Most companies talk about being AI-first. David A. Steinberg has been doing it since 2017.
In this episode of The Speed of Culture podcast, Matt Britton sits down with David A. Steinberg, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Zeta Global.
David shares how Zeta built a data and AI platform that now serves 51% of the Fortune 100, why the company sees itself as the disruptor rather than the disrupted in a rapidly shifting martech landscape, and what it took to rearchitect the business around artificial intelligence starting in 2017.
The conversation covers the launch of Athena, Zeta’s voice-enabled AI copilot built in partnership with OpenAI, the internal transformation required to make AI native to the way teams work, and what the rise of generative search means for how brands reach consumers.
David also reflects on his career, his advice for the next generation of marketers, and the mantra he has carried through every crisis.
A serial entrepreneur, David previously founded four telecom companies, selling three and taking one public, before pivoting into data-driven marketing.
At Zeta, he has spent nearly two decades building what he describes as the infrastructure for the inference generation of AI: a platform with 552 million opted-in individuals in its data cloud, an average of 5,000 to 7,000 data elements per person, and a first-party tracking pixel sitting on trillions of pages of content.
The company recently launched Athena, a fully conversational AI copilot built in partnership with OpenAI, and has projected its fourth consecutive year of over 30% growth heading into 2026.
Key Takeaways:
[01:54] How David Reads the Market and Why Triangulation Matters — David’s approach to identifying where to build next is not a gut call. He describes spending five to six hours a day reading across publications, white papers, and scientific journals, looking for signals in seemingly unrelated data points that point toward something real. He calls it triangulation. With Zeta, that process led him to a simple but consequential observation in 2017: there was no way to process the volume of data they were ingesting fast enough to make a decision that actually mattered. That gap became the founding logic for putting AI at the center of the platform, years before it was an industry conversation.
[06:30] Why Zeta Is the Disruptor, Not the Disrupted — As the broader marketing technology category grew around 10 percent last year, Zeta grew 30 percent. David’s explanation for why the company has been insulated from the disruption hitting so many SaaS businesses comes down to a few compounding advantages: a proprietary data cloud that has never been fed into a large language model and never will be, an architecture that puts AI and data native to the application layer rather than bolted on, and a revenue model that returns six to seven dollars for every dollar a client spends. Those three things together make Zeta a revenue center rather than a cost center for its clients, which is a fundamentally different conversation to have in a procurement meeting.
