepen their analytical skills and maintain creative and client relationship expertise. Agencies, he says, remain essential for crafting creative assets that AI agents utilize.
On privacy, Steinberg compares marketing personalization to a natural conversation rather than invasive scrutiny. He argues that respectful, contextualized marketing builds trust without discomfort by delivering relevant content at the right moment.
Looking ahead, Zeta Global recently launched Zeta Answers, an AI-powered framework that not only predicts marketing outcomes but also autonomously acts on them to deliver results in real time. Steinberg says this innovation marks only the beginning of their agentic AI advancements.