Marketing is Now Business Intelligence. Ed See on Signal & Noise at Zeta Live 2026.
What happens when marketing stops being a collection of channels, campaigns, and technologies—and starts becoming an intelligence function?
Recorded live at Zeta Live 2026 in New York City, during Advertising Week, Brett House sits down with Ed See, Chief Growth Officer at Zeta Global, for a wide-ranging conversation about AI, customer intelligence, the changing role of the marketer, and what the next generation of marketing organizations will look like.
Ed brings a unique perspective to the discussion. After decades advising some of the world’s largest companies—including senior roles at McKinsey and Deloitte—he made the move from adviser to operator at Zeta. His view of marketing is refreshingly straightforward: ultimately, marketers are responsible for creating profitable customers.
That means moving beyond impressions, clicks, ROAS reports, and other activity metrics toward understanding where real growth opportunities exist. Ed breaks the challenge into four fundamental capabilities: recognizing a pocket of opportunity, reaching it, delivering something relevant, and measuring the result.
From there, Brett and Ed explore why identity and signals are becoming foundational to modern marketing. Personalization is no longer enough. The opportunity is precision: understanding not only who someone is, but what they need, when they need it, and when a genuine transition or buying moment is occurring.
The conversation also turns to one of the biggest changes facing marketers: consumers increasingly have AI agents sitting between themselves and brands. Marketers have spent decades learning how to influence people emotionally. But as Ed points out, LLMs “think and do”—they don’t feel. That creates an entirely new constituency that brands will need to understand, influence, and remain discoverable to.
Brett and Ed also dig into the changing marketing organization: the rise of the technically fluent marketer, Ed’s earlier thinking around the Chief Marketing Technology Officer, why hyper-specialization may give way to broader marketing roles, and how AI could finally begin breaking down some of the organizational silos that have existed for decades.
They also discuss AthenaOS, Zeta’s vision for an intelligence layer spanning enterprise data and AI; why proprietary context may become some of a company’s most important intellectual property; the importance of both data sovereignty and AI sovereignty; and how agencies, technology companies, and brands may divide responsibilities in this new operating model.
And, naturally, they finish with the big question: Is AI going to kill us all—or unlock an extraordinary new period of human progress?
This is the third Signal & Noise conversation with a Zeta Global executive, following our discussions with Christian Monberg, Chief Technology Officer, at Cannes Lions, and Neej Gore, Chief Data Officer, at POSSIBLE. A huge thank-you to the Zeta team for welcoming Signal & Noise to Zeta Live and providing an incredible setup for the conversation.
For anyone thinking about the future of marketing, AI, customer intelligence, MarTech, AdTech, agencies, or the modern enterprise, this is one you won’t want to miss.
#SignalAndNoise #ZetaGlobal #ZetaLive #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #Marketing #MarTech #AdTech #CustomerIntelligence #MarketingTechnology #AgenticAI #EnterpriseAI
Transcript:
Brett (00:00.362)
And was it straight from McKenzie? It was straight from McKenzie. Yeah, inevitably we end up talking to a lot of Mackenzie folks, interestingly enough. I know if it's the industry. Yeah, wherever you are. Alex Brownstein, do you know him? He's a young guy. Direct from me. very smart guy. Yeah, dangerously smart. Yeah, so that was our two hour and fifteen minute Joe Rogan episode. I think we're on. Right? So maybe I'll introduce ourselves and then
What's the
Ed (00:14.168)
You did. Yes, I trained him. Dangerously smart.
Brett (00:26.382)
Like what is gonna be like the B roll, right, with our post production team. so hello everybody, this is Brett House, signal and noise live at Zeta Live, at advertising week in New York City. That's a long way winded way of saying I'm sitting down with Ed C, who has been at Zeta Global for you said about eighteen months. Straight from McKinsey. I just learned that he trained.
Eighteen months, yes.
Brett (00:56.266)
Alex Brownstein. Maybe apprenticeship. It's a classic apprenticeship. We work together. And he was on the pod. So that that actually might release before that, but that was about a two-hour and fifteen minute conversation. To your point about the dangerous smartness. yeah, he was he was a super smart guy. So you know, I definitely was looking into your background and and have met and and we've interviewed a bunch of people at Zeta Zaeta Global. So we had Nije on the podcast, he's become a friend of the pod, and he
We worked together.
Ed (01:07.916)
A straight guy.
Brett (01:24.309)
just told me he listens to it all the time, which is very cool. Chris, and then we had David come into this press br lunch that we
Always great to have David. He's got great perspective.
Torfix sits of humor. He was just cracking jokes that that that he was like, I am willing to kind of say anything I want to say.
Well, I think you reach a certain point in a career where you're a founder of something
Yeah, it's like George Carlin in comedy. Like I can say anything he wants to say at this point in his career. Maybe he always said what he wanted to say. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah. That's that's probably what g what kind of made him. But no, one thing and so McKinsey Deloitte, you've been an advisor, now you're s an operator with an organization that is going through as as David Steinberg put it, you know, a a pivot in two years that's a kind of a hate to use the term transformation, 'cause some people loathe that term. Right.
Ed (01:53.688)
Quite fun.
Brett (02:15.234)
But it's a big transformation in terms of the operating system, Athena, which those that don't know that Athena's been launched in partnership in part with Palantir. Alex Carp heard him this morning being interviewed by David, which is a fascinating conversation. It's always interesting to hear Alex, because speaking of unpredictable things that might come out of his mouth, but he was it was actually really interesting. He gave a lot of really sound advice on how we should all think about AI, right, as organizations change. So with all of that in mind,
Like what really caused you to make that switch? To to go from being advisor to being an operator? What did you see happening that kind of was like, I've got to be part of Azeta Global, let me talk to
of things I knew about Zeta. They were McKinsey client though they weren't my client, but I knew the assets that they had. And the thing that really excited me as an advisor to marketers, I was always talking saying, Look, you are responsible for one thing and one thing only, creating a profitable customer. You you boil it all down, that's what it is.
Yeah.
Ed (03:14.57)
Marketers frequently present their business to CMO to CEOs, CFOs and others by saying how many impressions they've delivered, talking about all the knobs and levers.
The ROAS they delivered, all these odd metrics that don't
Death really it's talking about how they manage their supply chain, but they aren't talking about the outcome. And that is a profitable customer. Yeah. To do that, they have to do two things. Set preference, we could call that brand love, but buy my whatever over somebody else's. Yeah. And set that preference strongly enough that they can deliver on the premium. Yep. That's the two big levers that they have. Underneath it, there's four ingredients Exactly.
Do that profitably as the service delivery for the client, right? So you're helping them to be profitable, but you're also doing it exactly profitably.
Exactly. When I look at what our clients need to do those sorts of things, it really comes down to four major ingredients. Can you recognize a pocket of opportunity? Can you reach that pocket of opportunity? Can you deliver something relevant? And can you see the results?
Brett (04:15.98)
And by pocket of opportunity, I would think, you it's gotta be that that that I think inc it has to be incremental. Above and beyond what let's say would do with your brand otherwise with no advertising, right, whatsoever. And that sometimes is the challenge.
Absolutely.
Ed (04:30.018)
Right, exactly. When you think about it, growth is granular. You can't just put out T V tonnage and reach every, you know, household. It doesn't work that way anymore. You can't get the effective reach that you need. But if you start thinking about growth as highly granular, you start realizing person level identity is the unlock. Yeah. And that's what attracted me here. Yes, we have a great CRM capability. Yeah. We have a you know we've got a DSP, we've got
Ed (05:01.24)
But underneath it all was the identity and the signals that we wrap around it. Yep. And that to me is the unlock that a marketer really needs. Yeah. And what I saw here was a company that was growing, had incredible talent, that had David and Steve at the forefront. And really with the worked together s close to the beginning. Something like that.
They've worked together since the beginning. They have like two thousand seven. Yeah, and and it was a very different company back. Very different.
Different company. And with that underlying backbone of identity, I think we are all looking at saying in an A of world of AI, having the ability to think at an individual level and then the speed and capabilities that AI brings to it, suddenly you can do marketing not at a personalized level, but at a precise level. Yeah. Rather than just pushing something that has your name on it, pushing something that's
Which ties into that theme of like relevance, right? Like how do you get relevant to me either as part of a cohort or as an individual? My question to you would be, because I've had this conversation, we did a huge series of of of live streaming and and podcasts at a Hollywood studio two days ago. And so we had a bunch, we had a big agency called Incubata. They're not huge, but they're they're good size. Yeah, good size, you like five hundred million, seven hundred employees, global. So a big client of mine, and and one of the big questions that we had was like, how important is
one to one. It's been the promise in the marketing industry. It was al Yeah. Are we are we
Ed (06:22.824)
too expensive. And is it let's start thinking about that. Yeah. Is once you know the individual and you have all these signals, you also know the when. When I first started working around the moment. Yeah, yeah. Beforehand we were always pushing and hoping we were around the moment, but now we know the moment.
Yeah. Context, the when and the how.
Brett (06:43.936)
Yeah, and every CMO would say that. I've heard those exact words of like, how do I strike it? Like it's kinda like lightning in the bottle when it's when it is and I'm not gonna say the r the three rights 'cause I think that's completely trite, right? You know the right time. But it's like how do you how do you actually find that in and effectively do that from a brand perspective?
Right, because there is when you think about any human, there's want and there's need and there's a transition moment. Yeah. And if you're there right before that transition moment and there as the transition moment happens, that's your window to convert. Yeah. And that's what we can begin to see with the data that we have.
Yeah. Well and you even move up funnel. I mean there's the there's the moment where you're gonna you know potentially be exposed to an advertisement that's more around brand awareness building.
There's the there's, you know, moving through and I I don't think consumers move linearly linearly through a funnel. But I do think that that halo effect is often the brand versus performance argument. Right. Is often kind of mixed in in you know, consumers are like, Hey, I'm not even aware of this product. Why would I convert with this unless I have some inherent unaided awareness, some brand awareness or affiliation?
I would actually I would actually argue and not in a negative way, but I would put forward that awareness these days is less important. Preference becomes more important. Yep. I can we're aware of so many things. Yeah. But is there some aspect of what's the promise and with that carrying the preference? Yep. And that's what you really want to start thinking.
Brett (08:10.178)
Yeah, those are the two things you're matching from a brand and a consumer, right? And have you have you noticed that like in in all of this talk over the last twenty years in advertising, oftentimes the consumer gets kind of left out of the picture. It's like the sell side and the buy side, the brands and the publishers and the agencies, you know, on on
about push. Yeah. With signals we can begin to listen. And we can begin to know when those moments matter. We can begin to know the consumer and this puts the consumer at the center. Yeah. With precision, not papered personalization.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that that that's that's kind of the importance of it. And it can be done at a cohort level as long as it's relevant and precise, right? As
Assemble if you have the individuals, you assemble those like individuals. It's true activation of a segment. Yeah. So we don't just take a segment which in many places becomes a light touch persona about how people feel. This goes deeper and I know who they are. I have a sense of what they're doing and I know when they're doing it. That allows me to assemble all those people in market at any moment. They become a cohort, they become a segment. Yeah. And then I can address them in a way that is appropriate to who they are, what they want.
where they're at and what they need to make a decision.
Brett (09:20.812)
Yeah, yeah. And that's that is relevance kind of like distilled, right? So you guys just made a a recent acquisition since so, right? make sure I get that right. GEO, AEO, GEO, I'm super familiar with the profound space and a lot of those other players that play in that space. that that's really hitting on something that's critical to sort of changing consumer behavior, right? People looking for answers, where are they going to, right? Going to their L L Ms, a billion active users with Chat GPT, and that's just one of the L Ms.
maybe even play it a little everything you're saying I agree with but when I talk to marketers I'm saying to them look you've been talking to humans for a long time yeah you have to start realizing you're talking to a new entity you have a new constituency that's just as agent to agent or marketer to agent because you have to be discoverable. Yeah senso plays in that space yeah and that ability now to say to marketers what do you need to do so that these people who are fronting
Yeah.
Ed (10:17.634)
your consumers, what do you need to do so that you're discoverable, that you're well represented. Yeah. All of those things are why we're going deep into that space.
Yeah, yeah, and those two and those two areas are critical, right? It's not only being found, right, which there's a lot of technical stuff on the back end. Right. Yeah, but it's also the answer that's being provided to the L LM. And that does it present an experience from the consumer perspective that's still a trustworthy answer to the question that I asked, right? Which is kind of the conundrum with advertising and LLMs. It's like, is it still gonna give me relevant answers or is this or is there a pay to play mechanism that's you know, like what we call the shittification of Google? Right.
We we all live through it.
Tin blue links, right? And then PMAX, right? You're like, I want an answer to a question and and yet I've got to go sorry, my the the interesting I tr I turned my do not disturb on and it still went through that. you know, we still want an we I want an answer to my question. I don't want to buy a product. I might not be at that stage speaking of relevance to what I'm doing. yet your your most of that front page, at least with traditional Google search, was exactly that. It was it was it was basically selling
Retail, P Max, all these things that were offering product versus answering the question. And I and I learned an interesting fact the other day that GPT, that thirty percent of all Google searches, no thirty percent of the of the information that's that's bubbled up in a in an L LM search on GPT would have appeared on page two or page three of a Google search. So it's it's
Ed (11:48.664)
Right.
Of of information that that ordinarily wasn't being seen by the l overwhelming majority of consumers.
And if you think about it, as marketers and advertising agencies have been in the business of pulling on heartstrings. It goes back to the old Dav David Ogilvie thing. What do you want people to think, feel, and do? Well, LM LLMs think and do. They don't do feel. Yeah, yeah. And getting preference for a brand has often been tying to heartstrings, an emotional appeal, an emotional bond, some aspect of empathy. But now you're having to address an agent
And that's not going to be responsive to those things. Yeah. So you have to start thinking about this as a very different entity that you have to address because they're going to come between you and your consumer and how are you going to make sure that the representation is there in a way that represents your brand? Yeah. You can't buy it yet.
Somewhat government Yeah, you can't buy it yet. Yeah, exactly. So no that that that's really interesting. So you you also you did I think you wrote a paper on this when you were at Deloitte and I know that you're like, well that's ancient history for me. That is a that is a long time ago. Right? Doesn't it seem like ten years feels like a hundred years nowadays? Two years Yeah, just how the rapid change of of of just the things changing around us. you wrote a paper called the CM CMT The Rise of the
Ed (13:00.778)
Two years feels like a hundred years.
Ed (13:09.176)
Chief Marketing Technology Officer, yes.
And we've heard a lot of talk about marketing engineer, about forward deployed engineers, which are slightly different, but but still this notion that people have to have almost hyphenated job titles and hyphenated kind of multifaceted experience as opposed to like you know, d like discrete specialization. Wha tell me the the premise of that and and have you seen some of that stuff kind of come to fruition?
Very much so. When that started coming out was really as Martech and NadTech were really rising, and a lot of my CMO clients at that point in time were like, We're being held hostage by by our CIOs, not because they are bad people, but much more about they were incented differently. See they were about information security, information stability. Whereas CMOs are about information innovation.
Exact and yeah.
Ed (14:01.258)
Yeah. And those two didn't really run together. Yeah. The CMTO concept was to start saying you need to take control of your own destiny and really start having people at a technical capability who are conversant
and able to really drive architecture, even if the data lived in IT, but you were the owner of the data, you were the owner of the technology, and you really were making the selections, not just on lowest cost for the total IPT portfolio, but what was serving marketers' needs the most.
And it and then we've had a lot of conversations on that topic that that marketers need to more need to be more than vendor managers, right? Where you have a bunch of of of tech in your stack. There was always that argument that suddenly the the the CMOs were spending more money on tech and stack than the actual CTOs or CIOs, right? And yet there potentially or you could argue that there was an inherent
You know, maybe maybe a lack of understanding of how it actually worked. That was often outsourced to the CTO or the CIO. Exactly. The the subject matter expertise of that. And and that's changing is kind of what you
It it has to change and has been changing. I will toss a slightly different perspective on what you were saying there. When people would say they're spending it more on technology now, I'm like, well, we kind of always did as marketers. Yeah. But we used to do it by hiring an agency. Yep. And when their tech couldn't do what we needed to, we fired that agency and replaced it with a new one. You're renting it. And the and the replacement cost was way lower. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Brett (15:25.868)
Yeah, as opposed to yeah, well that's an interesting question about sort of like like building in housing versus versus outsourcing some of these capabilities. I mean, are you seeing marketers you know, because that's that's sort of something that marketers have waffled around a lot where they're like, hey, we're gonna in-house media buying. And a few brands did that and it failed. they realized the complexity of that situation. Not only just the complexity of the multiple platforms they're buying against, but the billing structures, the order management structures.
The pay in thirty days or sixty days, right?
Working directly to publishers was hard.
Right. Google's like you've got to pay in sixty days or thirty days or we're gonna turn you off. And the agency is sort of assuming kind of a debt burden, right? Almost as like a financial services organization, right? In order to to basically allow that. Do you think in housing like in this age as we moved more towards, you know, sovereign data, sovereign AI, you know, operating systems either internally or being rented? Where where do you think in housing plays?
They manage the cat.
Ed (16:25.87)
Like, So I think the challenge for the agencies, and I think some of them are stepping up to this absolutely, is what's the value that they're bringing. Yeah. If they are seen as just low value ad, basic pl buying and planning, the identification's going to make them be a target. Exactly. Exactly. But if they're bringing value above and beyond that, I think that agencies have a bigger role to play because at the end of the day
Yeah, yeah. And that's like the human capital.
Ed (16:54.262)
Marketers want to be in a situation where the costs are being shared across the industry as opposed to carrying it themselves. That's the reason so many in sourcing aspects failed. Suddenly people and this was even when they were doing with T V, they suddenly realized I have no T V buying tools. Yeah. And do they want to build those Because you're carrying your own costs.
costs just go exorbitantly. Not only FT Yeah. It's not being shared and distributed across your entire client base. Right? That's yeah, that's that's a really so so economically for it's just that not only is it not their core competencies a brand, it's like they're they're there to build and sell a service solution or
And everything that they bring in house is adding cost against their margin.
Yeah, yeah. And so and so so you you you're you're positive and optimistic that that that agencies, you know, some people say agencies are like cockroaches. They'll find a way to evolve to the next apocalyptic situation, right? But they will find a way to evolve and adapt. And and I th and I I think that's what you're you're suggesting for sure. Now do you think and I think the Indies, you know, we talked about incubata, one of my clients, that they're moving very quickly, they're a bit more nimble.
They aren't carrying, you know, the tech debt and just the organizational debt.
Brett (18:00.878)
Yeah, the people the different portfolio companies though within those rings.
To feed and that's hard to do.
Yeah. What do you think the biggest blocker, not to get heavily into that topic because because we had Rashad Tobaccawala on the on the pod. isn't he the coolest guy in the world and he's so funny. He's like he seems so like s not kind of stoic and and and measured in how he talks, but then you talk to him extremely silly and witty and he makes funny jokes and even stuff offline that I can't even say like on on camera or I'm like, Wow, Rash Rashad, you're pretty you're a pretty funny guy. Like I like would like to have a drink. But
One of my favorite guys.
Ed (18:17.547)
Is he?
Ed (18:23.917)
Yeah,
Brett (18:36.226)
But he was saying how you know, he basically said organizations don't change, people do, and and and AI is going to be quote unquote hydrochloric acid on the silos that break the b of an organization, right? And so that kind of buys into his or plugs into his whole theory about sort of debosification, elimination of silos within orgs, right? Data congruence so people all have the access to the same types of data.
For so the the you kinda democratize insights delivery and intelligence.
You know. I look at it probably in a very similar way. We are hostage to our old ways of doing things. We're hostage to our old tools. If you even look at the upfronts, they're still built around Proctor and Gamble's timing. Yeah. And that that goes back almost a hundred years now. But still we are hostage to those old ways we built built people machines called the agencies to service all of those different aspects.
This is going to change that. Now will the organizations get in front of that and say we need to invent what the new world looks like? Or are they going to follow it, which means the silos won't break down nicely?
Yeah, yeah. And you think this this siloization breakdown is gonna happen both on the agency side and on the brand side? Yes. Right? And that's where this this c almost kind of the hyphenated job, right? The the rise of jobs that are kind of multifunctional because
Ed (20:00.878)
You know, if we went back even further, we went from having rotations in marketing on the brand side where people had to know how to do everything. Eventually they ran a P and L. They had all different experiences there. Then we went to a world of hyper specialization. Yeah. And people didn't get a perspective on the brand, on the
Marketing. You're almost h you're held hostage just by your specific function. Right. Right? Where it like narrows people. And what we're seeing right now is a kind of a democratization of of building capacity and build in in you know, because because you can give people access to these tools, right? And as long as you've got some sort of data congruence across an organization. Now I know everybody in the company can't b have the same access to human resources information, ERP information, financial information, but
to the market information, yes, they can. Yeah. And I think when you think about it, you know
There would never have been a world even twenty years ago where you said somebody was they did search. They were a search marketer. They might have been a marketer who was working on search, but suddenly along the way it inverted and your specialty was more important than your general craft. Yeah. And that was a big shift. Yeah. That's gonna have to change. There'll be more hyphens and then I think eventually it'll be back to your marketer who can use many Yeah.
Yes, you get these holistic channels, including like the shopper marketing, the offline channels, right? We all know that in the CPG industry, I meant 75 cents of every marketing dollar is being spent offline, right? In the stores, store placement, and obviously increasingly retail media. And then the rest of the media world is competing for this tw this this quarter, right? They're all it's like you know, like a spoonful, right? Is that old old John Lee Hooker? Is that or is that late in John Lee Hooker song, right? You know, everybody's fighting for a spoonful, right? I mean that's that's what we kind of saw.
Brett (21:44.204)
in the media industry and then you see within teams, you know, like with the on the brand side, all of this sort of infighting between, you know, you got linear and t and digital. It's amazing that we're still talking about this.
Well, if you think about it, I just came off doing a panel here where the person I was talking to said, you know, we keep hitting our clients in the face with our organizations. Yeah. They don't care. Yeah. And when you think about it the way you're saying it here, the fight between linear this what we need to do is are we addressing our consumers? Yeah. One that should be at the center. The story the whole world should be focused on consumers.
It's again you're forgetting the th the the most third leg
Brett (22:21.144)
Yeah, yeah, and and managing the consumer experience and you have to s and the hard thing is aligning teams and incentives around that, right? Like so people are not going to the to the CEO or CFO and arguing for a budget and trying to prove attribution and incrementality, which this other team may not agree with because they're saying, No, no, we're the ones that are driving XYZ brand awareness which which wouldn't, you know, it without that kind of thing.
And I think one of the things, you know, from my old role, if I was talking to CFO, they're like, If I actually listen to all the groups related to marketing and they each attributed it, I should be selling three X. Yeah. And they're not.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, totally. We're not seeing this in the bottom of the line, despite all the Roas reports. Right. Right. And the and the t and the total chasing reach. Yeah, yeah. And and and you yeah, you're not seeing the incremental contribution, right? Exactly. So you had a you had speaking of the panel that you had, and I think I think we'll we're somebody's gonna come in and flag us down eventually, otherwise we could just keep talking. right, they're like, You've gotta be here at four. I think they're shutting down the whole podcast thing going out at four. But
You all are claiming. And it's all incremental.
Brett (23:21.88)
You had a p had a panel, I don't know if that was the panel unless you did more than one today. Were you moderated? I did three. you did three? You haven't lost your voice yet. Right? You're you're you're so you had Scott Brinker. Yes. And it's funny because I saw that it popped up on my feed, and then I was like, Scott, I didn't know you were here today. So we had him on the pod. He's a Boston guy. Go Red Sox, super, super down to earth, right? Super smart and researched and experienced. You know, and and we talked about
He's just a great person.
Brett (23:48.318)
Fundamentally we talked about his report that he did with Databricks where it was around kind of data as the new operating layer and like the third I think it's the third generation of of of Martech, right? And we'll put Martech in kind of a broader category. and I love this conta this idea of like how he defined context, right? He wasn't talking necessarily like the semantic context layer of in like an AI tech stack. He was talking about sort of the data context and sort of the brand IP. Right. Right. That is
Jen, yeah.
Brett (24:17.93)
all the stuff. It could be content, it could be actual consumer data, it that but all it could be, you know, communications within an organization being collected and centralized. And how do you leverage that? Because that's where the the the data moats and the IP, the brand IP are built. And then how do you you know and it it Yeah. And is is Athena kind of lean it seems to me like this is a story that I'm hearing a lot. And I'm sort of painting some of the story for other companies as well. Is this where you see
how do you bring it to life and use it?
Brett (24:47.71)
Athena moving.
Absolutely. And I think with that with Scott's concept of all the context there, and then we start thinking about the AI and other things that would sit on top of it, we we're calling, as you know, Athena an operating system. And the reason for that is we see Athena as being able to sit on top of whatever data. Yeah. Full enterprise data eventually. Yeah, yeah. We're starting with marketing, but the full commercial space will be there. And let's face it, in many an organization
if you look at it, they would love to have the all their commercial data and marketing t data together to start saying what's driving what? Yeah. What can be done? Can I actually build a full end to end commercial plan that's inclusive of brand? Yeah. And that's where we see Athena really having the power is to be the operating system on top of that. And then we'll have the agents that sit on top of Athena to be able to accomplish, you know, the great tas acquire, grow retain at its simplest level. But below that there'll be an army of
of smaller swarm of smaller agents that are doing all the different tasks.
Yeah, yeah. And the way that that Chris, Chris Monberg and Anij and and then David came in for this this lunch were talking about it was was very much how I'm seeing most AI companies, most operating systems and the at least from the agency side, at least moving towards this this notion of sort of data sovereignty, so that you're that they might be leveraging Zeta's data assets, but they still are doing this in their own environments, their own clouds, right? with with protections around all of that. So there's no sort of data leakage. I think that one is sort of table stakes.
Ed (26:19.436)
That that's a must have. Right.
That's a must have. And I think the other the next next piece of this, and I asked David about this, was about sort of AI sovereignty. So if you've got models that are being trained and it's that that context layer. Exactly. That IP that's being built, it's it's internal communications, it's all of your data and information and and all of your learnings from kind of you know, campaign logic and and performance, right? That's stuff that you don't want to have trained into a model that's then resold. Because, you know, to a to a computer.
It's pret proprietary IP at some level. Yeah. Exactly.
Yeah. And so there's a really good article, from Snowflake called like context is the new IP from Eddie Drake who's a friend of mine and you know all you all those Aaron Foxworthy and all them. And it was it was a great article that really talked about that's where the the battle is because everybody's gonna have even first party data. You know, P and G is gonna share certain first party data with Unilever, not literally share, but like because they've got they're they're in the same category, right? You've got buyers, right? And there's not that much differentiation in sort of the data itself.
be modeled. There's lots of different ways. Yes, there'll be that awareness there. It's that one level that you're talking about that really is where the IP sits.
Brett (27:29.698)
Yeah, yeah. And and I think the argument of that paper was was you know, make sure that contractually with your vendor you own with your own. Don't don't re 'cause that Intel is the stuff that it starts to compound and it starts to build smarter and it's kind of like when you nudge an L L you're pushing it and you're and then you're adding more context to it so it makes better decisions.
You own what you own.
Ed (27:48.608)
I let me make a consulting equivalent for you. Consultants saw that for years and years and years and we'd package it up and call it benchmarks and best practices.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Now much of that is is sort of automated, right?
But now it can actually be a company's own IP, whereas if it was observed before, you wanna stop other companies from observing so different ways to do it.
And and let me ask you this, so maybe we'll end on on this topic is sort of we we you look at at the operating system universe, you look at, you know, and Rashad and I were talking about how you know the the when he when they were kind of reinventing Publicis about ten years ago, part of the the focus, strategic focus was to say we're not competing with Omnicom and WPP. We're actually competing with the continents. He called them continents, which which are the Googles, the Metas, right? You've heard all this stuff, right?
And the consultancies, which is the world you come from, the Deloids right. and we've got to completely reframe what we do because of that that competition. And then the simple premise that clients wanna w they wanna market to the world, not literally world, but they don't wanna be just caught within an ecosystem. The the Meta's ec ecosystem, the Google ecosystem, the AWS.
Ed (29:00.13)
The the the walled gardens. The walled gardens they know where they play but they don't want to be stuck.
Yeah. So how do you how does Zeta, cause Zeta seems like they're you're moving it we're seeing kind of a convergence of these types of capabilities coming from a tech player like Zeta, traditional tech player, and and then from the agency old goes and then the Indies, whether th those things are totally fully realized yet to be determined and you know debatable, especially on the operating holy old old go side of things. where do you see that going? like in terms of the convergence of all these things across these different groups? Do you think it's gonna be something
I mean, are you guys going right up against some of the agency sort of trajectory?
We we partner with a lot of the agencies. So there will always be tension between agencies and everyone else, between the tech companies, but I don't see that stopping the cooperation that needs to go on. Yeah. So long as we stay clients focused. But I do see
Yeah. And not a not every agency's wanna build this stuff themselves. No. So they can partner with you from a from
Ed (30:00.428)
We could be platforming them, what whatever it may be. Because again, if we're doing it from multiple places, how much of that's going to be truly differentiating? Yeah. In their in their use of it? Or do they just need the capability and add the differentiation themselves through their own capabilities on top of it?
Yeah. And do you think brands are are, you know, because we have these conversations and we're we're up on stage and Alex Carp is talking and and sometimes it feels like we're light years ahead of our own clients. Right. You know, when you go back to your maybe not the advanced sort of independent agencies, but if you go to the brand clients, do you feel that they're at the same place kind of because again they're in a category, they're within a specific company and a specific function, or or is there a certain amount of education and training and maybe upgrading of
talent or change of talent that needs to
Th th those org transformation pieces will be there without a doubt. I do think when you look at smaller, newer companies, yeah, they aren't carrying the organizational debt, the data debt, and they need to be able to get to scale quickly, which biases them very quickly into these operating system models. Yeah. And I think to some extent leans on them doing it internally as well.
Yeah, yeah. And so my final question, and I and I promise you this is my final question. So sort of the deep mind, the Google deep mind mission statement, right, is like solve for intelligence, it'll solve everything else. And we're in this period in history where like the thing that we're doing here, let's say AI, is gonna rise all boats, whether it's astrophysics or you know, quantum mechanics or medicine, right? All these things are gonna
Brett (31:36.526)
Simultaneously, which has never happened in the history of humanity. Like when the innovations happened, elect well, I guess electricity to a certain degree could is comparable. It rose mini bits. Fire fire. Right, it had it had an impact that was. Do you do you what is your perspective? Like, do you think AI is gonna kill us all? This is my dubrism question. Or are you like me, I'm more of a I call it the apocalyptic apocalyptic?
There's a higher problem.
Brett (32:03.554)
Great documentary on Netflix by the way, the AI doc right? Like where where do you fall on that spectrum of like, hey, this could have really negative consequences or it could be really, really positive in many, many ways that'll change
I think every great breakthrough had that balance. Yeah. It's going to depend on how we approach it as a society and how we I don't like the term regulate, but how we work with it to make sure it biases where we want it to. Whether it's what we learned on medicine could be used to create
a plague or something or other things, it's always been that way. AI is no different. It's moving faster and it's a little bit more abstract for people. Yes. Because they hear it's gonna kill us, but how? Is it the Terminator or is it something different?
Yeah, yeah. Is this immediately Battlestar Galactica? Right. Or are we talking right, yeah. And so so I think it's an endless debate and it's affecting even America's sort of industrial new industrial revolution, if you talk about it, the data center build out. Right. And I'm like, what are we really talking about data centers? but we're not. And or are we really talking about fear mongering, fear of AI, right? So that's a completely different story because you know, there's we and we we our last episode on signal and noise, check it out everybody, was with a government official in Wyoming.
That basically handles both sides of the debate. And it's just really interesting when you start to deconstruct and make it relative to other industry rollouts, right? And and their and their environmental damage, their people of the impact on people. So it's so yeah, I think I think we both agree we're we're both pretty optimistic that this is gonna have a positive impact. And I think the the collective capabilities of human beings will keep this stuff in control and working for the greater benefit of
Ed (33:45.346)
We hope so.
Of our planet, right? Well, thank you very much. This has been an awesome conversation. Appreciate your time. And thanks everybody for joining us, Signal and Noise Live at Zeta Live. an advertising weekend. Thank you, Ed C. It was it was great having you. And hopefully we can have a a longer conversation. Thanks. All right. Good. No, that was awesome. I was like we could keep going. Yeah, that no, I really appreciate it. That was awesome.
Absolutely. Thanks for taking the time with me. Thanks. Did that cover what you wanted? Yeah.
Ed (34:09.293)
Thank you. This is a good note to close on. Yeah. Because it didn't involve a big audience sitting in the room with me.
Yeah.
And I I was like, I've gotta ask him if he fixed Yeah, it's gonna kill us all that. Well it's funny, we took we took a in in the event we had, we took a we took a poll from the crowd. 'Cause we had this guy, I don't know if you know Douglas Rushkoff. I do not. He's written like twenty five books. He's got this and he he he has this pod called Team Human, he's a professor.
Comments